Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The night Nick Clerval arrived at his summertime cottage, his things just six boxes worth of stuff, the skies were lit up with lights. Spotlights, fireworks, the occasional coloured flare like a ship's distress signal. Music pounded through the very earth. Glitter was blown onto his porch by the wind. Trumpets sounded like faraway elephants. Choruses of singing drifted by, followed by laughter, and clapping, and the ground rumbling like a stampede of dancers had all jumped for joy at the same time.

The house next door was a castle of a mansion. It was alive, lit from top to bottom, breathing with the electric life of a party. Funny, Nick thought, thinking its gothic spires and mirrored turrets so out of place in this upbeat context. They don't make houses like this anymore. They just don't.

The war was over and people lived like the day it ended.

The ban on alcohol had backfired, and people took advantage of this like their lives depended on it.

The parties were bigger, badder, celebrations of every second spent breathing.

It was 1923 and Nick had moved here to West Egg, next to the house that hosted the most decadent, luxurious, beautiful — and soon to be the most infamous parties of the century.

Nick sat upon one of his boxes, and just gazed upon the mansion.

When Nick was young, his father warned him that people were made of multitudes. There was no such thing as two-faced or turn-face — only that some people were better at the pantomime of presenting oneself in the way they fancied other people to see them, and others were too civilised to point out the cracks. Nick took this to heart, promising his father that he wouldn't accept a friend at face value, that he wouldn't be too harsh playing judge and jury to those around him for the fronts they put up. It was only courteous of him.

He did not forget this when he was invited by his second cousin once removed, Daisy, to dinner at his house. A way aways from the flair of New York city was East Egg, the lush polo fields and languid land of Old Money on the harrowed edges of Long Island. Now Nick gazed upon the towering slabs of white stone columns making up a modern, Georgian-style mansion, and the petite woman standing in the door frame, hands folded neatly before her as her servants opened the doors at the command of a nod of her head.

Nick rushed out of the taxi, rushed up the stairs with eagerness that was only polite, and felt himself shrinking in the great vicinity of the house. The lady of the house, his cousin's wife, was dressed in pastel, a light salmon tinge showing through the sheer material of her skirt. She was wearing a string of pearls so long she had to wrap it many times around her neck. She held out her hands, gloved even in this heat, with idle expectancy she'd thought with every conviction was the receiver's honour, and Nick took it fumblingly, pecking her on the knuckles and feeling the many rings beneath. Only her diamond wedding ring sat on top. A pleasant blend of perfume followed her wherever she was.

"Tina," he greeted, acquaintances meeting out of context.

"Nicki-dear," she greeted, long lost friends reunited. "It's been too long."

She smiled, a perfect beauty-pageant smile found only on newspaper clippings of famous people on adoring fan's walls and compact mirror advertisements — totally empty. Nick had seen her on magazine covers: The Most Beautiful Girl in the World; Heiress Makes Daring Decisions; The Wealthiest Lass in America. It was all true in his eyes — when Tina flipped Nick's hand to hold his instead, taking him by the wrist to pull him down halls of tasteful impasto paintings, vases of identical flower arrangements, her skirt flying, her necklace clinking, her white-blonde hair bouncing, she was every bit the most beautiful, most daring, most wealthy girl in the world.

A far cry from the scandalous, pantaloon-wearing tomboy he'd sat with in his time studying at Yale. Little Tina "Tommy" Buchanan, the little tomboy wearing fedoras and slicked back hair, had been every bit as daring and precocious as onlookers suggested. Nick briefly wondered if this was the reason Tina had taken such a liking to him when he visited his cousin — Nick had sat with her when she was 'Tommy,' and had never brought this up about her when she now only went by 'Tina.'

"It's been far too long. When's the last time I've seen you? Why, it must have been years."

"We met in Chicago for brunch a few times." Nick piped up. He hadn't been surprised by this latest move on the part of the Buchanans, who'd drifted restlessly from place to place, or to wherever people ate caviar, talked about yachts, and donated to politics most generously. His cousin had said on the phone that this move would be a permanent one, a perfect place to settle down and grow old, though Nick took this with a grain of salt.

"But it was a while ago, wasn't it? This is long overdue."

"Very much so," Tina replied, swinging Nick in front of her as if this was a dance floor, the momentum strong enough for Nick to swing right into the door in front of them—

Two servants opened the next door just in time, leaving Nick to amble backwards into a fluttering curtain, caught in the wind, caught in the linen — and caught in a frame of a very attractive Hollywood production, one with sharp-chinned, dark-eyed leading men and fanciful fem fatales in dazzling, million dollar sets.

As Nick untangled himself, the fluttering curtains veiled the room in white, showing glimpses of a man's neat grey vest, his shirt unbuttoned just above it, and an untied bow slung lazily across his shoulders. Someone giggled, an impish sound from the patterned chaise sofa.

"Is that you, cousin-mine?" came a deep voice, rasping along, almost sing-song.

Tina cleared her throat, a stout command, and servants floated into the room, peeling back the curtains and closing the windows with sudden urgency. Bit by bit, as the white veils and linen were fought back, Daniel Buchanan came into view.

His dark hair, dark and gelled to the point of looking black, made him appear truly like the film star Nick had been expecting. His brown eyes, dark as well, were warm with the fullest approval. His smile, dazzling light and openly welcoming, convinced anyone who saw it utterly that he would not—could not—dream of smiling at another in the same way he did them. A promise between two people there was no one else in the whole world he'd rather see.

"Nicki," he said, turning to him fully, grasping his hand to pull him in close for a moment.

"Daisy," Nick said. Somewhat surprised, he reciprocated his hug. "You look well."

Dear Daniel "Daisy" Buchanan, possessed of the most unfair kind of beauty on the face of a man, who was nicknamed after a flower for it, spoke with what felt like an uncharacteristically low and rasped voice for that face. "Oh how good of you to come — you'd have to excuse my rudeness for not receiving you — like a bastard, I'd forgotten completely you were coming!"

He huffed pleasantly. "But just as well. You're such a lovely surprise."

As if Nick was the best gift to be given by his wife, he patted him affectionately on the back before deeming it good enough to release him. It was genuine of him — Nick knew for sure that his visiting Daisy after he was disowned by his parents — or "Just Daniel" as they had always put it — had changed their relationship from mere acceptances at arm's length to practically, well, family.

Daisy sighed a long sigh. "Do they miss me in Chicago?"

"Er," Nick made a sound, "—Yes! I came to send a dozen people's love."

"Oh," Daisy said, eyes flickering aside, and without managing the same enthusiasm as before, added, "How gorgeous."

"How horrid." Nick started over, understanding the fanfare Daisy had wanted. "Oh, they mourn you, they weep, they're on the floor rolling in indignation!"

This elicited a laugh from Daisy, his head bowing to hide his rather obvious delight. "Liar!"

"They have their arms stretched, clawing in grief, they're shouting in the streets: Daisy Buchanan, we can't live without you!"

"Oh! I'm paralysed by your words."

Then Daisy reached out, pulled him to face the figure slinked across the chaise sofa that Nick, to his embarrassment, had just realised had watched everything play out.

"My partner in crime, Jordan Baker," Daisy introduced, a hand still braced on Nick's back.

The source of the impish giggle, Nick thought.

"A very famous golfer, and an even more excellent friend. You must have seen her in action before."

"Oh yes," Nick lied, "I must have seen you on the cover Sporting Life, or was it…somewhere else? Pleased to meet you."

She did not take the enormous effort to straighten up from her lounging, so Nick went up to her, and was inwardly startled.

He held out his hand.

Jordan, her dark bob of hair and her cautioned, eagle-like eyes, ambiguously Asian, floated above the page of the magazine she was holding. They were fixed solely and vehemently on him; Nick felt instantly as if he were a mouse being sized up in the dessert pictured on the cover of her magazine, as if she had already decided she didn't like Nick one bit, and he didn't deserve the kind of smile Daisy had given him nor the game he had invited him to play.

She got up, stretching her legs, and Nick held out his hand further for her, but she just glided past him to the drinks on the bar table Tina was setting.

"I've been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember," Jordan complained.

Nick awkwardly put down his hand.

Daisy also went past him, taking the sparkling champagne out of Jordan's hand before she could get a sip out of it, and made the trek back to offer it instead to Nick. It took for Daisy to give Jordan an endlessly warm, reassuring look that Nick understood what the terrifying encounter he had was: a rabid protective streak.

Jordan didn't hate every stranger she met on principle, but she did when Daisy was in the room. She turned away from them both without so much as a pout, taking another glass. Daisy had vouched for him, and she accepted this. For the first time, Nick understood Daisy's proclamation of an excellent friend.

He watched Jordan slip what looked like an ornate snuff bottle from her clothes, then popped two small, yellow pills. Jordan caught him staring. "Oh don't look at me like that. It's just vitamins," she teased. "Vitamin C."

Nick laughed nervously and bent to sip his champagne, but before he managed, Tina intervened.

"Uh, uh," Tina said, yanking the glass from Nick's hand to replace it with another. Even though Tina was serving drinks in a dress, holding out a tray for her husband and his guests, she looked nothing like the image of a mild, American housewife at all.

"Men like Nicki here don't drink womanly champagne."

She moved on, offering Daisy his own glass of — Nick took a sip — of scotch. A particularly bitter and strong one that Nick definitely knew wasn't to Daisy's liking, the sweet tooth he was.

Tina held out the tray, looking demurely, and expectantly, up at him. Daisy took the glass.

Tina pressed the tray into one of the servants as they passed. "Nicki. Daniel here has told me you drove over here from West Egg. Throwing your lot in with those…certainly intriguing, fascinating new money types."

Nick caught the hint of sarcasm in her voice, but pretended not to. "Though my little cardboard box of a house is only eighty a month," he said jokingly, though it was the truth.

"Your life is adorable," Daisy said.

"I know someone in West Egg," Jordan piped up from across the room. She peered out the window, as if looking straight past the lake to West Egg.

"I don't know a single person on that side of the bay."

"Oh?" Jordan turned, a hand on her hip. "You must know Frankenstein."

"Frankenstein?" Daisy echoed. He went noticeably quiet for a moment, as if he had said something wrong, but the silence did nothing but make the rest of them aware of it. He laughed somewhat disingenuously. "…What a sinister name."

Nick, for once, was not ignorant of the name 'Frankenstein.'

But before anyone else could say anything more about it, another servant came up to Tina and announced, "Madame, dinner is served."

Daisy put down his untouched drink before he left the room.

Tina herded them all from one airy room to the next, sticking particularly close to Nick as if she couldn't trust him to make the walk unattended should he fall lost and lonely in the great, Grand Canyon of her home. Daisy and Jordan linked arms all the way, walking in step with one another. Nick didn't think it strange, but he couldn't help but notice Tina's eyes sharpened at a point, watching their backs. Nick knew what that look was. It was as if in her mind, she was replacing Jordan with herself, such a green eyed look of want.

Dinner was taken in a glittering dining hall with a large, crystal chandelier that reflected spots of light onto the walls like static, crystalline rain. Nick took the opportunity to spring forward and drag out Jordan's seat in lieu of a servant, a peace offering.

"So how are things, Nicki? Still scribbling away like a madman in those journals of yours?" Tina piped up.

"Not anymore, no. Seems I've come to my senses. I'm selling bonds now. Haven't I already told you I'm selling bonds now?"

"Oh, lucrative."

"And how about you?"

"I doubt any person could live a day without using a product from the department stores," Tina said confidently.

The Buchanan family were a large clan of people all born and bred for the day the next heir in the long line of procession would take over the dynasty of department stores and clothing lines and the little perfume empire on the side.

"Same old, same old, business goes on." Despite this, she went on at length about the old men at the top, annoying, old world directors that refused to retire for the company's — the world's — best interests.

After a while, Tina changed the subject.

"And how is life in New York, Nicki?" Tina asked, her voice jingling.

"Oh, lovely! I've only been here something like six months, but I'm a new man. All the colour, all the people — I visited the Times Square a few times and every time there was a spectacle," Nick said enthusiastically. "Like seeing a live show in the middle of the street."

Tina's smile went taut. It remained a smile, though the light-hearted, easy-going visage had vanished for something hard and quietly disapproving. "You're talking about those shows. Those…unabashed displays of perversion."

Nick dropped his enthusiastic outlook immediately.

"Tina," Daisy started, eyes fixed on his plate, "you know no one knows what 'those' and 'this' and 'that' means. You don't always have to be so ambiguous." He said it with total innocence, as if there were so many things Tina considered to be unabashed displays of perversion he couldn't possibly know which she was referring to.

"Ah — have I said something wrong?" Nick offered. He was sure another change of subject would be imminent.

"No, you've said nothing wrong," Jordan continued, looking at Nick for the first time. "There's nothing that shocking about the Times Square performers. They hold some of the most world-renowned drag performances out there. That's a simple fact."

Tina considered her words, her crystal-blue eyes unblinking. As if they'd iced-over, and whatever notions in her mind had also iced over, unchangeable and unchallengeable even in the face of fact.

She turned to Nick, addressing him only. "It's a disease, sinking into the skin of society these days. The so-called 'Pansy-craze," Tina said, with her distinguished voice and her prolonged diction.

"An eyesore forced upon the poor, moral, god-fearing people walking in the streets. Those women who wear white-tuxes and top hats, strutting in their ill-fitting trousers, are nothing more than dressed-up performing monkeys. And those men — oh no," Tina chuckled, hiding her red lips behind her knuckles shyly, "They're barely capable of being called that, are they? They wear dresses and high heels as if they were women."

Nick felt the temperature of the room drop. Daisy had begun to scrape his food around his plate, listening idly, Jordan paying no attention to hers with her eagle eyes locked on a candle flickering on the table.

"Every day they masquerade in the streets is a day we as a society drift further away from god's grace."

"Oh, I've — never noticed," Nick piped up. He remembered wandering into the crowd of one of the spectacles, nothing more, nothing less, and had simply wanted to contribute to his fair share of small talk. "And here I was thinking it was a carnival of some sort!" He chuckled to assert his ignorance.

Nick had, in all honesty, never given further thought to the Pansy-craze, having no idea the well-dressed people wearing suits or dresses were the opposite gender at all. This was a revelation for him.

"I do recall," Daisy started, head popping back up to join the conversation, "that as a Yale woman, you were quite fond of those trousers yourself."

Tina's icy look flitted across the table to Daisy. Daisy said nothing, busying himself with his glass of red wine.

"Weren't you? If the craze had hit a little sooner, as fate would have it I think — no," Daisy said, and he turned to face Nick instead, "I know for a fact that my Tommy would have worn those wonderful white tuxes and gorgeous top hats. They're so — so stylish."

Nick said nothing, knowing this to be true.

Tina took a large swig of her wine as he talked, slamming it back on the table after she downed it all. "You know I don't like that word. That's not my name. It's such an ugly name, Daniel, not suited to me at all."

"Whatever is it?" Daisy asked. "Always so unspecific."

"I don't like it, husband."

"Tommy?" he suggested.

Tina scowled. Visibly, she scowled, a look so cold and unkind Daisy quickly averted his eyes. He said nothing more about the subject.

"Those 'pansies' are not like men like you, Niki," Tina said, though he could tell she was announcing to the whole table, "they don't look at me like the way you look at me. And they don't look at Jordan there the way you look at her. You understand what I'm saying, don't you?"

The moment Jordan was mentioned, her fingers jumped. Her impersonal eyes changed back into its eagle-like quality, watching Nick with a low veneer of disgust. Nick had been preoccupied with shovelling food into his mouth, unable to speak. He nodded slowly, and Tina went back to her picturesque dinner, as if that was all was required of him for her.

They talked of the movies and the excellent weather they'd had for the rest of the evening, things they all knew would not draw further ire from the likes of Tina's judgement. Daisy and Jordan chattered back and forth, at times leaving no space for either Tina or Nick to butt in; other times speaking to each other at once, with friendly but empty banter to will away the frivolous night. It was all frivolous to them — the delicious dinner and guests to entertain that would simply be filed casually away and forgotten — just as Tina had forgotten Nick's existence when he was not physically in the room, and forgotten their Chicago brunches not so long ago; and Daisy of Nick's arrival despite his enthusiasm on the phone when he invited him.

"So, this Frankenstein," Nick piped up, "I do at least know him after all. Well — know of him."

If Nick hadn't been watching carefully, he wouldn't have seen Jordan's broccoli slide off the end of her fork as she held it to her mouth, nor the near-imperceptible change in Daisy's brow.

Jordan recovered quickly. "Have you now? Why, you intrigue me even more, Nick. You're a friend to quite an enigma."

Nick made a face, bobbing his head left and right. "No, no. I've never met him. He's my neighbour! That's all."

"That's all?" Jordan said. She sighed, morose, though artificially so. "And here I was hoping I could hear the gossip I wanted to hear surrounding that man. He's quite the legend in New York, you know."

Nick made another face. "All I know is that he throws great, colourful parties. I should know!" Nick said jovially, thinking about all the live jazz music that played until the early hours of the morning, "though I haven't actually acquainted myself with them to provide what was asked of me. I've disappointed you, Miss Baker."

"Just Jordan." She leaned in, eyes more eagle-alert than ever. "Some of the gossip I've heard about those parties is quite…shocking."

Tina sighed shortly, taking a sip of her newly refilled wine. "What is it now? Another fight broken out on the dance floor? Why, I've heard enough of that trash in the papers."

"Go on," Daisy leaned in too, seeming finally to be fully captivated by the conversation instead of floating in and out of it as he had done all evening. "What's so shocking?"

Jordan smiled. "I heard that people go into his parties, and they don't come out."

Daisy soaked in those words, looking severe. Nick blinked, feeling instantly uncomfortable. He'd lived for almost six months in West Egg now, in the small, former groundskeeper's cottage only a few lazy steps away from the mansion holding those dashing weekly parties.

There was a man, who stood in the dark of the window, looking out between the half-drawn curtains. Always looking out, as if watching for something — or someone. Nick caught his dark silhouette in the window sometimes, doing nothing but what he could only assume to be thinking. At times, he couldn't help but think that he himself was being watched.

Tina put down her glass on the table, giggling loud and shrill. "Hahahahah! Imagine living all your days on earth only to end up swallowed by a party! How hilarious. What else do you have, Jordan-dear?"

No one else shared Tina's sentiments.

"I'm serious," Jordan sat back in her seat, smiling wryly. "Someone worked it out in one of those tabloids — missing people. A whole slew of them, last seen at Frankenstein's Cadis Mansion. The number of people who go into those parties isn't the same when they come out. That's fact, I hear."

"Where do you suppose they went?" Daisy asked. "…Did he convert them into servants?" he added lightly.

"The number of people who go in isn't the same as the number of people who come out — because Mr Frankenstein quite likely has combined five or six of them into one: the new, improved, ultimate partygoer," Nick said seriously. "…Or so they say, according to one of my favourite pastimes reading Mary Shelley in candlelight past my bedtime."

Daisy's head spun to him, his dark eyes and parted lips dripping with the humour of it — he dissolved into laughter like sugar in tea, having to finally stop himself by covering his mouth.

Jordan was equally impressed, barely able to disguise her snort of approval. She huffed above her wine, joining in. "If it were me, I would go for something a little more elegant. A Mr Darcy. Or, if I'm feeling particularly generous with myself, perhaps even a Dr. Jekyll."

There was another bout of laughter. To think, all Nick had to do was to make fun of his neighbour to get Jordan's approval.

"Goodness…" Daisy recovered from laughing, brushing back a strand of loose hair. He raised his head, as if to say something, but it was lost before it came to his lips. He sighed, and said with the air of an afterthought, "…I don't believe that's his name. That can't be his name."

Nick considered this. "You know, I don't believe that's his name either."

Tina chuckled for half a beat. "The papers and rumour mill all want us to believe the man's a Midas-touched, gold-spinning entrepreneur. They want us to take a thing like him seriously when he calls himself something so— that." Tina raised her glass. "It's comical."

Nick could do nothing but raise his glass in agreement. Daisy and Jordan did too.

"You're right," Nick said. "But let me be frank. If I was a newly wealthy eccentric, I'd open my house and gladly start calling myself Dracula."

The table laughed uproariously, laughing and laughing until it felt as if they'd all run out of one collective breath, the night having run its course.

After a few more words of banter, Tina leaned forward and told Nick, "I admire you moving to sell bonds here, Nicki. And I forget how utterly hilarious you are." She leaned back, smiling slightly. "I'd be happy to pass along some useful contacts. In fact — we should go to town, and I'll personally introduce you."

She said the word 'personally' in a different way from everything else, that word denoting how precious it was for her to offer it.

"Oh, thank you." Nick saw no reason to refuse. "That's very kind of you — you just let me treat you to — to cakes, or coffee, or—"

"I'd prefer brandy, like old times," Tina stated, asserting a nonexistent 'old times' into their past just like that. "How about the Yale club? They have the most magnificent—"

But Nick never found out what exactly was so magnificent. The carefree nature of the dinner was interrupted by the shrill, metallic urgency of an incoming phone call. The picturesque facade painted over. The mirage in the distance uncovered.

A servant rushed into the dining hall with equal urgency, going up to Tina — not Daisy — but Tina, to whisper in her ear. The air in the room changed again. Daisy had stopped in his track, his shoulders going noticeably taut. "…What's so good about brandy in some old, dusty club, Nicki? We have perfectly good brandy right here and now — Clyde! — some brandy, if you will."

Nick did not know how to refuse. Daisy had started to speak loudly and hurriedly, with the air of a man who had been caught in an unseemly position, and was desperate to explain himself away. He, too, sounded urgent.

But Tina just smiled sweetly, shaking her head as if she were on a Saturday night commercial. Like a mother chastising her misbehaving children. "No, no, not now. I'm entertaining a guest, can't you see?"

She waved the call away. "So where were we?"

"Nowhere important," Jordan said.

"Something magnificent," Nick reminded her.

"What's magnificent?" Tina was about to say something when the phone rang again.

This time, without going through the fanfare or pantomime of an excuse or an apology, Tina got up and left. Her heels clacked coldly down the marble floor, drowning out even the scream of the phone.

Daisy tossed his napkin onto the table. Then he smiled and sighed as if slightly inconvenienced. His eyes soon locked with Nick's, who was looking at him with a jovial look, keen to keep on the night's festivities however fragile they were. Daisy beamed at him. "You're such a good man, Nicki." He paused. "A beautiful man. Isn't he? Jordan?—Beautiful."

And then he too got up, leaving without hearing an affirmation.

"He's teasing," Nick said, turning to Jordan. "So these rumours about my neighbour, you think—"

"Shh!" Jordan's head had snapped to one side, her neck craning to see the Buchanans through the frosted glass of the door. "I want to hear this."

Nick turned as well, looking at the silhouettes move.

"Hear what?" he asked, half a whisper. He was too afraid to offend, even accidentally, the likes of Jordan. "Is something happening?"

Jordan turned on him, her eyes wide and shocked. "I thought everyone knew."

"It seems I don't."

She shifted in her seat, clearly uncomfortable. But then her features settled back into a calm sheet. "Tina's got some man in New York."

"What do you mean?" Nick blinked. "What's he doing for her?"

"He's probably warming up a bed, is what he's doing for her."

Nick had barely parsed the meaning of that sentence before Jordan sunk back into her seat, rolling her eyes with all the pent up malice she had all throughout the dinner, lying beneath the calm surface. "She can be so vindictive. Just because Daisy talked to a man one time in Chicago she thinks she can have her boytoy telephone at dinner time."

Nick couldn't even get a word in before Jordan's eyes flickered back to the door, warning him of the couple's return. Nick had expected to see the two return together, a unified front to disperse those ugly words from the same rumour mill that spat out libel about the man next door. But when the servants opened the doors, only Daisy stepped out.

"I'm so sorry," he said to Jordan and Nick. "Tina will be back in a moment. It's business again — so much business." Then his eyes fell on Nick and Nick only. "…Cousin-mine, will you take a walk with me?"

Nick followed Daisy out of the house, going around a chain of connecting verandas. Two antique-looking lamplights stood on either side of the stone rails, meant surely to accompany the use of the set of white, art noveau garden chairs. But they were unlit. The evening light had long left, leaving a cold chill in the air that nipped at the tips of their noses. Daisy and Nick sat in the quiet gloom, in the velvet dark.

Nick slipped into his pockets for his box of cigarettes. Fragrant, flue-cured tobacco of North Carolina, the popular blend of the day. He popped one into his mouth, and offered one to Daisy. Daisy shook his head. "I don't smoke, Nicki. Hate the things."

Nick pulled the cigarette from his mouth and stuffed it back into his pockets. Daisy's lips quirked.

"…We don't know each other very well, Nicki," Daisy said, somewhat suddenly. "Even if we are cousins. You never came to my wedding."

"I wasn't back from the war," Nick said.

"That's true." Daisy hesitated, but then fought past it. "I've had a hard time, Nicki. A hard time indeed."

Nick's brows furrowed, consternation falling over his face. "I'm sorry about everything that—"

"About my being disowned? Don't be." Daisy got up, going to the rails. He clasped his hands behind his back and looked up at the sky, as if in competition with it. "There's nothing good about being owned."

Nick didn't know what to say. "How is Pam?" he diverted. He'd seen pictures of Daisy's daughter in the house, framed in gold and silver. "Can she talk or walk, or — perhaps both?"

Nick had horribly miscalculated the capabilities of a five year old child, and it took a long, regretful minute for him to realise this. But Daisy just nodded his head absently. "Yes. She's an angel. People say she looks more like me than she does her mother. I'm not quite sure that's true, but they assure me it is."

"It's a good thing," Nick said, a thinly veiled compliment of another man's looks. "To look like you is a good thing."

The expected chuckle of thanks Nick wanted to hear did not come. Daisy looked stressed...pained, even. Nick had thought every parent loved to boast of how their offspring looked like them.

Nick got up, going to lean on the rails beside Daisy. He might have sworn to have seen harsh, turbulent thoughts come like waves behind his eyes before drawing back into the large sea of his well-kept secrets. Nick understood, at least, why Daisy was such a stranger to him before family had abandoned him.

"You want to know something about me, Nicki?" Daisy said. "I didn't have a charmed life in Chicago. I didn't have a perfect life in San Francisco before then, either. Nor Louisville. Or LA. Or wherever it was before then. People didn't like it when I expressed I wished to remain a bachelor. They didn't like it when I was…a 'friend of Dorothy's'. So I take everyone's collective advice, I do my duty as a good American lad, with good American stock, and married a good American woman. And they still didn't like it. Didn't like that she retained the Buchanan name, and I took her name instead. 'Scandalous,' they said. 'Sacrilege,' they said."

Nick thought about what to say. "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

Daisy huffed, turning his lovely face in his direction, beaming. "Yes. Yes, Nicki."

He sighed, continuing on his story. "We had to leave Chicago because of it. No — Tina — Tina can take the rumours. She doesn't mind being called a femme-fatale or a matriarch or a she-wolf. No. She minds being called the stupid woman who married a queer."

There was utterly no emotion in Daisy's voice. No rise in it, no lilt, not a tremble to be heard. He said it calmly, with dignity.

"The rumours died down when I married her," he said, stating a list of facts rather than telling a story. "I was at a club, The Menagerie, had a bit to drink. There were others there like me. One leaned in, too drunk for civility, and touched his lips upon mine. It got in the papers not a few hours later. The rumours exploded. Tina hated it. So we moved."

Daisy turned fully to Nick, now, smiling softly. Then his eyes went wide, and his mouth went wide, and he raised his head to laugh into the cold night air. A baritone, song-like laugh that rang through the air. "Rumours?! Gods, that's rich coming from me. That's really rich!"

Nick didn't join in with his laughing. He just walked up to him, put his hand on his back, and basked in his dissatisfaction with him.

People were made of multitudes. They say one thing, and do another. They do one thing, then regret it later. They don't do anything, and they regret that too. They regret the thing, then don't do anything to change it. Nick wondered when Daisy had started to think otherwise about his relationship with Tina. If he had realised beforehand, but went through with it anyway, or realised it after, but did nothing, and will do nothing about it at all.

The lights on the rails suddenly flickered on, illuminating Daisy's face. He glowed with a sort of pride, regal and tall, and gave Nick a look that suggested he understood him, yet could never hope to understand him; asserting himself in the secret society to which he and Tina belonged, to which he was both beloved, and hated. But the tiniest feeling of being beloved, Nick thought, was too intoxicating for Daisy to ever think of walking away. To be fawned over, to wear nice clothes, and eat nice food, and have everything. Daisy, who had sailed across the world and been to every beautiful place upon it, had nowhere else to go.

They came back inside, where they shut the closet door on the things they'd said in the dark.

That night, when Nick came back home to his unlit cottage in West Egg, there was a figure on the end of the dock. It was his neighbour's dock, one that stretched ludicrously far into the water. A silent, open lure to the dangerous depths of the lake. Nick twisted his head to the side, eyes snapping up to see the west wing window of the Cadis Mansion, expecting to see something there as he had always seen something there.

But the window was empty. The curtains were drawn fully, not a sliver of light coming from them. Without the life of a party, the gothic mansion felt dead and corpse-like. As all gothic mansions were supposed to feel, Nick supposed.

Nick turned back to the figure on the dock, and thought quietly, that this must be the elusive Mr Frankenstein.

Mr Frankenstein, who stood and stood at the dock's tip, doing nothing but looking. Nick found himself, for the moment, watching the watcher. All of a sudden, he felt tempted by the water as well, wanting to see what had caught and caged the man's attention. And he was looking at something, searching for it like a favoured star in the whole wide night sky. Like a man maddened — ensnared by a siren.

There was a red light at the end of the other side of the bay. A signal light, warning boats of the incoming dock. Coincidentally close to where Nick had in fact returned from. Nick briefly worried the man would take but one more step and fall into the deep, all for that little, blinking light.

Just like the monster of Mary Shelley's book, who wandered into the foggy, icy waters with all the weight of its leaden grief, and was never seen again.

Chapter Text

Tina made good on her side of what she thought was a done deal. First thing in the morning, short of pulling Nick directly out of bed into the train, she whisked him away from Long Island into Town with the promise of the magnificent-something in the Yale Club. Nick took her hand when she languidly held hers out and helped her onto the train; he directed them to their seats when she handed over the tickets, and then sat for what felt like an hour in silence as she looked vehemently out the window, wanting to keep the silence.

The camaraderie found in the previous day was not so easy as to be found again no sooner than lightning would strike twice. Her generosity, having been flagrantly displayed at the dinner, was now quietly spent, and she rested keenly.

Nick looked out the window too. In the near distance was a half-built town of industrial spires and smoke-spewing chimneys, dispersing soot over the sky like snow. It was home to only shadows of men, who moved sluggishly through the smog and dust as if they were a part of it. The uncomely-looking town that people turned their eyes from powered the entire electric, booming city of New York a mere few kilometres away. It was the ugly backstage truth to a shining theatre illusion; a great valley where the fires of progress and vitality had finally burned out, and where their ashes were left to gather. Nick watched the smoke rise and rise, impossibly black against the cloudy sky. He found himself looking forward to passing the valley, to turn his own eyes away and look at the brightness of the city instead.

The smell of perfume, a pleasant blend of flowers — perhaps a hint of jasmine, a whiff of roses, but mostly, gardenias — was such a stark difference to the bleakness outside the window, heavy on Nick's mind, it thrust him violently back into the train compartment.

Nick turned to Tina, who was applying the perfume from the tiniest spritz bottle, her tulle gloves in her lap. It was then he realised she was wearing her own perfume: Buchanan No. 6, eau de parfum. He'd seen advertisements for it. Men gathered around the feminine outstretched hand of a woman, fighting amongst one another for the privilege to kiss it. A line of lovelorn lads lined up behind a woman holding a brimming bouquet of gardenias. It was a debutante's necessity that was too expensive for its target audience to ever afford. Buchanan No. 6: not just a perfume but a glamour to adorn, a spell to bewitch.

Tina smiled as she cast it upon herself, drawing Nick's attention this clandestine way instead of asking for it.

"What did Daniel say to you on the veranda last night?"

"Pardon?"

"Daniel. He said something to you last night, didn't he?"

Nick leaned back in his seat, blinking as if confused. Feigning ignorance. He had no intention of telling Tina what he and Daisy had spoken about, not in the least. Daisy was his cousin, and he felt a twang of responsibility towards him and his feelings.

"…We chatted here and there, like old drinking buddies." He smiled good-naturedly. "You know, boy's stuff. And the like." Nick hoped that would be the end of it.

But Tina's brow lifted almost imperceptibly, her red line of lips unmoving. "…I'm…oh, excuse me, Nicki — I think I'm just a smidgen jealous of you."

Nick blinked in what was genuine confusion this time.

Tina explained. "I've never had anyone to talk to about girl's stuff." She smiled ruefully, her red lips thinning. "…Did you know I had brothers, Nicki? Well, I do. Two, in fact. Both of them younger than me. Both of them good, strapping young boys, born with a gold spoon in their mouths and the promise of the Buchanan empire."

Tina sighed pleasantly, though she crossed her arms as if the things she was speaking about were not pleasant for her to recall at all. "I often think of what my parents thought when they had their first child, their shining heir and — it was me. A girl child. A…a little detour for their wishes before it came true. And it always would come true. Buchanans — 'we always get what we want,' my mother would say."

Nick listened. "That's a rather catty thing to say," he said. "We can't always get what we want," he said, and meant — you are a girl child and yet you have everything, the promise of the empire without the golden spoon.

Tina looked at her reflection in the window, a beautiful, billboard spread of a face, the only one on par with Daisy's, and looked to think deeply. "A catty thing to say? I've never met a cat in my life to know," she said absently. She turned back. "My brothers were conditioned to be the heirs. Out of the two of them, one would go on and inherit the empire. They were tutored religiously in economics, the sciences, politics and the like," she said vacantly.

And then, as if she had snapped awake from falling to death in a dream, said, "And you want to know what happened in the end? Richard — second youngest — still needed Father to pull his strings to get into Yale. He dropped out in his second year and ran with his trust money to Crete with a chambermaid. Jonathan — third youngest, put on his best businessman's suit and ran our camera company into the ground. Sliced off one of the heads of the hydra, just like that."

Tina snapped her fingers to enunciate. It seemed to echo throughout the compartment. Her sharp words startled Nick. They were blunt without courtesy, awkward in their honesty. It was as if Nick had been boxed in on a priest's confession booth, these divulgences meant for someone else's ears, surely not his.

But Nick nodded seriously. "So that's why you're here. The prodigal daughter, done fixing their problems, and brought your name back into glory." He hesitated before continuing. "To be perfectly honest, someone like you running the head of the largest family enterprise in the country is simply unheard of," Nick said, with genuine commendation. "They're lucky to have you."

"It wasn't that easy." Tina unfolded her arms. She put on her gloves again, slipped a hand into her purse, pulled out a cigarette, and attached it to the end of a golden cigarette holder. Her eyes locked with Nick's, compelling him to fumble around his pockets for a lighter. Tina leaned in a little, her heavy string of pearls clinking together as Nick lit her cigarette with pious duty.

She took a drag, blowing white smoke into the private train compartment with the air of someone swallowing pride a mile long. But she parsed it, elegantly so, reining back that colossus of pride to tell Nick, "Life's just a game, Nicki. A great, big, rigged game of roulette. And my parents — my brothers — no one on this green earth — considered me a player. I begged and pleaded and came out of Yale on top, but my parents still babied my brothers, begging and pleading them to take over the corporation."

She took another drag, filling their compartment up with smoke. "A game is something you have to dominate. You know this, Nicki. You're a man who's always had a seat at the table. I forced my parents to see me, forced my brothers to concede to me by working twice as hard, twice as long to get what I would have gotten had I a cock. I had to claw and sweat for my birthright."

Tina slumped back, raising her head and bearing her lovely, pale neck as she exhaled smoke. She watched it rise and dissipate like a youth enjoying the wonder of blowing bubbles and watching them fly. "And it is my birthright. And I did it all wearing a bleeding dress."

In that instance, she looked unlike the CEO of a multimillionaire company, unlike the heiress of a department store empire, and patently unlike the petite housewife waiting on her husband's guests. Tina Buchanan looked exactly like a girl born into money who had grasped the intoxicating, irrefutable power of not having to marry into money to keep that golden livelihood. With the air of a child emperor, slumping on their throne, she propped up her legs upon the seat next to Nick and smoked to her heart's content.

This was a drastically different image of the heiress Nick had in fact seen before upon her pantaloon-ed days in Yale. Tomboy or not, Tina was a person who had everything, but that was not enough for someone who did not merely want a seat at the roulette table, but wanted to control its every throw of dice, every newly shuffled hand. She was the kind of person who was ever-determined to keep that 'everything' she had, not willing to part with even a single coin of her well-collected horde, or to lose a single sphere of control, a single scale off one of the heads of the hydra.

And Nick realised, suddenly, that that meant every aspect of Daisy too. Who he talked to, what he talked about, every bit and bob in the papers about him that reflected back on her.

"…I didn't know you in Yale," Nick started. He grimaced, thinking he sounded crude. "I sat with you in marketing. Accounting too, I believe. I wish I could have made more effort to…talk." Then Nick leaned in, clasping his hands together as if bracing himself. "Why are you telling me all this, Tina?"

Tina's eyes were on him all of a sudden. She had the lightest crystal eyes Nick had ever seen. Her fashionable bob of white-blonde hair, and those light eyes, and the halo of reflected light behind her seat, starkly visible in the smoke, was almost…angelic.

"Because you cared to sit with me at all," Tina said simply. "…At the roulette table."

Nick sat back, thinking upon those words. They sat in silence as the black smoke outside came closer, while the white smoke in the compartment swirled, spurred by their breaths.

"I talked to Daisy about your daughter," Nick said slowly.

"Daniel."

"Daniel."

This was what Tina had wanted from him, after all. Part of it, anyhow. She turned her head to him, brows going sweetly up. In her head, there were only two sides to any game: the people who sided with her, and the people who sided against. The expression on her face told Nick she thought he chose the right side.

"I saw all those adorable pictures of little Pam and wondered, stupidly, if she could walk and talk. She's — what? Nearly five? And of course Dai—Daniel shut me up good. She can walk, she can talk, and she can dance, he said."

"He said that?" Tina said, sitting up straight. The smile that lit up her face made her look truly like an angel. Her enthusiasm was as if Daisy had never inquired about their daughter before, and this was news to her. "Of course he did," she said happily. She sat up in her seraphic cloud of Buchanan No. 6.

"Pamela's an advanced child. She can read too. Baa baa black sheep. The three little pigs. Almost all the words," Tina boasted.

Daisy or Daniel. Tommy or Tina.

Pam, or Pamela.

Nick wondered what the girl's name really was.

"You should have had the governess let her romp about at dinner," Nick said, his own smile returning. "Daisy told me she looks like him. That people say she looks like him."

Tina huffed, covering her mouth with her hand. The smell of smoke had overwhelmed the smell of gardenias now, snuffing it out like a light in the dark.

"I wouldn't have it any other way," Tina said. "I'm glad she looks like him. He's beautiful. He'll see that soon. Our Pamela, his daughter."

There was a wistful want in her tone of voice. As if Daisy, in Tina's eyes, hadn't yet realised whose daughter Pam was.

"You're beautiful too," Nick said. An empty admission. Even if it was true.

But the light in Tina's eyes changed.

A spark in them ignited, like she had just realised she was what the tabloids called her, she was a she-wolf, and that she'd been talking to a ram all this time. Nick swallowed, eyes flickering from side to side as Tina stubbed her cigarette on the window sill, straightened up neatly, and leaned in. And then leaned in further. Her lashes batted, her red lips parted, her crystal eyes looked stark at Nick's. She wanted something from him and realised right now that she could take it.

"You think I'm beautiful?" Tina said, an inch from his face. "Do you fancy me, Nicki?"

She went in, meaning to kiss him.

To buy him.

Nick breathed out sharply and stood up. Her nose bopped against his vest. "—Doesn't everyone fancy such a good-looking woman? You, you, you — you're lovely, Tina. Wonderful! Daisy is lucky to have you, he— He's lucky, yes—"

Tina reined that look in her eye back in, her lips set into a deep, surly frown.

Before Nick could splutter any more, a uniformed trainman knocked on the compartment doors. "Madam Buchanan, Sir, this is your reminder that your destination is—"

"Stop the train, Mister," Tina said coldly.

"…Pardon me...?"

"I said," Tina's eyes turned from Nick's to the trainman's like a bear looking at bait, "tell the conductor to stop the damned train."

Nick trudged through the Valley of Ashes, the squealing metal of the train behind them chugging back to life after it had come to an unnatural stop in the middle of the track. Tina marched forward in her silver heels with what looked like no difficulty at all. Nick followed wordlessly behind her.

The black smoke streaked the sky, blanketing the entire street like the eternal dusk of a black and white noir film. Every now and then, the men, like shadows of their former selves, still stuck in place doing the last thing they had done while fully bright and alive, turned up from their shovels and grease to stare. But then they looked away. As if not daring to stare too long upon the shining beacon of Tina Buchanan.

She walked with the kind of air of someone who had walked this ashen path a hundred times before. This place seemed to Nick the last place on earth Tina would get caught existing. Nick had not the slightest idea where she was leading him.

He felt suddenly panicked. He'd offended Tina, and now she was taking him down some isolated back alley in the middle of nowhere where no one would ever think to look for him, and where no one would ever connect to her. She had the power to make him disappear, that was fact. She had also the power to toss him down a well in frank public execution style, and who was any coalman here to say otherwise? Nick was wading in exceedingly dangerous waters—

"Over here, Nicki." Tina stepped up from the soot of the street into the dust of a small gas station garage. "Watch your step."

He followed, scraping his shoes on the concrete ledge before going up.

Nick peered in. Inside, every table and workshop surface was sprawled with metal tools, rubber tubes, springs and nuts and bolts, supremely cluttered. Things hung from the overhanging metal grate, chains clanking when swayed by an unbearably hot draft, which upturned and relocated swathes of ashes into cubby holes and corners. Everything was wood, metallic, spider-web or markedly rust-eaten. Nick noticed a small, sun-faded cut out of an Arrow Collar Man ad stuck on the bottom of a window pane.

Through the garage clutter, a woman sat on a beaten wooden stool tapping her feet. She was listening along to music playing on and off an old radio that flickered and buzzed. When the signal went out, she sang the missing parts lowly before the song puttered back to life. Bunched up in that rusty gas station garage, her hair in fraying days-old finger curls, she looked so small.

"Mrs Myrtle?" Tina called. Her voice sounded loud in the room, breaking what little spell the radio held for this Mrs Myrtle.

Mrs Myrtle started from her stool. Nick could see now that she, too, was just a shadow. She was made of the same thing that embroiled the coalmen outside. There was nothing that could be done for her.

"Mrs Buchanan? I — We didn't know you were coming."

"I told you, you can call me Tina," Tina implored, but she did not mean it, and somehow Mrs Myrtle understood this.

Tina looked around the gas station workshop as if searching for something.

Further in the workshop, Nick was startled by a vibrantly red head rising from the hood of a torn apart car. Nick could tell he had been working on it for a long time, but the car was in such bad condition he doubted any amount of tinkering could actually fix it. The man threw his work to the side — in true, and somewhat purposefully comical form, he threw his wrench to the side, ignoring the loud clatter on the floor — and came to them. He received them with a large smile.

"Madam Buchanan." The redheaded man gazed at her wistfully. His hair was so dazzlingly red it seemed to stand out amongst the hard veneer of grey that had taken ahold of the rest of the room and valley. Backed by concrete, he was inordinately bright and energetic.

To Nick's utter surprise, the man leaned in to kiss Tina on the cheek.

Even more surprising, Tina accepted this.

"Myrtle," Tina greeted. Before Mr Myrtle could withdraw, Tina grabbed his collar and forcefully pulled his ear to her lips. The man shivered with delight. "Get on the next train out of here," Tina said, as she slipped him more money than he'd be able to make a month, "And bring your sister." Her eyes darted momentarily in Nick's direction. "He'll like your sister."

She can be so vindictive. Suddenly, as intrusive as a phone call during dinner, Nick was struck with harried whispers of yesterday. Just because Daisy talked to a man one time in Chicago she thinks she can have her boytoy telephone at dinner time.

Nick briefly had trouble believing his eyes as Tina blatantly and hungrily mouthed Mr Myrtle's ear. With some trouble, they finally broke.

"Nicki, this is Adam Myrtle. I'm here to discuss selling him my car." Tina had already turned on her heels, on her way out. "This is Nick Clerval, the writer," she said behind her to Mr Myrtle.

"Uh, actually, I do bonds now. I sell bonds now."

"A pleasure to meet you!" Mr Myrtle shook his hand strongly without looking at him. "I'll be there," he mouthed past Nick. His thick New York accent could even be seen in the way he mouthed the words.

Then Nick followed Tina out in a daze, trekking back to the small, makeshift station for the next train to come and take them away back to civilisation. They stood carefully close, waiting. While they waited, Nick's thoughts dissolved, inevitably, into judgments.

Nick thought about Daisy, standing on the veranda spilling his soft secrets he could tell no other, calling him, cousin; because all of a sudden family had become very important to him, meant something to him, meant enough for him to trust Nick with the unpretty truth of him.

And Nick thought about what had just transpired in this smoky dust bowl so far away from that gleaming dinner. Tina with that look in her eye, compelling him to be hers, as if loyalty was a thing that could be bought and sold. As if the final way to collect him was to have Nick be implicated in this ruse. And Tina blatantly calling on her man in New York as if Nick knowing was of no consequence — because it wasn't, because she knew, and Nick knew: he wouldn't tell.

Nick took Daisy's secrets, and Tina's secrets, standing transparently on one side and the other, and scrunched those secrets into a ball in each fist.

"Where's your wife?"

"In Town. With Nick. Yale Club."

"—Coming with me this Saturday?"

Jordan threw the question at him the minute the study doors closed shut. She hated meeting like this. Like she was shoving herself and Daisy into a broom closet to speak unspeakable things. They weren't. It was perfectly acceptable for a golden socialite to go to some godforsaken party, for fuck's sake.

Daisy said nothing. He wandered aimlessly around the study until he all but hit a window. Without speaking, he drew open the curtain. Jordan supposed he was gazing to the other side of the bay. A forbidden pleasure. A forbidden fruit he had tasted once before. But now that he had tasted it, desire itched at the back of his mind.

"I can't," Daisy said. "…Why did you have to bring it up during dinner? You drew her attention to it. She could be onto us."

"Onto us for what? For having fun? For dancing?" Jordan scoffed, shaking her head. The two heavy-weight jewels on her ears swayed, kissing each cheek with cold. "It's not illegal to go to Frankenstein's parties. If it was, half the city would be in chains."

Daisy turned. He gave her a pathetic, rueful look.

Jordan swallowed back, her arguments shot down. She was so damned weak against his distantly shielded, carefully subdued, sad face. "…The last time we went, you had such a good time." She pursed her lips. "I just want you to have a good time."

"You want me to rebel against my wife."

Jordan's eyes shot back up. Daisy smiled in that way that told her every time that she was his bestest friend in the world, and he could only thank her for it. That she could be smug in the fact that the way he smiled at her was a way he could smile at no other.

"I won't do that."

Daisy lingered, his dark eyes shifting in thought. "…Did you mean it, when you said that people who went to Frankenstein's parties didn't come out?"

Jordan froze. Daisy was her best friend, and so scared of any little thing that could hurt him. Even a rumour. Especially a rumour.

"No. That's just codswallop. What, how gullible are you? I said it to make Nick shake in his boots."

Daisy grinned. "Treat him gently. I like Nick."

Jordan shrugged. "I'm going. With or without you."

The city of New York set upon them with blinding power, roaring loudly with its cacophony of high traffic at rush hour, every hour of the day. Shop assistants and street vendors and papermen were ever abundant, unafraid to reach out to tantalise with their goodies. They retreated easily into the trove of their shops, agonisingly aware there would be something someone would be in the mood to purchase, ever-vigilant in their consumerist evangelism.

Tina had beckoned Nick to follow and trust blindly in her for the past hour, floating from shop to shop in the glittering Fifth Avenue stores. Without much fanfare she finally stepped into a Rolex store, caught by the latest Leyendecker work. As was, admittedly, Nick.

It was here that Nick watched Tina as she surveyed a line of gold-plated watches, prompting the assistant to take out many from behind glass. She had Nick try them for size, which he lacklusterly agreed to. Watch after watch was clasped and unclasped onto Nick's wrist, with Tina and every assistant in the emptying store as critics.

All of this occurred under the watchful eye of Leyendecker's advertisement illustration. The Arrow Collar Man, as he was favourably known, hawked the fine wares of Troy, the New York Cluett, Peabody & Co., Inc., the purveyors of detachable crisp collars and cuffs which men attached to the body of their Arrow dress shirts. The man, a chiseled, rather detached, but endlessly suave and unerringly handsome bachelor looked stoically down at the rotating queue of watches, immodest in his decorum. He seemed to contribute his fair share of secrets, selling not just watches and shirts, but the manifestation of what Americans dreamed.

After a while Tina chose the second most expensive watch and had it gift wrapped.

"I thought — I thought we were going to the Yale Club," Nick asked weakly. He had already given up on the useful bonds contacts.

"We're not going to the Yale Club and their subpar brandy, Nicki," Tina said. "Don't fret. I'll show you a good time."

They came into the area with attractive cookie-cut out shapes of apartment houses, where Adam Myrtle was waiting for them. The apartment, the highest on the floor, was cluttered in exact opposite fashion that the garage was. Instead of overwhelming grey, Nick was overcome by the unbearably cherry wallpaper, the pink persian carpets, the white, lacey sofa covers. After dumping their purchases upon a harpsichord seat, Tina and Myrtle disappeared into one of the rooms, leaving Nick to sit out in the living room with a glass of champagne he poured for himself.

Left alone with his thoughts, he felt utterly stupid for coming here. Squeals and thuds sounded obscenely behind the thin walls. Figuring out rather lamely what Tina and Myrtle were doing behind the bedroom door, Nick reddened, flustered, and got up to leave.

But just as he went to make his escape, the apartment door burst conveniently open. A slim, trendily dressed woman slunk in the frame in stunning turquoise. Her hair, also fiery red. "So? Aren't we having a party?"

"…We are?"

She let herself in, and a small but tight swarm of other people Nick did not know flooded in behind her. "Catherine. Adam's sister. A pleasure."

"Oh, you must be the cousin!"

"Ain't he pretty? They didn't tell us you were pretty. He's pretty, right, Chester?"

Chester then snapped a picture of him, igniting the room in a flash of light. Then they rushed past him to make themselves at home.

"Where is the cheese board? Someone promised me one and I brought truffle camembert."

"The glasses are in there."

"Where does your brother hide the wine?"

They were dressed to the nines, clad in jewellery and bright colours. Catherine sported an elegant headdress with a crest of white egret feathers. One of the other girls' dresses was even cut above the knee. Nick, in his sensible tweed, felt distinctly underdressed.

Though it seemed not to matter to the guests. Nick marched past Tina's party entourage only to be stopped just as he again got to the door. Tina and Myrtle had come out. Tina's shawl had been removed, as was her silver heels. Myrtle's collar was ruffled, his tie totally missing and his flaming hair suspiciously mussed. The golden watch Tina had bought was sitting on his weather-worn mechanic's hands.

"What are you doing, Nicki?" Tina thrust forward, taking his hand to pull him back.

"I — I have to be going now, Tina, er, Mr Myrtle."

"Call me Adam!"

"Right, Mister — I'm so sorry, I should be going—"

"Nicki, Nicki, Nicki," Tina cooed, her perfectly manicured nails digging into his sleeve. Her light eyes locked onto him, and Nick was mesmerised by the knowing look in them. "Listen. You've always been a watcher."

Nick's mouth propped open, but Tina shook her head quickly at him.

"No, no, no — I don't make any judgments about that. I don't. But you've always had a seat at the table Nicki. You have a seat and yet all you do is watch. You are a well-bred, fanciful man, full of tenacity, any smart woman should clamour to be on your arm. Now, things are happening, they're happening right now and they're about to pass you by. Do you want to sit there on the sidelines, scribbling in your pages, going through your numbers — or do you want to play roulette?"

The partygoers behind them tossed their already poured drinks up.

"Spin the wheel!" Catherine yelled, toasting him.

"Bet on us!" the girl with Chester called.

Nick looked at them all. For a moment, he was unable to help the small smile creeping across his lips. The apartment cheered at this development and pulled him further into the pit of the party. Tina and Myrtle danced, Myrtle's hands resting on Tina's hips, outlining the wasp-waist beneath the fashionably tube dress. The girl with Chester posed as she danced, and Chester began frantically to snap pictures. Nick thought it was only polite that he ask Catherine — actually held out his hand and asked to her baffled amusement — to dance.

Then someone got out the alcohol and the rest of the night came to Nick in pieces, like Chester's snapshots. Mr Myrtle chugging booze from a Ming dynasty vase. Tina swaying her arms about like a wild concert goer. Catherine singing badly out of tune to the music, then everyone, including Nick, joining in. Then Myrtle was suddenly in his underwear. Then Nick looked down and discovered he was in his underwear. Then Tina out of nowhere was wearing Nick's pants.

A few gleeful cries of "Myrtle! Myrtle!" sounded as people, including Tina, were chased across the room, followed by Myrtle's equally gleeful laughing.

"I tell you all the time to call me Adam, Tina!"

At some point during the night, Catherine pulled Nick aside, sat him down, and then lounged in his lap. They sat there watching Tina and Myrtle dance amid the utterly trashed apartment, cherry wallpaper ripped, vases broken, clothes strewn, carpet wet. Catherine leaned in and said to him, "None of them can stand who they're married to."

Nick, barely able to think, asked, "Doesn't Myrtle like his wife?"

Catherine scoffed loudly. "That prude, shy little girl in the shop?"

An image came to him like a wave of nausea: Mrs Myrtle, sat on that low wooden stool, humming along to the fizzling radio. Small. Bug-like.

"Though not like it's not his own damned fault," Catherine slurred.

She leaned in on Nick's shoulder. "Georgina Wilson," she said. When Nick said nothing, she added, "Her maiden name. Before she became a Myrtle." Perhaps there was some fame to be recognised, some past, spent glory, but Nick was none the wiser.

Catherine looked to her brother with pity. "He married her thinking she had money. She did, but it disappeared soon after. She married him thinking he loved her. Now they're stuck with each other." Then she dozed off atop of him.

The upbeat music blared in Nick's face, his ears throbbing with the beat. He removed Catherine as gently as he could, then stumbled a way across the wasteland of the apartment, stepping on clothes and spilled drinks and yuck. Nick, pushed and pulled by invisible forces, finally got out of the rip and shut himself outside on the small balcony. From outside he watched the secrets of this secret society unfold from behind a glass wall. There, and not really there at all. One of them, and not. One foot in, and the other out.

An image: Chester and his girl laughing, laughing, their voices loud and shrill. Catherine passed out on the couch.

An image: Myrtle stomping out of the bedroom, his red hair, like blood, damp. Tina strutting out after him. Back in her silver heels. They clicked like gunshots on the floor. He opened his mouth, saying things Nick couldn't quite parse. Well I guess I have your bloody husband to thank! Nick caught a name: Daniel — Daniel Daniel Daniel — Daisy!

Through the glass, on the other side of the transparent wall, Tina picked up an empty bottle and broke it across Adam Myrtle's nose. There was blood everywhere.

Often, Nick had this feeling of déjà vu. He was outside his cottage, sitting on his boxes. Or he was lying on his porch swing, having coffee. Or standing at his letterbox, looking out at the bay. He was sitting or lying or standing, but in his déjà vu he was always alone and — and he felt the distinct feeling of being watched.

Nick did not remember how he got home that day he spent with Tina. He woke up on his porch swing set, hugging the clothes he partied in. He scrunched his nose at them, then tossed them to the floor. That feeling overwhelmed him.

Nick took a breath and looked up.

He was there again. The man who stood in the dark of his window, looking out between the half-drawn curtains. The shade of the blinds hiding his face, and his silhouette eerily still. He just stood there, thinking.

It was sinister. Like a leviathan in the water. Like a blacked out, doctored photograph. But Nick was not afraid, not even of being watched.

He didn't know why.

Chapter Text

Here was the famed procession of events as Nick understood at this time.

Five years ago, the year 1918, at the end of the Great War, one James Frankenstein appeared out of thin air and bought the most expensive property on the entirety of West Egg, Long Island. It was all public knowledge; West Egg was already well reputed as the land of New Money, but it was as if Frankenstein had wanted to prove just how much of it he had. The first thing he did was tear down the millions of dollars worth of real estate. A grand Georgian manor with thirty rooms, a luxurious bay view and everything a filthy, rich bastard and his clan could have clawed and coveted from their souls for.

He tore it down. Then he started over.

He brought in materials from all over the world, specific types of rare wood, only a certain type and colour of brick and stone, some special species of this and that, and that and this. Then he hired workers who told the press of how he rolled out fully developed blueprints, of how he berated them for even the smallest of blunders, as if he'd designed and already lived in this house. They used techniques that hadn't been used for centuries at his behest. They revived crafts thought to be lost to time. They endured endless stresses at the enticement of his handsome paychecks. After two long, gruelling years, with rotating battalions of builders and designers and landscapers, Frankenstein had built himself an honest to devil, real life gothic manor in the year of the lord 1920. The name: The Cadis Mansion.

Two hundred rooms. A pair of tower-like turrets. Practically medieval windows. White marble courtyards. Pointed spire decor. Fountains in front and out back. A fortress from another century that would last centuries. The only thing he kept from the original property was a generous circular swimming pool. People would joke it was only a moat short of a castle. People joked a lot of things, in actuality. That an angel had come to build a garden of eden. That a demon had come to build a nest of debauchery. Whatever wondrous and astonishing things there was to be said, there was one thing everyone had begrudgingly agreed upon: the man was certainly richer than god.

Then the parties started.

Every three weeks beginning Summer of 1920, Frankenstein opened his personal pet project of a home to the public. They said he jump-started the lifeblood of Jazz Age party culture. That he made multiple deals with Mephistopheles to keep supplying food and lights and adrenaline and happiness to the masses.

Starting 1920, saying 'James Frankenstein holds parties' was just as staple as expressing that the sky was blue. Every three weeks. Like clockwork. Never late. Never a tick early. Three weeks.

This went on for three years.

Then, one February day in 1923, after Frankenstein's usual glimmering Saturday party — there was another one directly after it.

Then another one. And another one. And another…

As if grossly prolonging a feeling ephemerally stricken, as if urgently chasing something in pursuit; as if he, desperately, never wanted that February day to end.

Frankenstein held parties from Saturday through to the next Thursday seemingly out of nowhere, the pattern broken. The clockwork fizzled. From then on, the tempo of Frankenstein's parties changed. Instead of every three weeks, the time was carved down to every single week. The Cadis Mansion held parties every single Saturday, from day to night, dusk to dawn — all the way until present.

Overnight, the question on everyone's mind changed from Where does the money come from, to —

Why does he throw these parties?

Nick joined the tidal wave of people, flocks and flocks of displaying birds of paradise rushing through the black gates of the Cadis Mansion, Nick a plain linen peasant beside them. He'd expected to have dinner and then politely but vehemently refuse the dancing, and for not everyone to roll their eyes at his invitation as if it were faked, a ploy. Not even the guards believed it was a true invitation sent by the host.

"Hello, I'm looking for a Mr Frankenstein?" Nick asked about the thirtieth servant. "I mean, I expect he wants to see me, judging on this invite."

"Who's Frankenstein?"

"Honey," said another, leaning in, "He's our employer?"

"He is?"

In all sensibility, no one was 'invited' to a Frankenstein party. People simply invited themselves, and Mr Frankenstein turned no one away. Nick, through the crowd, could see men and women from every section of society all dressed up for the occasion.

There were film stars strutting purposefully down red carpets, war heroes having a drink, officers dancing still in uniform, sensational column writers surrounded by walls of giggling fans, fedora'd gangsters exchanging numbers. There was Nick's own Wall St boss, Walter Chase, gambling away his salary at the well-staffed roulette tables, college-aged boys jumping fully clothed into the pool, homeless men having their weekly gourmet meal, young girls taking a smoke. Within a few minutes, Nick himself began to wonder if his invitation was a fake, and he'd been lured by some anonymous fool to get out of his house and have a good time like all the other good fools.

The party was unlike anything Nick had ever seen. It made Tina's look rather like a flat warming for a shack, and the Times Square New Year countdown a mere charity project.

Indoors, the ballroom was packed. A ragtime singer dressed in brilliant silver was on the revolving stage in the centre, bellowing her heart out as people swayed around her. A fully staffed orchestra was split into three groups, one accompanying on the first floor, another on the second floor overlooking the ballroom, and then another on the third floor overlooking that. In the rooms and sitting areas, gambling dens ushered in the hopeful and the hopeless.

"Fold."

"Fold too."

"Man, I fucking quit."

In the dining room, three long tables were stuffed to the brim with food, and a whole other room was dedicated to deserts. "Taste this, it's delicious. I don't know what it is but it's good."

An army of chefs stood on standby, serving food straight from demonstrative pans. A barbecue roared outside, where two cooks spit-roasted a full boar. "Johnny, lower the flames, you're burning it. You're burning it. You're burning it!"

"It's called 'well-done,' bonehead. I'm not feeding people bloody raw meat, not on my bloody watch."

There was probably more going on in the upper levels, but Nick followed the flow outside to a magnificently lit fountain.

Outdoors, Nick could see famous jazz bands practically stolen from their city stages, their appearances cancelled in order to perform for podiums of dancers, dressed in sparkly flapper dresses and giant feather adornments. An announcer stood out into the open in brilliant blue and enunciated into his microphone, "And now, ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for the talented Miss Gilda Grey!" The crowd went wild. Again and again.

"I love you!" Miss Grey cried, teary eyed, "I love you all so much! Muah!"

One long stretch of the stone walls of the mansion had been converted into an attractive garden spectacle — a wall full of live roses. Every inch absolutely covered in red and pink roses with the ease of crawler vines. A rather impressive engineering feat. The smell was beautiful and overwhelming. People lined up to get pictures taken by one of the professional photographers with the roses.

"Don't pick the flower, sweety! It'll die."

"Sweetheart, there's like a thousand more. Picking twenty wouldn't make a difference."

Not far from the stage, the podiums and dancing people was the pool. A diving board had been installed, and Nick watched the last professional diver expertly flip off the end. Then the music changed and the synchronised swimmers appeared, long legs elegantly pointing out of the water in sync to the beat. When the swimmers were done, a small army of servants filled the pool with giant rubber duckies and inflated zebras and the like, and people clearly ready for the occasion jumped into the pool with their togs.

While wandering past the courtyard, Nick spotted a familiar head above the crowd. A woman taller than everyone else, with her dark bob of hair and shiny black dress. Her eyes, Nick could see even from this distance, were done up with dramatic gold makeup, accentuating the eagle-like quality of them. Nick smiled.

Jordan Baker was dancing to The Golden Goose band, her hips swaying, her arms waving, her lips in a large, genuine smile. Nick had never seen her like this. He felt almost guilty for looking, seeing her so candid and frank. She was not alone. Jordan bowed down from the clouds and wrapped her arms around a pretty-looking brunette girl, guiding her to put her own hands in Jordan's hair. Nick's smile faltered, changed, and then quirked up again once he understood. Of course. The looks of disgust Nick had gotten at dinner before made merciful sense. Daisy's best friend, also a friend of Dorothy's.

Nick left her to dance.

A party of this magnitude, of this level seemed hardly practical, stupendously wasteful at this point, and yet a damned biblical miracle. But Nick thought no more about it. The jazz pounded, clashing just slightly with the orchestra inside that was playing something classical; and the lights beamed like lighthouses, enticing boats and people to crash against sharp rocks instead of repelling them; and Nick, too, was pulled into this garden of earthly delights.

Everything glittering, golden, roaring and electric. Everything pulsing, moving, existing with a life of its own. Every week, Nick had sat in his house watching the sky light up and for the music to sound, for things to happen without him there. But now he was here. Everything happening around and to him. Nick felt as if he was eavesdropping on these people's lives, wrapped in his wild, orgasmic, rolling world — privy to the very heartbeat of it.

Nick drank from the rivers of alcohol provided, until he felt it amplify his eardrums. Or maybe that was just what it felt like, as people conversed loudly around him to be heard above the music.

"Haven't you heard, lad, James Frankenstein was a war hero! Killed three men with a single bullet, killed more with his bare hands," a large, round-faced man said, exhaling from his pipe.

"A war hero?" echoed his mate next to him.

"No, no, no — that's absolute rubbish," a slick looking man but with the barest outline of a moustache piped up, shaking his hand aggressively, "War heroes are all dirt poor these days and you know it, yet the man bathes in gold coins and green notes. He came outta nowhere. Obviously, he's some kind of gangster. No other way to get rich that fast than ganging it up."

He threw back his head and laughed. "Not that I'm complaining!"

"Really?!"

"How awful!"

"Gangster?!" a lady all but shouted in the crowd, "He's an Oxford man, haven't you heard? Highly educated. Well-groomed. Sophisticated. Or at least that's what his maids let slip. Oddest thing I heard is that he doesn't sleep with any of them."

Another partygoer grasped their companion's shoulder, spinning them around. "I hear he's a doctor," he said, simply releasing him without further ado.

"Wait a second, wait a second, this will be the freshest thing you hear tonight — there was a lawsuit once — a suit filed by some underling of his. You want to know what he was accused of? 'Using black magic.' Black magic!" the man bellowed. "And ya can quote me on quoting that! Ha!"

"If any of you go missing this party, we'll know who took you," the lady listening to him said, tapping him playfully under the chin.

"That's slander," another lady whispered in Nick's ear.

Nick jumped. He turned to look. "Jordan!"

Jordan laughed, then smiled apologetically. Nick was astounded that he could finally match the girlish giggle he'd heard at Daisy's to her face. She seemed to him to glow. "Are you surprised? I'm a regular here."

Nick raised a brow, keen to be on her good side. "What do you mean, slander?"

Jordan's eyes went wide. "Oh don't you know? It's not black magic he's using. It's all practical. Pure seamstress skills. Otherwise, how else could he sew together the ultimate partygoer?"

Nick blew out a breath, laughing as well. "See how he never shows up to his own parties?" Nick pointed towards the extravaganza, and Jordan mockingly followed it, searching with her nose.

"I've cracked the code. It's because he likes wearing half-face masks and pricey theatrics. The missing partygoers were merely invited to his underground lair to hear him sing," Nick said proudly. "The Phantom of the Party."

Jordan gasped out loud and laughed harder, clasping a rather strong grip on Nick's shoulder for balance. "Oh god. I bet he's not just horribly disfigured. Unlike the Phantom, he just has a terrible voice…"

"You see, that's why the kidnapping."

Nick smiled as Jordan calmed herself down.

"He's teaching the ultimate sewn-together partygoer to sing down there."

Jordan shook her rather ruffled hair and took a final breath before erupting into laughter again.

At this moment, a woman who'd been in the vicinity and had overheard their quips, turned to them with an apologetic look in her eye. "I'll let you two in on the joke," she said in a level voice. "This 'Mr Frankenstein' doesn't exist. I'm here always, taking my time sampling every insufferable dram of alcohol on these premises and I've never once come across some Frankenstein."

She sighed, as if she felt embarrassed for them that they still believed in the tooth fairy and didn't know any better. "You'll have a better chance finding the boogeyman."

"That only makes me more curious," Jordan sing-songed. "If no one can find him, I'm determined I will."

But her petulance didn't really reach her eyes. She looked pensive, defensively so. It was like something switched on in her head, making her seem very businesslike all of a sudden.

"My vitamins." Jordan took the moment to reach for her snuff bottle, taking two yellow pills from them. Then she turned to Nick.

"Let's go."

"Go where?"

"Let's go look for this Mr Frankenstein." Jordan put her hands on her hips, all sportswoman-like. She wore her dress, fringed at the hems, like sports clothes. In fact, she wore everything with the ease of movement and largeness of life as sports clothes, as if she'd grown up on luscious, rolling hills of golf courses and did not care to adhere to the properness of women from the city. Her dark eyes gleamed and she bent to regard him. "Aren't you curious where Mr Frankenstein hides all day in his house? What say you? "

Nick's lips curled into an indulgent smile. "To the mansion."

"To the mansion."

They cut through the crowd with the help of Jordan brushing people out of their way, and entered the first grand-looking door they found into an inner hall. The insides of those old, grand castles were always dim and dark, tempered by old wood that had wasted away in time until they were almost black; but Nick was met with highly polished rosewood, deeply brown but with vibrance and depth retained only in its finite youth. The hall was lined with oaken seats with imitation tapestry, upholstered in chippendale style. In them were guests resting between dinner and supper, with glasses of wine and interestingly decorated cocktails.

Nick and Jordan perused the guests' drinks, turning up their noses when spotting a particularly ugly pilsner, and puttered all over the imperial carpet with their mudkissed shoes. They came to an airy drawing room, fitted with large, draping curtains. Two generous red cedar chairs sat before a majestic fireplace. The flanks of the fireplace were carved into the fashion of a huge bird, but not one Nick recognised, and surprisingly asymmetrical. Symmetry had always been a virtue of gothic structures. Their wings were stretched around the fireplace, making an extravagant pose around the roaring fire.

"Ohh," Jordan mused, tapping a thumb on her chin. She looked at Nick through the elongated mirror that stretched almost to the ceiling above the mantle, as if they were critiquing particularly dubious art. "It's two phoenixes." On the fireplace mantle were two black marble statues of herons: one with its head rising to the sky, the other with its head bowed to the ground. A golden clock sat in the middle.

Next, they ran up a flight of helix-shaped spiral stairs. It was the colour of the rosewood walls and just as new. Nick had wanted to run around on the central staircase in the first hall he entered on the way in, but he had no way to find that now. They came out into a medium length parlour with more chippendale-style chairs and a matching table. In the corner of the parlour was a pair caught furiously kissing near some melted candles, which they bypassed. Nearby was a shiny piano.

"Can you play it?" Jordan asked.

"No," Nick said. So they moved on.

Opening and closing a few meeting rooms and their connecting antechambers, filled with luxuries they did not care for, Nick and Jordan went along.

The next room they stumbled into was much like the first hall. It was a library, almost two storeys high, with ladders and balconies. A sea of books covered nearly every inch of wall. What caught Nick's eye most were a set of banquettes that were bright, stunningly yellow, with a pleasant birdwing-like sheen. He sat in them with satisfaction as Jordan nosed through some books when a gruff, booming voice came down on them.

"What are you doing here, you two fools?"

Nick startled awake, jumping from the seat. "Pardon me?"

There was another man in the library. An old, cynical party-goer unhappy to be roused from his solitude in the great, empty place. "What are you doing inside here, and not out there in the glitter?"

Nick and Jordan stifled a collective, guilty giggle. "We're looking for Mr Frankenstein," he called up to where he was on the balcony. "Pray tell, have you seen him?"

The old man pouted and put down his book. "You shouldn't be here. No one comes to these levels in the mansion, even during parties." He waved them away as one would do pests.

Nick, unaffected, turned to leave. But Jordan angered. "Oh-ho, if Frankenstein exists, you're not him. You can't tell us to go."

The old man shook his head quickly, but with none of the malice one would think be present in an argument. "No, no, you misunderstand." He pursed his lips, teetering on the edge of a decision, before he said, "Do you know that this house is haunted?"

Nick could not help the kernel of amusement taking root in his head. Nor the astronomical rate at which it was growing. Jordan's brows fluttered up in equal incredulity.

The old man, his eyes round like an owl's, drawled, "In the early hours of the morning, always when the noise has died down, and the halls are empty, I hear screaming. Now, I've been here every week, taking my time reading every book on these shelves. And always, at the time the morning is quietest, I hear wailing. Crying. Screeching. Know this, you two. This mansion is haunted. Deeply haunted. I would not go looking for a man who makes his home with ghosts."

They left with that warning on their minds.

"How can it be haunted," Nick mused the second the owl-eyed man was out of earshot. "The mansion's barely two years old."

Jordan only laughed and rolled her eyes. "Maybe it's the ghosts of all those bored to death by that man's drivel."

"May-be."

They quickly crossed the room into another when their shoes clacked across the ground. They had happened across an intricate mosaic floor. However, instead of powerful boasts of house insignias or coat of arms, it was a mosaic of roses, thorns and green brambles. Words inscribed at the bottom conspired among themselves in a strange language utterly foreign to Nick.

As it neared midnight, Jordan called off the adventure, pulling Nick back down another set of mahogany stairs. There were fireworks, she explained, gorgeous fireworks, but Nick hadn't the mind to care.

This place weighed on him. Old mansions made of dark wood and stone were often weathered, worn, run-down and discoloured, and this usedness was charming in itself. Nick had expected the same wear and tear of the Cadis Mansion like the great landmarks of Europe; but the newness, the sharpness of the stone, the undiluted colour of the fabrics and upholstery and carpet, which seemed so obvious to him now, had been strangely lost on him before. It felt as if it were a slice of history falsely made. All of it was shiny new, without heritage or a past. The mansion was beautiful in its grandeur. Artificial in its antiquity. Immortal in its stasis.

As their adventure ended, and Nick and Jordan came out into an arched arcade area, they leaned on one of the arches, picking finger foods as they passed back into the mansion.

"Well, that's that." Jordan smirked, but it seemed half-hearted. Her usual boredness had began its reprise. "The place is a goddamned labyrinth. Frankenstein could be hiding anywhere."

"Well, a pity." Nick shrugged. "I was keen to pay my respects to the host. I'd like to have known what their sense of humour was like, inviting the likes of me." Nick popped a sugar tart into his mouth.

Jordan swung in his direction, her black bob shaken into ghostly streaks across her face. "What?"

Nick slipped his hand into his vest pocket, fished out the crumpled invitation, and handed it ceremoniously to her. "Either Mr Frankenstein wants me to hear him sing...or someone has played a very funny joke on me." He chuckled heartily, expecting her to do the same.

But Jordan was engrossed with the invitation. She went suddenly stoic, and her easy-going aura dissipated like curtains falling upon a finished show. Her face was sheet-white, her eyes tinged with something akin to fear.

"Nick Clerval," Jordan said, finally said, slow and strangely riled, "You have to get out of this party."

Nick's smile disappeared. "Pardon?"

"You have to leave. I'll escort you."

"Escort me? Escort me where?"

"—Jordan?"

Nick and Jordan turned. The pretty lady Jordan had danced with earlier was holding two fizzy, pink cocktails with rather sunken garnishes, wearing a confused expression on her face. "Are we still going dancing?"

Jordan chewed nervously. "Tee, this is Nicki. Nicki, Teresa. She's a friend."

"A friend?" Teresa gave her a look. She sighed sharply, spurned. Then she turned and walked away.

Nick's jaw clenched, feeling awkward about it. "Er — go to your partner, Jordan, we can talk later. You're in the phonebook right?"

Suddenly, Jordan looked down at him with an expression of hurt. "What? No. She's just a friend. I have a partner. She's just not her." Jordan shook her head in exasperation. "I thought Tee knew! I — what am I saying, forget it!"

Jordan went after her friend, but not before she grabbed Nick's wrists with both her long arms and said, as if talking to a scared child, "I'll come back for you. Wait for me here. We'll leave together. And Nicki, don't move."

Then, bizarrely, she left.

Nick waited a while just in case, but he didn't think she'd come back. So he wandered back into the heart of the party, where the announcer was now blaring, "And now, ladies and gentleman, it's that time of the week again — the fiiiiiiire wooooork countdoooooown!"

"Ten! — Nine! — Eight! —"

Nick hurried to find a perch, taking a position on the steps down to the second courtyard; all was in order to await the fireworks. Scores of people milled past him, going up and down and anywhere. There was a slight rest in the festivities, a short pause for breath before an upsurging tide, where all partygoers chattered in excitement. All seemed to balance on the knife-edge of something fantastic, compelled and entranced by a capital feeling.

"Do excuse me, but haven't I seen you somewhere before?" a man said.

Nick, taken in by the anticipation in everyone's air, leaned forward on the rails. It took a moment for Nick to realise he was being engaged as the disembodied voice further implored, "Perhaps the Third Division during the war?"

"Yes," Nick said vacantly.

"The Seventh Infantry?"

"I was in the Ninth," Nick said as he twisted to reach for a drink. With unwarranted triumph, he yanked a champagne off a servant's passing tray.

It surprised Nick a lot that the servant holding the tray full of refreshments, unoccupied hand glued to his back, was exactly the person talking to him.

"I see. How are you finding the party? Do you find everything to your liking?" He began to say. "I should like to know your verdict."

Nick retraced his steps and went back up two or three to see the fireworks better. "Oh, yes! It's bombastic, it's ballistic it's — hah, funny thing, I actually got an invitation — an actual invitation to this party! As you'd guess, from Mr Frankenstein himself."

The servant took the last champagne off the tray himself with one white gloved hand, and then passed the rest to another passing worker.

Nick's fingers were tingling from the drinks, his blood up from the party and hysteria, all the people chanting a countdown around him, and without thinking much he took two or three steps back down to the servant's level and patted him favourably on the shoulder as he said, "People say he's a war-winning, black magic-using gangster with a doctor's degree! From Oxford! Haha. They say that people go to his parties, and they don't come out…"

For a moment, the man failed to understand. It was as if he were the only person on earth who hadn't been fed on a diet of the host's many incredible exploits.

"I apologise, Mr Clerval," the servant said, and this shocked Nick so much he finally turned to look at the man.

Long, sunshine blonde hair that unfurled around the shoulders, as beautiful as Renaissance renditions of seraphim, seemed to glow against the black backing of his clothes. The most piercing, deep blue eyes held Nick's in gentle apprehension. He had a face that looked rather like those marble statues of greek gods on display in the Louvre. Wearing a black tailcoat, with white gloves, and an elegant, long-tailed bow around his neck — what Nick had mistaken as servant's clothes — the man shook his head to himself, a self-reprimand.

He'd called him Mr Clerval, and Nick finally understood.

"I've made a regrettable first impression. And am simply a bad host to boot," the man said with lyrical articulation. He briefly shut his eyes in subdued pain that was not only for fitting courtesy, but alarming in its full sincerity. He elegantly composed himself.

"I am Frankenstein."

The man bowed. "…James Frankenstein," he said, as if he'd just remembered.

"—Two — One!"

The fireworks exploded. Frankenstein lifted his champagne. "Ever pleased to make your acquaintance."

The smile he gave him was melancholic. As if he hadn't smiled in so long he'd forgotten how, yet he was trying this very moment, so hard, so laboriously, to find it again for the sake of Nick. Nick who had honoured the man before him thoroughly by humbling himself to come here of all places, quite probably having many better places to be than to accept his unworthy invitation. The fireworks were a once in a lifetime bombastic, kaleidoscope experience, and Frankenstein faced away from it, lifting his glass higher to toast him. Nick could not stop staring at him as his lips pulled tight, and he smiled for the first time in a long time.

Caught stupidly off guard, Nick, too, finally raised his glass. "Mr Frankenstein. Why, I'm sorry I—"

"Not at all. It was my personal shortcoming not to receive you with the proper formalities."

Nick smiled sheepishly. "It's a lovely party, Mr Frankenstein. Thank you for having me."

"Please. Call me James, Mr Clerval."

"Right, James!"

"Nicki?" Jordan, out of the milling sea of cheering people, took Nick's wrist and yanked him towards her. "I told you to wait for me."

"Ah, Ms Baker. How glad I am for you to join us."

Jordan gave him a once-over. "Who's your friend, Nicki?"

"Jordan, this is our host! Mr James Frankenstein." He smiled broadly, giving her the look of a shared in-joke. Their disfigured, man-eating monster a handsome, dashing young man.

But Jordan was not looking at him. She was staring at Frankenstein in awe, and Nick couldn't blame her. He seemed to be the kind of person who had that effect on people, all tasteful angles and cherubic curls, and none of the haughty aura that made old wealthy men so statuesquely ostentatious, and yet wholly unapproachable. Nick wondered how he could have ever overlooked the man.

"A pleasure to meet you," Frankenstein nodded to her gravely. His elaborate formality of speech, and the meticulous way he held himself, just missed the fine point of being absurd. Nick had the impression he was picking his words with great care.

"Now, Mr Clerval, is there anything you need?" Frankenstein continued. "Anything at all not to your tastes? I'd like to take care of you to make up for my rudeness."

Nick's mouth parted. "No. No, no! If I asked for any more," he said, gesturing to the grandness of the party, "I'd be put on the Naughty List December for sure."

That coaxed a little chuckle from his host, who held out a hand and guided him back up the stairs to the dance floor. "Well if there's anything you need, I will be hurt if you don't let me help."

"I wouldn't dare let you know, then," Nick said automatically.

Frankenstein smiled. It came easier to him, that time. "...Ah," he said weakly, and then ran a hand through his hair. Then his eyes gleamed, and Nick could see the cogs in them turning as he made a very spontaneous decision.

"Why don't you come and ride in my new hydroplane tomorrow? Or the day next?" Frankenstein asked enthusiastically. "Whenever you're free, Mr Clerval. And I just got my Wilson Automobile up and running after a bout of repairs. How about a ride in that?"

He watched him intently, anticipating his answer. Nick noticed Frankenstein's eyes were blue — a deeper, brighter blue than Tina's.

"Sure. I would like that," Nick answered.

But a servant — another servant, a real one — came up to Frankenstein, then, and said, "Bermuda on the line, Sir."

Frankenstein's shoulders tightened. "I told you. Do not call me Sir."

"Sorry. Bermuda on the line, Mister."

Frankenstein turned and apologised for nothing again before going to take his phone call. He excused himself with a small bow that included each of them in turn. "Mr Clerval, Ms Baker. I hope you'll enjoy the rest of your stay. Please do not hesitate to ask for anything."

"Of course. Goodnight, James."

"It was a pleasure to meet you," Jordan said, finally recovering. The look in her eyes had utterly changed. An utterly beast-baited, loathsome look. Her fingers, consciously or not, crossed at her sides. Frankenstein either did not notice, or chose not to. "Bye bye, James."

"Good night."

Then he gracefully left.

Jordan led Nick to the dance floor, where, to his surprise, she took his hands and wrapped them around her waist. She was so tall she could only put her arms around his neck. They swayed to the music like that, just thinking. Speechless as to the revelation they'd just seen, and their rather mean-spirited jokes.

"Can you believe?" Jordan started, as Nick struggled to spin her around.

"I can't believe I called him ugly."

Jordan leaned down and laughed artificially into Nick's neck. Nick chuckled too. "Okay. I certainly did not expect...that."

"What did you expect? You know, in reality."

He took her hand and they parted languidly before returning.

"Someone old and fat?" Jordan asked curiously.

"Young men don't cooly appear out of nowhere and build a castle on Long Island."

Nick spun her again.

"I thought he would look…brutish," Jordan said, sucking on her lip.

"Really? How come?"

She shrugged. "I dunno…Someone with that much money and power, I guess." Her nose twisted curiously. "And that hair in 1923? It's like he's not even trying to keep with the times."

"But it was pretty, wasn't it?"

"Hm…" Jordan hummed.

"…Should I grow my hair out like his?" Nick asked, straight-faced.

Jordan slumped over him and laughed again. This time it was a genuine laugh, and Nick wanted so bad to ask her what had gone so suddenly wrong before, for her to give that hateful, animal look.

But then he decided against it, and asked instead, "You said you had a partner. I know you were here with your friend, but why not come with your partner?"

Jordan's eagle-like eyes went alert again. As if Nick had said words that went straight to her heart, and she could only watch them pierce her. "You know, I understand why Daisy loves you so much now. I'm sorry, Nicki, but I thought you were just some backwater cousin who would wash his hands after shaking the hand of one of the fellows. Someone who'd come to ogle and laugh at my best friend." She smiled sweetly. "But you're not like that. You care. You really just care."

Nick didn't know what to say. "You don't have to deflect. Just don't tell me. Just tell me you'd rather not tell me."

Jordan shook her head. "I just got awfully sentimental. My partner and I, we're both cut from the same cloth. Inseparable. We used to do this all the time," she said, as she spun Nick. "…But then work — her work started keeping us apart. She had a job, you see, a very important one."

Jordan's smile lost all the happiness in it at once. "The last I saw of her was years ago."

"Where did she go?" Nick asked, a lilt in his voice.

Jordan shrugged again. "Who knows."

They danced, swaying and swaying around the large dance floor, surrounded by a million reflective falling streamers, people still talking and partying around them. The music dimmed down from a high-strung jam to a jazzy swing. A few late, straggling fireworks popped in the distance. Some of the streamers floating down caught in Jordan's hair, and Nick peeled them off of her.

"She'll come back, won't she?" Nick asked quietly.

Jordan looked down at him. "Of course," she said. "Of course she will. She loves me." Her lips turned up half-way. "And I, her."

People were made of multitudes, of course, and this was no different for Jordan Baker. Jordan, to Nick, seemed like a deeply hurt girl who snarled and snarled at the world to keep herself, and her loved ones, protected, and she always thought it was her personal obligation to do this. It was no wonder to Nick how she had first regarded him on Daisy's couch. After all, there was nothing so frightening as a wounded animal, nursing its cuts and bruises.

Nick wanted to ask her again about the way she looked at Frankenstein, but then someone tapped her on the shoulder and said, "Excuse me, Miss Baker, but my employer Mr Frankenstein would like to speak to you."

Jordan's eyes went utterly wide. "What? Me?"

The servant nodded. "Yes, Madam." He held out a hand to guide her.

Jordan nodded her answer, swallowed, and then turned to Nick. "Nicki. Enjoy the party and then go home. Don't wait up for me."

Nick opened his mouth to say something, but Jordan kissed her fingertips, and then brought those fingertips to Nick's mouth. They trailed down his chin as Jordan turned to leave.

"Don't wait up."

It felt so much like a final goodbye he ended up waiting for her that whole night.

In the early hours of the morning, the life of the party came down in a steady decrescendo. People had begun to leave in large crowds the way they came. There were servants fishing things out of the pool, clearing plates and glasses and sweeping streamers off the floor. There were spills everywhere. There were footprints everywhere inside. Only a single, straggling singer sat on the edge of the fountain, singing in mumbles to the slow jazz music.

As more and more life left it, the novelty of the spires and towers and turrets turned pointed, its grandness in the light turned into looming in the dark, its beauty in the crowd turned to loneliness walking these hallowed, now empty courtyards. At once, Nick was aware of how antiquated the whole thing was. Like something out of another age, or an old relic reconstructed. Made new to look old. To be old.

To be something.

Nick waited and waited until finally the fountains shut off, silencing the night. It was then, when the mansion lay spent, that Jordan hurried down the limestone steps with her shoes dangling in her hands, running towards the last taxi. "Hold it! Hold it for me, please!"

Nick hurried, reaching her just in time.

"Jordan! Jordan!"

"…Nicki?"

Jordan scoffed, a short breath of air. "I told you not to wait. Never mind. Never mind. I heard — the most scandalous news, you won't even believe!"

But Jordan had already scooped up her shoes and hair ornament, tossed them into the back of the taxi, opening the door for herself. "It's ridiculous, it's amazing, no one in a million, million years could have possibly guessed this, I couldn't have guessed this — me! — Oh he's lost the plot. I have to, I need to—"

She was mumbling, speaking a mile a minute and looking everywhere at and through Nick at once.

"So what happened?!" Nick couldn't resist. "—Did he sing to you?"

Jordan snapped into a robotic smile. She shook her head, all those funny connotations suddenly not funny at all. "Nuh-uh. Oh, I'm sorry. Here I am tantalising you and I promised I wouldn't tell."

"What?" Nick made a face, smiling. "Just tell me."

"Oh, I can't Nick, I promised. He made me swear. He made me."

And with that, the taxi drove off with her in it. But then it turned around the fountain, coming back to the same spot. Jordan rolled down her window, her hair toiling in the wind, obstructing her eyes a bit; she leaned dangerously out of it and yelled. "Nicki, call me! Call me up, I'll tell you everything. We'll go to tea! I'll tell you everything at tea," she said, a promise this time to him.

She looked back at him in the upturned dust, distraught, until Nick nodded. He could see contentedness come over her face before she disappeared back into the car.

Nick walked back to his house. Upon his small front porch, clutched by spreading, unflowered vines, his porch swing squeaked back and forth. The letterbox was still as full as he left it, all unread advertisements for homely things like vacuum cleaners, fruit blenders, washing machines, things too big for his own little box. One of the flyers had fallen from being jammed in the letterbox slot, and Nick picked it up. A painted ad for Arrow Collars. The man, looking stoic, gazed on into Nick's distance.

The old laundry lady who did Nick's washing had returned his clothes laying in a basket near his door. Some leaves had fallen into it. Leaves had scattered everywhere already, but there was no one to tidy those.

Nick turned to look.

There was no one on the end of the dock. There was no one in the light of the window. Yet he still felt the feeling of déjà vu. Maybe he was being watched. Maybe he wasn't. Either way, it never bothered him. He was never afraid of being watched, only of being alone.

But why should he be afraid? After all, the man in the mansion so new and old, so large and looming, lived utterly alone.

Alone in his box.

And alone in his castle.

Chapter Text

As agreed, Nick called Jordan and they scheduled for tea some time later.

In the meantime, Nick worked at Wall St, glued to a telephone, speaking of bonds and stock brokering. He'd bought a dozen shiny volumes on banking and investment, the first book in the set being opened exactly twice. They were soon left to their devices doing the much more practical job of collecting dust on his shelves. The work was monotonous, and the only bright spot in Nick's daring New York life seemed to be his friendly neighbour.

Frankenstein continued inviting Nick to his parties week after week. He attended all of them, loathe to turn him down for some unknown reason. Nick rode in Frankenstein's terrifying hydroplane; Frankenstein had a pilot's license, of course, as well as a boat license and a car license and all the licenses in the world as far as Nick was concerned. Nick also made use of his private beach and even his pool a few times. He was very generous, giving Nick every allowance and every indulgence, never asking for a thing in return. It might have seemed dubious if Frankenstein hadn't already owned everything a man could need to be perfectly placated several lifetimes over.

But the man seemed not to have a modicum of personal preference. Frankenstein always dressed as if in uniform, carefully choosing his words, existing as a blank canvas for others to draw on, the thing in eyes of the beholders. Even through a dozen humdrum interactions and polite, friendly chatter, Nick thought, he hadn't any idea who James Frankenstein was.

One morning, Nick was startled to breakneck attention at the whizzing and zooming of a mechanical monster, one that called the very earth to quake, and reanimated the well-gathered dust upon the books. Nick fumbled outside where Frankenstein, in that black and white suit, in that long-tailed bow, and in those pristine white gloves, lounged behind the wheel of the most strikingly yellow Wilson automobile Nick had ever seen. He looked, quite admittedly, like somebody else's chauffeur.

Or, today, Nick's personal chauffeur.

Frankenstein yanked the passenger's seat open, beat on the door, and smiled a soft smile. "I said I would take you for a spin in this one, Mr Clerval. I didn't want to reflect badly on myself to drag it out any longer." He sighed lightly, clearly proud at how blindingly yellow the car was. Nick couldn't help but stare in spite of it, and then at Frankenstein's long, sunshine hair, which brought Nick to the conclusion that the car was that colour specifically to compliment it.

Frankenstein curled a stray lock behind his ear. "Care to join me, Mr Clerval?"

Nick burst out laughing and did just that. "You don't have to keep calling me 'Mr Clerval,'" Nick said, donning a straw boater hat before hopping in.

"Oh. Alright."

"Call me Nick!"

"Of course."

As Frankenstein took off, the acceleration caused the back of Nick's neck to slap back into the car seat and choke him for a second.

They drove along West Egg, passing perfectly round bush after perfectly round bush to the open stretch of road into the city. The Wilson, Nick thought only a few moments after getting in, was a deathtrap on wheels. And Frankenstein, despite all his fancy licenses to drive rockets, drove it like he was driving Nick straight into God's open arms. Frankenstein cut corners and drove down the middle of the road and very narrowly missed the fruit truck coming their way, roaring down the highway like no tomorrow. He drove with only one arm on the wheel, the other reached far out the sides to lash against bushes and tree leaves and wind, even though gloved. He zoomed and zoomed, speeding down the empty roads with practiced ease.

And Nick was okay with this, because he was not looking at the road. He was looking at Frankenstein, his clothes buttoned up to his neck like always, his eyes steady and calm ahead, his hair whipping in the wind like a curtain of fine silk. The colour of the car really did bring out his damned hair.

"Something on your mind?"

"Hm?" Nick sat up straight again. "No. I mean, I was just admiring your car. How did you come by it?"

Frankenstein smiled like he'd gotten the knack of it already. "I went to Vince and Beatrice Wilson and told them I wanted a car. I purchased the chassis, engine, suspension, fenders, gas tank, torque tube, radiator, grill shell — the essentials — before they sat me down with a designer for the body and hood." He spoke fast and easy, like he had a hobby in making fast and expensive cars. "What I mean to say is: it's custom made."

"It's fast," Nick commented.

"Very," Frankenstein smirked.

"…You said you were in the Seventh Infantry. We hadn't met." Nick watched a bike whizz behind them. "If we had, I'd have certainly remembered you, James."

If Nick had not been watching so closely, he'd not have seen the lines tighten around his eyes. They were fraught, imperceptibly, with something troubled. Frankenstein just nodded. "I was in the infantry. Just not as a soldier." He looked to Nick slightly, gauging his reaction. "I was a doctor. A doctor only. Never even held a gun."

He pulled off a stark, sharp turn. There were bound to be scuff marks behind them.

"You…" Frankenstein started, "You've probably heard a lot of things about me. A lot of rumours. Well, I'm afraid that's all they are — rumours. Let me tell you the truth about myself…"

Nick noticed that Frankenstein hadn't called him 'Mr Clerval' again after he'd asked him not to. But never once did he call him by his name.

And while it was slight, Nick could still tell — Frankenstein had an accent. Like English wasn't his first language. Like it wasn't his third. Pieces of different tones lilted in the strangest of places. Distinctly unAmerican, however. A foreigner, perhaps European?

"I am the son of some very wealthy people in the Midwest. Sadly, they've all passed. I was educated at Oxford, family tradition to be. Spent a few of the happiest days of my life there before moving on. I thought of opening a practice when I moved here but instead I opened a few drugstores. And it's become something of a chain."

The way he spoke was like smoke and fog, always moving and changing and disappearing, masking things beneath a great mirage. Nick instantly understood why there was such a litany of rumours and lies. Frankenstein sounded like someone who quite frankly started those rumours and lies. There was not a lick of truth in him that Nick could see.

"So I became a businessman. And I daresay I've gotten quite a lot out of it." Frankenstein leaned sideways and winked.

A doctor's degree in Oxford, but he ran drugstores. That alone sounded like a lie. From a family of wealthy people in the Midwest, but they've all conveniently passed. An infantry man who'd never held a gun. A master of piloting, boating, driving, and chauffeuring.

"So, forgive me, but I must ask," Nick prompted, "Your name."

"My name?" Frankenstein uttered. "…James?"

"Your family name," Nick said awkwardly. "You didn't have it…changed?"

Frankenstein chuckled beneath his breath. "There's a tall tale from my family. That I — we were descended from the Franks of Gaul. One of the many Germanics that besieged the Western Roman Empire." He chuckled again, as if that was funny. "…No way to tell now."

They turned another sharp corner, and then Frankenstein slipped into the glove compartment to toss something into Nick's lap. It was a medal and a picture. He did not, this time, face Nick.

"That's a picture of yours truly during my Oxford days."

Nick took a look at it. There was Frankenstein, on the very far side of the picture, standing in what looked like a class photo. It was backdropped indeed by the University of Oxford. The photo seemed genuine, though Nick knew things like this were easy to fake. And the medal. Awarded to one Dr. James Frankenstein for Medical Excellence Unparalleled. This one was a little harder to fake, but not impossible for someone like Frankenstein.

But why did Nick believe so flagrantly they were fake? They could have just as well been real.

Nick was startled out of his thoughts by the sound of a police siren, high pitched and jarring. A motorbiked policeman was on their tail, all blinking lights and seething whistling that brought the whole street to attention. "Pull over, you! Police! Pull over!"

Frankenstein cruised on without pause. "Of course, of course," he chorused. From his pockets, he produced a name card. Confidently, he flashed it before the officer speeding beside them.

The officer's eyes went wide in recognition. "Oh, it's Mr Frankenstein. I uh….Good day, Sir! Have a good one, Sir!...I'd know you next time!"

Frankenstein's shoulders suffered a little from the mode of address.

With some disbelief, Nick's head followed the officer's as they zoomed away. All the while, Frankenstein continued making small talk to Nick as if there had been no interruption. "Oxford is where I got my medical degree before coming home to the States. Then it was off to the Western Front, 1914. Just in time."

Nick’s brows hiked up in bemusement. But he just sighed agreeably and held the medal up to the light. "If you call me Mr Clerval, then perhaps I should call you Doctor Frankenstein?"

Frankenstein shook his head with a smile. "You can call me whatever you please, Mr Clerval."

He braked fast, and the car actually skidded to a stop. Frankenstein turned fully to Nick, and said with uncomfortably high emotion, "I hope I'm not coming on too strong — it's just that I — I wanted to tell you something about myself. Something real, so you didn't feel like I was just some stranger."

There was something desperate in his voice. Desperate not to be a stranger.

"You see, Mr Clerval, I'm going to make a request of you today. A very large, very important request."

Nick hung onto his words. But Frankenstein simply sat back, smiled, and kept driving.

Nick watched him.

The truth was, Frankenstein was not a bad driver. He was just someone Nick had never seen drive, someone tightly ambitious and wholly decisive of every move he made. Every change of gears and every change of lane so meticulously controlled. When the lights turned yellow, he sped up to make the gap. When he turned a corner, he knew just how much power he needed to make it sharp, but make it nonetheless. He knew where his arm was, and where his leg was, and where the car cruised at every moment. There was simply no hesitation. No rational fear of crashing. Completely in control.

Just like he was of this conversation, drilling the truth he so spoke of so passionately into Nick, and bringing up ever carefully this so-called request.

Nick found himself again watching the watcher.

Frankenstein parked the car and took Nick to a series of winding, maze-like streets, where they twisted and turned in a single file line. He led them to a small barbershop wedged tightly between an empty greasy spoon diner and a closed key-maker store. Frankenstein opened the door, triggering the small silver bell tied to it, which alerted all inside. It was a medium sized barbershop with eight hair-cutting stations, but only two were open, and only three clients awaited in the chairs. Nick instinctively jerked out his arm to stop the door from slamming back into him as Frankenstein entered, but then realised he'd only stepped in to hold the door open for him.

Nick removed his straw boater and nodded his thanks. "I suppose we're here for a little haircut first?"

Frankenstein smiled secretively. As if he knew something Nick did not, and revelled in it only because he knew he'd be the one to divulge it to him. He shook his head, saying nothing, simply turning to the head barber and nodding. Nick didn't see the expression on his face then, but his attention suddenly fell on a small viewing hatch that slid open to reveal a set of accusing eyes. Nick's mouth propped open dumbly, reeling from this development. But as he turned to share his shock with Frankenstein, Nick realised he, and everyone else in the barbershop, regarded this as if all walls had eyes built into them that slid open at any convenience.

Under pictures of hairstyles and next to pricing lists, the set of eyes darted from Frankenstein to Nick, Nick to Frankenstein.

"Oh, it's you, Sir. The usual, then?"

The head barber stomped over and beat his fist against the hatch. The eyes winced at the thud.

"That's Mister to you. Mister, you great lump!"

"Yes! Yes, sorry."

Behind the wall, a flurry of locks and chains jingled before a secret door cracked open, and the barber gestured for them to go in. As Frankenstein passed, the man operating the secret door held a hand to Frankenstein's ear, "Bermuda's been on the line again. Been asking for you a ton. What should we tell'em?"

To Nick's surprise, Frankenstein pursed his lips, looking utterly disrupted by the announcement. He simply brushed it away like it was none of his business.

"Enjoy, Mr Frankenstein," the man said instead, changing his tone and allowing him to pass.

"Thank you as ever, Bernie."

Nick followed Frankenstein inside, going down a steep, circular staircase much like those in a castle tower. But inside was not dark or dour. Electric lights were fixed to the walls, as well as black and white pictures of well-dressed people standing and raising their glasses, pictures of dancers mingling with their crowds, and singers belting out long notes on stages. Soon enough, music began to vibrate beneath Nick's feet, the beat booming through the bricks in the small space that finally fanned out into a large, rather colourful underground bar, filled with all sorts of people.

There was the circular stage, the wall of alcohol and laughing people, just like in the photos. There were the dancers, a different dance troupe than in the photos, but lively and skimpily dressed all the same. A band of two trumpets, a saxophone and a piano stood in the corner, playing tasteful jazz. All the guests showered money at the dancers and barmen, smoking into existence a small, low-lying cloud, and everybody — absolutely everybody — was drinking.

A speakeasy in the heart of the city, and Frankenstein had shamelessly led Nick here.

It was clear that Frankenstein had arranged in advance for a small private area in one corner of the speakeasy, meticulously furnished, candled and flowered. He sat Nick down on one of the plush couches before going away for a minute. He came back with two crystal cups and began pouring them, handing one to Nick.

"What do you think?"

Nick gratefully took it, but didn't take a sip. Instead, he threw back his head and lounged. "It's beautiful. All those lovely pink lights…remind me of fireflies. Though I don't believe fireflies can be pink!"

Frankenstein released the breath he was holding. "I'm glad. It's always a bit noisy here, but I thought it would be…exciting."

"I wouldn't worry about excitement," Nick said. He raised his glass to Frankenstein and then downed it in one gulp. "I've never had so much of it than when I'm in your company."

From the corner of his eye, Nick could see a server come up to Frankenstein, as if to whisper in his ear something important, but with one staunch half shake of the head from Frankenstein, they turned around then went in the other direction.

Frankenstein recovered impeccably and raised a brow. "Oh?"

"I nearly had a heart attack while in your hydroplane," Nick said soberly, spinning his glass. "…But I digress. It's lucky you're a doctor, I wouldn't have been in any danger."

"You didn't know that when you got into my hydroplane," Frankenstein said slyly. He chuckled under his breath.

"Well, what can I say?" Nick said, cocking his head. "Perhaps I like to live dangerously after all."

"Like moving to Long Island out of the blue, learning how to sell bonds?" Frankenstein said.

Nick looked up, seeing how Frankenstein had leaned in, fingers entwined on his knees. Nick had Frankenstein's rapt attention, every inch of his being attuned to what interesting things Nick might do or say; and Nick thought, that was an intensely large pressure to overcome in the moment.

"…Yes. I thought I could make it as a writer, but that thought soon fizzled." Nick crossed his legs. "You told me your family fancied themselves descendants of the Franks of Gaul. In my family, we have a similar tall tale: we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch."

Nick put his glass down and clapped his hands together. "Not as old, but it sounds prestigious." Nick laughed. "Hahaha, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother. He started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today. It was either carry on the hardware store or — do something different. And that's why: bonds."

Frankenstein took Nick's glass and filled it up for him, his eyes never leaving Nick.

"But that was after I returned from war. After that, home just seemed like — not the homely, warm centre of the earth it once was. Just the ragged edge of the universe. I was horrible to anyone who cared to face me," Nick said in a petulant way, to diminish his own words as if they meant nothing. "I was just so antsy…and restless. I had to leave."

Drafted into the army, freshly twenty four years old, Nick Clerval was thrown into the trenches. He'd held a gun for the first time then, held charges, held the hands of downed soldiers he didn't know very well as they departed. He'd killed then, used his weapons for its intended purpose, blown people he didn't know at all well apart. Then they shipped him back from France, discharged him to his own devices, where he went home to the cream and white cape cod house, where he stood behind the family hardware store. He'd watched people die, just like the other four million or so American men, and now home did not feel the same way it had before he'd left.

Nick looked up again, and caught Frankenstein looking at him with a kind of awed, almost reverent expression. "I…understand, Mr Clerval," he said. "I understand perfectly. That's…the same reason I left my old home. I travelled a lot, after leaving. Searching for something. But none of it meant anything in the end. So I ended up settling in West Egg." He sipped his drink. "How can you go home when everything has changed?"

Nick pondered on that. "Did you find what you were searching for?"

"No." Frankenstein paused. "...Not then." A smile graced his lips then, candid in its honesty. "But now I have."

He did not say more, and Nick did not feel right to ask. "You're an enigma, James," Nick said.

Frankenstein took a small sip of his drink. "Am I?"

Nick nodded. "Throwing parties as extravagant and beautiful as yours. Showing kindness to a man you just met. Watching a neighbour who lives in a box."

Frankenstein's eyes widened imperceptibly, but Nick had been watching, and he noticed it like he noticed how Frankenstein refused to call him by his name, or treated him jovially but always at arm's length, or hated to be called Sir. Nick could see his mind working — seeing him realise Nick had always known he was watching.

"I…I am desperate to know who you are," Frankenstein admitted. "…Forgive me for my being coy. You — you are close to someone very important to me. Someone who was the reason I left my old home to come here."

"Your old home…the Midwest?" Nick asked.

Frankenstein's brows creased briefly before falling back into a blank sheet. "Yes, yes."

Nick sat back. "We are friends, James, aren't we?"

Frankenstein's eyes flickered up at him, unsure. "Of course."

"Then think nothing of me saying that I know you're not from the Midwest. I know, because I am from there."

Frankenstein's jaw tightened. His face set like flint. His calm assurance, so carefully crafted, atomised. He was worried, on edge now, not in control; it became evident that he'd practiced all of this feverishly in his head, and now that reality was deviating and Nick was unwilling to accommodate in the name of courtesy — invisible trappings of upper class etiquette — his plans were veering off course. He was not in control of the conversation as he had control over the car, and this made him antsy. Like a house of cards, Frankenstein's friendly, neighbourly manner, fell.

"I can explain." Frankenstein smiled, but with obvious effort. "Jordan — pardon me — Ms Baker! When you go to tea with Ms Baker, then you'll understand. She will satisfy your curiosity. By then, my intentions will be plain."

Nick reeled. "Jordan?"

Frankenstein nodded. Nick met his careful gaze questioningly. But Frankenstein was calm again, his demeanour startlingly open for the first time, seeming almost recklessly unguarded. In a short rest between them, an understanding had passed. This man had a very personal favour to ask of Nick, one that forced him to be vulnerable. Just like the man clipping his arrow collar crisp onto his neck, Frankenstein had adorned his sleeve with his heart — but he was not used to wearing it this way. He was taking a leap of faith. Trusting in Nick.

But he left the decision to be trusted in return solely to Nick.

Frankenstein could only have known about his upcoming tea with Jordan, which Jordan had suggested mere moments after leaving his mansion at the party, if he'd suggested it himself. As the thought crossed his mind, Nick darkly understood. He had instructed Jordan to ask Nick to tea.

Nick did not quite know how he felt about that.

Before he could linger upon it, something cut through his thoughts.

"Nicki?" came a luxurious, almost honeyed voice. "Is that you?"

Nick looked towards the crowded bar entrance, expecting to search for the source of the inquiry. But the moment he turned his head he locked on to the only thing he could possibly keep his eyes on, arresting him immediately. Through the crowd of noisy, cheery, gallivanting people in their impressive dress, was Tina Buchanan.

Tina, who stepped into the bar like she was royalty, because in this city she was royalty. Half the clients here worked for her or one of her conglomerates either knowingly or not, and everybody acknowledged this, but she acted as if she was the only one who didn't. She saw it as an act of charity, for her not to acknowledge this.

She smiled that television housewife's smile, white picket fence behind dramatically red lips. As she walked forward, heels clacking with intent, the light swam on her satin dress, giving her a luminance that made her stand out like a jewel under a bulb. Simply standing next to the other bar goers made them seem instantly lesser-than, the way she held herself, eyes never leaving what she thought was the only thing of worth in this place. Tina crossed the expanse of the speakeasy to Nick, the white fur collar on her coat rippling in slight motion.

"Tina," Nick waved with little enthusiasm. But then he stood up — because Frankenstein, with the demeanour of a man who'd just been burned like a cat on a hot tin roof, jolted the table and stood up first.

Tina came to their table, the sea of people closing behind her after her trip was concluded. "It is you, I knew it," Tina said, though she regarded him as if she had just met a misplaced friend on the other side of the world, or a nocturnal animal during the day. As if she couldn't equate Nick with a place like this, and for her, worlds were colliding. "What a happy coincidence."

"Just my thoughts," Nick lied. He leaned in to air-kiss her cheek.

Tina sat down next to Nick, the fur on her collar bobbing up-down. She sighed happily, rearranging her coat so it was only lightly draped on her shoulders, making sure it looked good, and wafting her bold, floral perfume into the air. Buchanan No. 6. Eau de parfum. The scent of concentrated gardenias — candy-like, potent, and hypnotic — seemed to expand her very presence so that she was not merely sitting in a small seat at a small table; she was in the very air, weaving through the lungs, hair, and clothes of people surrounding her.

On her finger was an extravagant ruby ring that easily caught the light. Blinking red, like the end of a dock. It drew Nick's attention that her diamond wedding ring, however, was missing.

"Our last expedition was so fun," she mused, red lips curling, "I've been meaning to do it again. But — you know, things as of recently have horridly kept me at bay."

Nick had no idea what could possibly keep this woman away from anything she was meaning to do, but nodded agreeably. Tina smoothed down her satin dress and then asked how Nick had been the past few weeks. Nick sat back and chatted amiably with her, which was mostly him diverting questions about what exciting things he'd gotten up to since their last meeting. It was obvious in her voice that Tina hadn't expected he'd done anything of importance, but for the first time she was dead wrong. On the contrary, Nick just listlessly agreed, not wanting to give up the finer details of his life, how he'd practically spent every weekend at glittering parties.

But Nick wondered why his spirits had suddenly taken such a toll.

It was as if Tina had singlehandedly dulled the life of the bar. The patrons had lessened as if they'd realised it too, the lights seemed dimmer as if Tina's satin dress stole from it, and — and Frankenstein had stood to receive Tina, sat when she walked past him practically to sit in Nick's lap, and had now definitely gotten the wrong impression about them.

Nick kept turning towards Frankenstein, trying to communicate an apology, an explanation, but Tina held Frankenstein's attention despite not wanting to interact with him in the slightest.

Then Frankenstein finally got up and left.

Tina shifted to fix her coat again, ensuring it was in the most flattering position before crossing her knees in the most demure, ladylike fashion she could. "Whatever are you doing here at the Barbershop, then?"

"I was just with a friend, having a few drinks," Nick said.

"You come here often?" Tina patted his arm. "Horrid place," she said, eyes screwed petulantly shut for a moment, "but even I must admit it serves the best liquor."

"Quite the best," Nick said, despite this being the first time he'd come here. "Are you here alone?" Nick feigned concern. "Without company from Daniel?"

Tina shook her head, her lips pulled. "Daniel hates side dives like this. All very poor quality to him. He likes glistening luncheons and high rise club houses." Her head cocked to the side suddenly, as if she was dissecting something on a plate. "I had no idea you were one to come somewhere like this, Nicki. Had I known, I'd never have suggested something so drab as the Yale Club."

Nick straightened up. "What do you mean?"

Tina took Nick's drink, dragging the cup across the table once to get rid of the dripping condensation, and took a sip. "See there. At the poker tables in the back. That's the Gary Loman, the commissioner of the police. The one playing opposite him? Henry Garcia, one of the top brass of the mob." Tina took another sip, turned in another direction. "On the bar stools. Oh, I forget his name, but that's the gentleman that fixed the 1919 World Series."

"Fixed it?"

"Like a child cheating a game of 'pin the tail on the donkey.'"

She laughed acutely, passing the drink back to Nick. Nick held it in his hands, refraining from drinking from it.

"Hmm…I see some politicians, but no one truly important," she waved, dismissing them. "And — oh, why thank you."

She glanced above them, waving away the server who had poured a glass of red wine at her side and offered it to her.

It was Frankenstein. He handed Nick his own stemmed glass and poured it as Nick held it up to him. "Carbernet Sauvignon, wine of Bordeaux. Aged since November 1918."

"Armistice wine?" Nick said.

"It should taste especially sweet." Frankenstein smiled at him widely, and Nick felt as if all the air had just cleared from the room.

Nick finally turned to Tina. "Tina, this is my friend, Mr—"

"—James," Frankenstein said quickly. "Just James."

Tina's eyes roved over him. "Hello. I'm Tina."

Frankenstein was well aware of who she was. But Nick had the feeling Frankenstein did not wish to reveal to her his identity. Something about him had changed. Even the short lapse of certainty before paled in comparison, Frankenstein did not seem simply caught out of favour, but actively nervous. Whatever his feelings, he brushed them aside, regarding Tina in a gentlemanly manner.

"Madam Buchanan," Frankenstein greeted.

Then something remarkable happened. Tina lifted her hand absently in his direction, but Frankenstein had reached out with dignity, even eagerness, receiving her hand rather than correcting himself and seizing it out of embarrassment. He held her perfectly manicured hand between his gloved ones, bowed uncommonly low at a perfect ninety degree angle and, devoutly, kissed her ring.

There were connotations to this action that Nick noticed keenly. He seemed earnest in this gesture, as if he retained its original meaning for vassals to their lieges.

Tina noticed just as severely. She met Frankenstein's reverent gaze, very mellow, calm, a look of nonchalance in her own eyes, but from one moment to another, her comfortably-retired generosity began to rear its head. Beyond a collection of small tells, Nick could not even have given it a name: a compassionate curl to her mouth, an eyebrow arching in reception, her chin lifting towards him in sure acknowledgement. A dozen tiny, little details that did not change or mean a thing, but the air around her went acutely magnetic.

"It is an honour," Frankenstein said. Her hand was still in his, himself bowed over it a little lower than Nick was comfortable with. "May I join the two of you?" He asked as if he wasn't the one who had invited Nick to the bar in the first place.

"Certainly," Tina conceded, amused. "You look like a bit of fun."

Frankenstein smiled pleasantly as he once again took his seat. "I host the occasional get-together here and there. People enjoy them," he said. Nick almost rolled his eyes at his absurdist modesty.

Another curious phenomenon occurred between the two, then. For a moment, Nick and the surrounding hum and clink of activity were forgotten as Frankenstein and Tina took center stage in their little play at their little table, two actors made up for the same role. Blue eyes, blonde curls, and smiles that glinted like silver fresh from the mint.

Tina sipped her wine. "A good choice you've made, James." She tilted her head back, making a show of savouring the taste. "Though I myself would have preferred something more dense, powerful. A Chateau Lafite Rothschild perhaps."

"I shall take note of that, Madam." Frankenstein pulled his own glass from the tray. With an incredibly competent flourish, he poured for himself from a high vantage. "It would be a shame to waste such a bottle though." He raised his glass warmly. "Madam Buchanan, Mr. Clerval." He nodded and drank, matching Tina's performance with his own.

Absently, Tina's eyes roamed to the back, eyeing the poker tables. "Are you a betting man, James?" she asked, seemingly forgetful of Nick as she indulged in her wine and the new piece of entertainment in front of her.

"I'm not a gambler, but the occasional risk"— Frankenstein smiled sharply—"is a thrill."

"Then care for a game of cards?"

"If that is what pleases the Madam."

Embodying graceful servitude, Frankenstein stood up, walked over to Tina, and bowed slightly as he extended a hand to lead a mistress made of majesty, and Tina placed her hand in his, steeled in her conviction that she was majestic.

Nick puttered along after them to the finely felted poker table.

Four players — Nick was only an observer — the dealer dealt them their hands with robotic efficiency. Recognition flickered over the eyes of the others at the table at the sight of Frankenstein's ever practiced, suave smile, but was soon covered by a still, guarded expression known by the name of the game. Cards were in hand and towers of chips were stacked neatly upon the table, waiting to tumble, be lost, and won.

"You understand, James, I don't play with children." Tina counted her chips and pushed them past the white betting line. "Raise, five thousand."

"Of course, Madam." Frankenstein smiled demurely. "Call." He pushed his chips forward, not once glancing at his cards.

"Call."

"Fold."

The dealer added another card to the row in front of them.

"Raise, ten thousand."

"Call."

Tina looked at him then, lounging back in her seat like a lioness, and smiled a little. A privilege she bestowed upon those in her presence, and this particular smile was reserved for a James Frankenstein, who tossed money in the pot as easily as herself.

"Raise."

"Call."

Their hands were revealed, and an elderly gentleman, white beard carefully combed and eyes obscured by weighted wrinkles, took the pot.

"You're not going to bail so soon, are you?" Tina challenged.

"I cannot pass an opportunity to play with you, Madam."

She raised to astronomical amounts of money, and just as nonchalantly, Frankenstein matched her.

"Raise." "Call." "Raise." "Call."

And somewhere in between, Nick saw something shift in Tina, because in the midst of flicking cards, counting chips, and tossing money as if it were only paper, Tina decided that she rather liked what she was seeing.

"Raise."

With a sleek smile, she lifted her hand to the gleaming diamonds on her ears, and tossed those stones into the pot. They were priceless jewels. But she was a Buchanan — the Buchanan — and could afford to play however she wanted to play.

Tina looked at Frankenstein with curious and challenging eyes. "You seem like you've had your fair share of rendezvous." She nodded in answer to herself. "Someone like you? Undoubtedly, even if your style is unorthodox."

A wariness came over Frankenstein's face. He glanced at her, then back at the table. "I am afraid I am ignorant of the matter, Madam."

He smiled, making light of the conversation and momentarily setting his cards face down to fiddle with his cufflinks. For an instance, they caught the light and Nick's eyes like stars: silver, edged with gold, and emblazoned proudly and elegantly in the center, a high gothic cross. Though Nick had never taken Frankenstein for a religious man.

"Call."

Frankenstein, with his own brand of beguiling arrogance, matched her move. He took off his cufflinks and added them to the pot. They clinked upon the earrings and chips.

Tina laughed. Her hand drifted leisurely down until it rested on Frankenstein's lap, claiming her prize for tonight. She was blithe and uncaring of the thousands and thousands she could lose, she had millions more; but a man of Frankenstein's splendor, such that he moved through the world with an unrelenting force of living just as much as Tina herself, only came about once in a lifetime or perhaps even two. They were two people of matched intensity, of vigor of life: those rare, important, ambitious people who could control the cards and the game like magic.

Nick watched the line of Frankenstein's shoulders stiffen. He turned away only enough to put distance between them, but not enough to offend; a tremendous effort.

"In that case, it wouldn't hurt to experience a few new things, would it? Perhaps there are things I can show you, personally." She smiled knowingly, much more knowingly, and batted her lashes.

"Raise," she told the table, her eyes never leaving Frankenstein. "Join me for a night, would you, James?" Her hand wandered, perfected in their motion, to the little black ribbon Frankenstein wore, and invasively and confidently tugged at the silk, loosening the bow. Her hand trailed down to the ends of the ribbon, holding it like a leash.

Frankenstein smiled at her in return, entirely more cynical. The strain in his face utterly repulsed, inexcusably insulted, as if Tina had suggested something barbaric and beneath even his imagination. There was a pause as he finally gave a glance to the cards in his hand.

"Fold."

Tina blinked in surprise. "Oh? Suddenly so shy?"

She reached out.

He batted her hand away, stunning her and smiling a polite, plastic smile all the while. Frankenstein's seat scraped against the floor as he stood. "Madam, I have been honored to share a most diverting game with you, but I'm not in the business of whoring myself out."

Without even the pretence of waiting for a response, he turned to Nick and tossed his cards on the table.

Curtly, he said, "Mr. Clerval, I apologize, I'll have to see you later. Please, enjoy yourself here as much as you'd like. I've got things to do, errands to run, you understand." Then, with a courteous nod to Nick and only Nick, Frankenstein fled the bar.

Nick turned back to the table and noticed Tina's astonished and thoroughly offended stare at Frankenstein's abandoned hand of cards.

"Who does he think he is?" she mumbled, irritation creasing her ever perfect face.

Nick looked at the hand — a royal flush — and found himself breaking out into a modest and brief chuckle.

"Something amusing, Nick?"

"Oh nothing, he's just — very strange, isn't he?"

"Remarkably." Tina's tone was flat as she turned back disinterestedly to the table and clicked her tongue. With their hands revealed, she claimed the bets and stood up with a vague air of indignance only shallowly masked by her empty, monied smile at Nick. "So, do you need a chauffeur, Nicki?"

"Oh! Yes," Nick realized. "That would be nice."

"Then let's go." Tina walked ahead of him, her fur coat swaying with presence that only she could possess before she paused. "Oh, here, you can have these." She absently reached back to throw him the cufflinks.

Nick wordlessly turned them, cold and clean and glimmering, in his hands. Even the gold — the damned gold — matched Frankenstein's hair.

When he arrived back in West Egg, Nick could not help but peer beyond the gates of Frankenstein's mansion, as if he could catch a glimpse of a mythical phantom, larger than life, the stuff of stories and symbols.

The vast garden sprawling in front of the house was being attended to by a single — just a single — small, wrinkled man bending over the shrubbery, who noticed Nick standing lonely by the gate. The gardener waved and adjusted his hat. "If you're looking for Mr. Frankenstein, he hasn't returned yet."

Nick nodded in a friendly manner, then thought to ask, "Is it just you who's tending to all of this? All by yourself?" Such expansive property would require a whole team, Nick thought, and Tina had demonstrated, having stationed servants and workers at seemingly every corner of the Buchanan manor.

The gardener chuckled deeply. "Yes, it's rather unusual isn't it? I only come here on the occasion. Mr. Frankenstein doesn't like hiring people very much, it seems. How he manages all of this, it's beyond me."

"I see, thank you. You have a nice day," Nick called, then proceeded into his own home.

He stopped in front of his mirror as if caught and felt Frankenstein's cufflinks in his pocket. They clinked together, jingling. He pulled them out, looked at them, smiled shyly as he put them on his own cuffs and presented himself before his mirror.

"Mr. Clerval," he imitated rather stupidly, giddily flashing his own smooth smile and charming gaze, imagining his reflection with those bright blue eyes and that long sunstreaked golden hair, before dropping the act and shaking his head. Nick quickly straightened himself out, embarrassed. For a long minute, he stood infinitely grateful that he lived alone such that no one saw his little performance.

The cufflinks, he tucked back safely into his pocket.

Chapter Text

The Glass House eatery lay at the top of a partly hidden staircase off the street, tucked and shied away from the rest of New York's continuous current of occasion. Just as the great writers had foretold, the insomniac hustle and bustle from the original city that never slept churned restlessly without reprieve, tapering off just slightly to an early morning song of speeding traffic, ever-announcing papermen, and usual department store hubbub.

Nick made his way up the narrow staircase to a deceptive little garden glass house. He was greeted with a contemporary yet casual dining space, an elusive and stylish rooftop retreat where men and women chattered amidst the soft clinks of endless swirling sugar and coffee. It had taken a while for Nick to find the entrance, and even longer to flip through his pocket notebook where he'd scribbled down the password Jordan had whispered to him over the phone.

"Just tell me what on earth is happening," Nick had said, half-chuckling to ease the tension. He'd compromised again upon his own bewilderment and now found it mounting towards irritation. "I know Frankenstein put you up to this. For tea, I mean."

"Shhh," Jordan hushed over the phone line. "Shh, Nicki. The phone could be tapped. Talk to me tomorrow, at the Glass House. The password is 'Honeysuckle."

Nick's book flipping came to a frantic stop in the present as he faced the server. "Honeysuckle. I remembered."

Then Nick was led to another nondescript yet gorgeous corner, this time furnished with peacock wicker chairs, sheer curtains on stilts with no ceiling to hold onto, and the yawning city skyline. Finally, in a soft candlelight glow was Jordan, sat in a magnificently emerald green dress. Her black hair was capped with a low cloche hat pinned with a large, jewelled brooch, her eyes shaded sharply below the brim. Beside her on a spare chair was her discarded cashmere coat.

"Nicki," she said, more business than a greeting.

She'd spotted him from across the rooftop before he did her, but didn't get up, only poured him his drink as he approached. There was a sharp windchill in the air this high up in the early light, a whistle where the breeze sailed between high rise buildings just right, yet Jordan, in her dress, did not notice.

"Your idea of 'tea' is getting up at the crack of dawn to go tramping up a staircase?" Nick huffed, sitting down and waving away the server trying aggressively to unfold his napkin. "So what is all this secrecy about, pray tell?"

Nick took a sip of the water Jordan offered, only for fire to hit his tongue as he realised it was gin. He coughed without opening his mouth and Jordan laughed without opening hers. Jordan raised her manicured fingers in a truce.

"Okay, okay. You got me. I was 'sent' to see you by Mr Frankenstein."

Nick stared at her.

"I'm sorry I had to beguile you at the end of that party. But I'm glad you were there. It would've been a lame, lonely way to go, without you there." Jordan quirked her lips at him and all offences, even tricking him to this arranged, counterfeit tea, were forgiven.

Nick remembered being in the pulsing crowd in the heart of the party, and Jordan yanking him away from Frankenstein as if in a jealous rage — her! — a strikingly provoked look on her face. It was frightful, unforgettable. This did not make sense to Nick then and it made even less sense to him now.

"You spoke to him only once," Nick piped up, cautious, "and your opinion of him has changed this much?"

Jordan shook her head. "You misunderstand, Nicki. Yes, he sent me here to talk to you. But don't for a second think I'm in his pocket. I'm not doing this for him." Her eyes flickered up, shadowed by her cloche hat. "I'm doing this for Daisy."

Nick felt like Jordan had just answered a question by posing a million others. "What?"

"I found out the truth, Nicki. The funniest damned thing I've ever heard in my life. The greatest, doltish gossip. Mr Frankenstein told me the reason he throws all these large, beautiful parties." She held her breath, and Nick held his, and she grinned with the air of a paragon dispensing an irrefutable truth to a witless non-believer, the other being the one who was humiliated for it. "He was looking for someone."

Nick went quiet. Below on the streets, the sounds of traffic fluttered up to the roof above, coalescing with the shrill clinks of fine china, the scrapes of mugs and porcelain, and twinkles of serving bells ringing rich in the air, making up white noise that Nick could no longer hear.

"And that someone was Daisy?"

Jordan nodded. "I said I'll tell you everything, didn't I? So I'll tell you everything."

For a short while Nick had forgotten that Jordan, too, was part of this evasive, ambiguous world for which he, if he wanted it, could only try to give chase and never quite catch up, except for these fine instances where the barrier between worlds thinned. Where rays of moonlight illuminated the velvet gloom. Jordan, too, was now giving leave for Nick to join in on the secret society she shared with Tina and Daisy. Just for an instance. Under the cover of the clinking cutlery and asinine chatter from the other tables, Jordan unveiled yet another layer of the raw truth behind the glamour of his cousin's life.

"I met Daisy Fae when we were 19. By then, his family had already thrown him away like garbage. He was engaged to Tina for as long as I'd known him. But I thought he was lying, you see," she rolled her eyes performatively, "Like Tina didn't really exist, she was just some girl he'd pull out to some other girls to prove that…he wore his suspenders on straight."

She shrugged, shoulders hunching up to touch her heavy earrings. "A pathetic move, really. It was a bar for the fellows. For the unmentionables in high society." Jordan's eyes flickered up, a nervous edge in her that surprised Nick. "I was adopted, you see. I'm a little nothing girl from nowhere town. My parents, lovely people, adopted me from only the best, cream of the crop orphans."

"Oh," Nick exclaimed, surprised he was surprised. He might have never guessed, her secret society seemed to fit on her as sure as a glove, if not for her complexion.

"Of course you don't know this, Nicki, you're far too clueless to care. But others did, and that's how I found Daisy. He didn't mind." Jordan said, and her chest swelled with sparsely held-back affection. She digressed. "Anyhow. The Menagerie. When we were there, away from prying outside eyes, we could be our authentic selves."

Nick smiled unbidden. He saw the image of Jordan optimistic for the first time in the arms of a girl as they danced, her laughing head towering above all others at the party; he, the guilty voyeur, who averted his eyes then.

"But we were casual friends then. Drinking buddies." Jordan lifted her gin, prompting Nick to hold up his own. Their glasses chimed and Jordan tipped hers forcefully back. "Everyone goes there to have a good time. One day out of the blue, Daisy takes me out back, looks at me like — like I'm the only friend he's ever had in his life — and tells me," Jordan leans in, as if recreating the moment for everything it meant to her. "He tells me — you're the only one I'm inviting to my wedding."

In all truth, Nick hadn't received an invitation, discounting the fact he was with the ninth infantry. Many people hadn't. It had been a very public marriage, all over the news and tabloids, but not a single member of Daisy's family, Nick included, had attended. It wasn't hard to make the connection that all the witnesses to the event were Tina's, the Buchanan family, the empire. And apparently one Jordan Baker, sitting in the corner. A dispassioned Daisy looking to her and only her in the massive celebratory crowd. A marriage in the middle of a war.

"We were casual friends I still somehow thought. So, day of the wedding, I taxi to The Hotel Drake where he was getting ready and dressing up. All that jazz," Jordan says, without much feeling, exhibiting how casual and easy-going she had been that listless day.

Like she of all people understood that people are made of multitudes, and they do these things, these strange, contradictory things to themselves, like wedding themselves to women they don't love, and can never love. It was just a thing people did because circumstances eluded them; they were born disquieting, fellows from the disavowed, disconnected from blood and fortune. She didn't have a spare moment for judgement. Just a girl, at a bar, who was invited to a friend's wedding.

"And the wedding was pushed nearly four hours late."

"What?" Nick exclaimed. He sat back in disbelief. "Four hours?"

Jordan nodded gravely. This had not been in the tabloids, it was incredible that it wasn't. Tina "Tommy" Buchanan, Dream Girl's Wedding Four Hours Delayed. Buchanan Heiress Forgotten at the Altar. Femme Too Fatale for her Fiancé. The pap would have gone beyond wild, the magazine-literate masses frenzied by chum. Instead, the papers had cordially noted it was The Wedding of the Century. One perfect evening, Daisy Fae had married Tina Buchanan with all the pomp and circumstance reserved for the most eligible bachelor of elegant society.

Nick swallowed, knowing nothing good could come of the revelations he'd learned. "What happened?"

Jordan looked down, huffing. "I go to his room. And what do I find? A whole parade of people lined down the hall, all these, all of them — I don't even know who they were. Servants and florists and — and the groomsmen. Groomsmen that I didn't know, that Daisy didn't even know! They were all camped outside room 1065, where Daisy should have been getting into this done-up limousine."

Jordan's voice began to change now, like demonstrating she herself had become emotionally involved in someone else's separate situation. Her impersonal eyes were now rabid with burden. "They're slamming on the doors. I do nothing. I watch and watch them slam on the door, Daniel, get the hell out of there right this second! Then I step up. Knock on the door lightly. I say, Daisy. It's me."

Then Jordan sat back. All at once, reality seemed to rush back into the confines of the candlelit tea, the white noise of the cars, the china, the flapping sheer curtains. Jordan fumbled in her purse, producing that same previous snuff bottle. The way she fumbled, it was almost like a nervous tic. She popped two vitamins in her mouth, which seemed to subdue it.

Jordan continued. "He lets me in, and I look at him. And, Nicki," Jordan said, blowing air out her nose, "he was not looking good. His hair had been professionally done, but he'd scratched at it so much it was in his face and all messed up. His shirt was a mess. Damp with alcohol. Alcohol everywhere. Room practically destroyed…"

"…He didn't want to marry Tina."

At this point, inanely, the food arrived. Nick watched Jordan peck at her plate, himself only eating to go through the motions people should do at a restaurant. Close by, laughter erupted from a couple hidden by the tall backs of their wicker chairs, and somewhere else, a bottle of champagne was being popped. Vague shouting and police sirens whirled in the low distance.

"He couldn't go through with it," Jordan suddenly said. She pushed her food aside, gestured for more gin. "So I did the only thing I could do. I told the rest of them breeders I'd bring their dear Daniel to their precious little wedding. Then I stole one of the wedding procession's ribboned-up Cardillac's and took Daisy for a spin."

Jordan recalled this all with such intensity, so personally, like she was silently or perhaps accidentally boasting, in a way, that she knew Daisy better than his wife could ever hope to know him, that she was there when his wife was struggling to wed him. This observation she saw as fact gave her immense satisfaction, the way she smugly sipped her gin and grinned with the triumph of knowingly engaging in something criminal and getting off scot-free.

"So where did you go?" Nick asked.

"Nowhere. We just drove."

"For Four hours?"

"For Four hours."

"Then…" He paused as a server removed their plates from under their noses. "…So he decided to go in the end?"

Jordan nodded.

"What changed his mind?"

Jordan shrugged. There seemed to be more she was concealing, but for now, it was all she was willing to say. Perhaps she felt like Nick, trapped in the confines of the train compartment, wanting to preserve what little privacy his cousin had left from seasoned pryers, merciless onlookers. Nick, who felt obligated to Daisy, his only family; and Jordan, who was unshakingly loyal, his only friend.

Nick could not fault her for that.

"After hours of driving, he just looks at me finally and says. Thanks, golfer girl. Take me to my wedding now." Jordan chuckled humourlessly. "As you can guess, I went ballistic. But he fought me over it. He actually fought me over it."

Nick couldn't even imagine his gentle cousin lifting his voice to shield himself, let alone against another. For him to fight to go back to that wedding seemed as bizarre as if a tiger had just asked its handler if it could go back to the circus.

"So you took him to his wedding."

"Yeah."

Nick sat back, taking it all in. "What's this have to do with Frankenstein."

"Oh, it's got everything to do with Frankenstein." Jordan's eyes meandered. "You know Tina, don't you? Spent a whole day at the Yale Club with her."

Nick was about to retort, to say that they did not spend their time at the Yale Club or wherever the devil that was. But instead he just said to her with poise, "She tried to collect me."

"Oh?" Jordan pinged the edge of her empty glass with her nail, eliciting a charming ring. "And are you collected?"

She smiled, having already known the answer. She was not in Frankenstein's pocket, and neither was Nick in Tina's. They were impassive, unswung, and there was respect to be found in this.

"Yes, I know Tina," Nick started. "How she controls every aspect of her husband's life. How she wants to know who he talks to and what he talks about, and what he does when the wife isn't home."

Nick knows he had overstepped — he shouldn't be saying this of someone else, least of all someone the likes of Tina. But he felt as if he had finally reached an understanding with Jordan, a closeness between two people who did not have to act like the world was full of nice people when they had both spotted one that was contrary. That was what he liked about Jordan. The knowledge that for all her hard facade, it was all out of care and concern for a friend. For Daisy. His cousin truly was blessed for her.

"There's a reason Daisy has no one. Everyone else is too scared or too easily manipulated or too easily bought by Tina."

"Daisy told me about The Menagerie," Nick said, eyes cast downwards.

"Did he? Ah."

"That they had to move all the way out here."

"Move?" Jordan piped up.

"Wasn't that it?" Nick inquired.

Jordan stared at Nick as if he had no idea what he was talking about.

"…They didn't just move, Nicki." Jordan pulled away. Her eyes wandered again, hesitant. "…The Menagerie burned down after that scandal fell out."

It took a moment for Nick to parse the implication. His horror occurred late, his eyes going wide and his face going flat in disbelief.

"...Gods...another ludicrous scandal...But this was the end of it for Tina. Even worse than the other times. Tina burned it down to get back at Daisy," Jordan said flatly. "I'm quite done watching her run his life into an early grave."

Jordan, sitting up, suddenly looked as hard and hateful as the night she looked upon Frankenstein, determined to hate him, and walled and distrustful as the night she regarded Nick on the sofa, hell-bent on keeping guard against Daisy's freely given warmth.

"Now you want to be in on the ruse?" she teased, and Nick dramatically leaned in. "I'm not letting Tina have her way with my best friend. She can bribe his contemporaries, I'm well enough to refuse. She can burn down his bar, I can take him elsewhere. I took him to a Frankenstein party months ago, and we had the freaking time of our lives! And the best part?" she cried, drawing a few heads to their table. "The best part is that Frankenstein recognised him."

Jordan laughed out loud, hitting Nick on his shoulder. She had a surprisingly strong arm; Nick laughed politely as he rubbed the spot she'd playfully struck. He had to remind himself she was a star golfer, after all, and women golfers didn't get to stardom with weak arms, or un-eagle-like eyes.

"Here's what he told me to tell you: he wants you to take Daisy to tea."

"Tea?" Nick pulled back. "Jordan. What do you mean — Frankenstein recognised him? They — they know each other?"

Jordan smiled a knowing smile, endlessly self-assured. "Here's the kicker. According to him, he's been waiting for Daisy ever since he moved to Long Island, five years ago."

The night of the party, Jordan Baker let herself be led off into the Cadis Mansion.

The life of the celebration boomed outside, streamers hovered down divine from the heavens, fireworks lit up the windows, flashes of colour and vibrance spilling from the hysteria outside to the dim, rather empty recesses of the hallways within. Inside the Cadis Mansion, in the upper levels apparently cordoned off from the public, was a strange and estranged world.

Jordan's heels were not the only sound echoing down the walls — the walls, the floors, it seemed, were the type prone to groaning and creaking, and every sudden sound seemed to nip at her heels as she walked with as much purpose as she could summon towards the mansion's host. Each sound seemed to amplify in the vast expanse of the rounded, arching doorways, the spacious, mahogany interior and spiral staircases.

"This way, Madam."

The servant up ahead had slowed down for her. Windows lined the corridor, each one casting flowery shadows of the stonework tracery supporting the glass. It had a very gothic, almost church-like quality.

Jordan looked outside. In the upper echelons of the mansion, the people below seemed so small, and the ground so far away. It truly looked like a carnival. But with Jordan's eyes, she could see every pleasured expression, every outburst of wonder tilted up towards a bursting sky, combusting colours reflected on cheering faces. Perhaps she was looking for a last trace of Nick. But it was impudent of her to try. There were simply too many people and too much movement for her to spot him.

"Madam?"

The gas lamps were lit. But they were placed inconveniently far apart, bathing splotches of hallway in light and others in darkness. The servant blinked, trapped in an island of shadow, wondering what was wrong.

"I'm coming."

This enclosed place gave her a sense of unease. She was trained not to show weakness. On the field, in the household, or in the swathes of cheering public on a golf championship stand. The rumours she'd collected so fervently now clung to her skin like a glutinous coating, suffocating her in her chitinous shell.

Finally, the servant ran ahead, knocking on a door and announcing out loud, "Mr Frankenstein. Miss Baker has arrived."

Inside, Frankenstein stood by a window. Outside, the booming fireworks seemed entirely too close for comfort, rattling the room and reverberating through the rosewood, sounding like cannon fire. Frankenstein himself was drenched in artificial colour, awash in bright crimson and cobalt and purple, fading into pink and soft blue and lilac. He seemed deep in thought, lost in meditation, when Jordan's heels clicked against the floorboards. Her presence seemed sharp and shrill, bringing into focus the antiquity of the room, and of Frankenstein's trance. Jordan's contemporary black dress and shoes looked to stand in a gothic pastime. Recognition flashed across Frankenstein's face before he turned with a warm, inviting smile. Back to reality.

"Ms Baker. A pleasure to see you so soon."

"It is."

Frankenstein gestured for her to sit, but she remained standing. He followed suit.

"You must be wondering why I've stolen your time, I apologise for this. I wish just one thing of you, Ms Baker."

Jordan tilted her head to the side, earrings kissing her cheek. Her fingers crossed aggressively at her sides. "It's not polite to keep a girl from her company. What is it?"

"Six months ago, in February. You attended one of my parties." He stepped away from the window, wanting to come to close. It was a show of sincerity, but Jordan did not trust him, and edged away.

Ever the gentleman, Frankenstein turned away, back towards his designated spot. A servant going back to his post. A pet to his perch. The way he dressed himself was laughable. He was almost indistinguishable from the servant who had led Jordan here, other than the long ribbon tied asphyxiatingly to his neck. Jordan had imagined someone pompous. Arrogant. Pointed. Instead, she found a hermit hunched in his house, stalking the crowds below. It seemed suddenly, very anticlimactic, and very pathetic. But she should have known no man could have stood up to the behemoth beholdings of scatter-minded partygoers; reality was usually disappointing.

"I don't mean to be rude," Jordan's voice cut through the room loud and clear, unlike the deferent tenor of Frankenstein's. "But I'm a large fan of yours. I've been to many of your excellent parties." She smiled widely; conjured, but lifelike. "I love large parties. There's never any privacy in small gatherings. I came every three weeks back then. As I said, James. I'm a loyalist."

She wondered how he'd react to her using his first name so brazenly.

"You came with a friend."

Jordan's eagle eyes flashed, taken aback. But Frankenstein did not notice her turn of emotion, her surprise. He hadn't paid the least attention to what she had just said, not the guarded malice in her voice or the lack of pretence, the lack of grace beautiful socialite girls were supposed to be possessed of; instead his eyes were fixed on the window, or perhaps something beyond it — the sparks of the last straggling fireworks bursting in them, and there wasn't even indignation upon his face, only something such as distant determination.

"I'm…sorry?" Jordan uttered.

She puttered forward. She was, all of a sudden, enamoured by his apprehension, the timid tip of his head away from her, like a well of emotion had overcome him. This was not what she had expected, and all coldness evaporated from her.

Frankenstein cleared his throat. "You came with a friend. Six months ago. February."

"I don't know," she replied, baffled. "I bring a lot of friends. Today, Tee — Teresa. Also Amy. Jacqueline. Miss Hoss — I never did get her first name, the shy girl. Meredith…I don't like to come to parties alone, you understand."

Frankenstein made an assuring sound deep in his throat, daring to look at Jordan again. "It was a man," he said. "He had black hair. Slicked back, I imagine, but it had fallen out of shape. He wore a blue, midnight suit, his collar undone…And he was with you."

There was an intensity to him. He said it as if reliving the moment, as if he was still living in that very precious, crystalline moment, one that could last a lifetime, and he wouldn't mind to remain that way. And the way his eyes roved out the window, still searching for the ghost of a man that had only come here once — so ever determined to catch even a single glance of him in the crowd again — it looked, to Jordan, like torture.

"You were dancing together. Doing the foxtrot, I believe. And I think — I think you were in a hurry, because you left before I could make my acquaintance…"

With just a few words, Jordan understood flagrantly that Frankenstein was just like her in one respect. He knew what if felt like to be deep in love. His eyes were still plastered out the window, the tracery shifting shadows on his face. Searching; ever searching.

"Daisy."

Frankenstein looked up, his brows flitting up in great reassurance. "You do know him."

Jordan sighed a long, tired sigh, and slunk down to lounge on his cushy, overstuffed couch. "His name is Daisy. My best friend. He's a very admired gentleman, though he likes to keep to himself rather than bask behind the camera shutter. His wife, however, calls him Daniel. Daniel Buchanan."

"…Yes. I am aware of his wife," Frankenstein said, with the smallest lilt to his voice. "It's very simple to find information on Tina Buchanan, the heiress, but not so much on her husband."

All of a sudden, as if he only just realised how uncomely it was to ask after other women's husbands, Frankenstein clasped his hands together and said, "Don't be perturbed, Ms Baker, please. I am just…"

He sat across from her, gloved palms on his knees, back straight, back to being a rigid gentleman engaged with the fear of seeming ungentlemanly. "—Just a man who used to be friends with Mr Buchanan. A very, very long time ago, we were friends. You understand, I haven't seen him in such a long time."

Jordan crossed her legs on the couch. "I'll tell you what, James," Jordan cut through his speech. "I'll answer all your questions about Daisy if you do me one favour."

Frankenstein sat stock straight, the light in his eyes looking as if he were a starved man dangled a piece of bread; a moth ready to beat its wings, derangedly, against a hot electric bulb.

"Tell me," Jordan asked, "—before the press finally leaks it, because I want to know before everybody else inevitably does— tell me why you throw all these glimmering parties, Mr James Frankenstein."

It was Frankenstein's turn to look taken fully aback. Like her answer was too unfathomably good to be true, that this was dastardly too simple. "Of course."

Nick's mouth propped dumbly open, floored by this revelation after revelation. It was as if someone had doused him in cold water in the middle of winter, washing away his logical thought, taking with it his capacity for distinguishing fairytale from reality.

Affected, Nick rummaged in his pockets for a cigarette. Finding his pack of cigarettes, he slid open the box and offered one to Jordan. Jordan shook her head. She, seemingly out of nowhere, produced a slim, gilded pipe out of a leather slip. Nick briefly glimpsed engravings on the side of the leather. It read, thuốc lào.

Nick watched her lounge back in the wicker chair with her gilded pipe, which shone in the light, enjoying the sight of her long, graceful neck. He put his own cigarette to his mouth.

They smoked together in silence.

"It's almost unbelievable," Nick said, facing Jordan, and both of them started fiercely, clamouring at once with their feelings bursting out of carefully restrained bunches.

"I've done the math," a plume of smoke escaped Jordan, obscuring her face as she spoke, "Six months ago—"

"—Was the first time he broke the three-week streak. One party after the other, and another, and another—"

"—From Saturday all until Thursday — one party stretching on and on—"

"Until he started throwing them every single week," Nick finished.

Jordan beamed at him. She took a long drag, fanning over a small wave of hard, nicotine-laden smoke. "You see? It had everything to do with him. He threw all those parties with the hope of all hopes that one day, Daisy'd wander into one of them." She chuckled again, like she still couldn't quite believe it herself. "Guess it does pay, to be rich, and endlessly, terribly stupid. He threw all those parties thinking the person he was looking for was out there, and he'd see the party, and maybe by chance — he'd just appear. Romantically. One day...God," she laughed again, heavy and unkind. "What a pipe dream!"

"All of this," Nick droned on, still in his haze, "all of these parties — all for Daisy."

There was a man, who stood in the dark of the window, looking out between the half-drawn curtains. Looking out, as if watching for something, searching, restlessly, for someone. Waiting patiently as days turned to years, and the parties went on and on, and the guests drifted in and out. Nick caught his dark silhouette in the window sometimes, doing nothing but what he now finally understood as waiting. Now he'd been told that all of this, all of it, was just for Daisy. The incredulity of it robbed him of his breath.

Nick huffed, wiping the sweat from his brows.

"And all he wants me to do is ask him to lunch?" he blurted, basking in the enormity of all that had transpired. "…The modesty of it all," he breathed.

Jordan nodded, and her cloud dissipated in similar rhythm. Nick smoked without reserve. "How do you think they met?"

"Don't know," Jordan said. "He didn't tell me."

Nick thought about this. "Do you trust him?"

"What?"

"Do you trust James Frankenstein?" Nick asked her.

Jordan's lips curled upwards suggestively, but she shrugged in blithe fashion. "I think…there's more to him than meets the eye. Look—" She gave Nick's arm an affectionate squeeze. "I care about my best friend. Him? I couldn't care less."

The image of Daisy, standing on the veranda with his dignity intact, smiling to him as bittersweetly as Nick has seen soldiers do in the trenches in the aftermath of a battle, came unbidden. Caged and cornered. Tethered and tormented. He couldn't shake it off.

Nick took a taxi back to West Egg after a day spent wandering the town. As he passed neatly trimmed sets of bushes in the shapes of swans, flamingos and deer, he found himself drawn to the gothic mansion. It was partially lit tonight, some luminance coming from a few windows like lost fireflies. Occasionally a shadow passed by, perhaps a servant or maid. Or perhaps a trick of the eye, as it was too late for guests to be in.

The solemnity of the house made Nick feel uneasy. Filled with singers, dancers and party fever, the mansion had heartbeat, brimming with cheer and vigour. Without the blood of a party, it lay cold like a sealed tomb. Nick's eyes were wide open, witnessing this quiet, offhand, yet damningly public exposé. The Cadis Mansion, new yet ancient. A thing always, from its conception, rooted in the past.

"Here?" the driver beckoned. He whistled as they approached the black gates of the mansion.

In the mirror, he began looking at Nick in a new, enchanted light.

"No, the next one," Nick corrected, gesturing towards his little brick cottage.

As his taxi puttered away with an apathetic "Good night," Nick walked up the path of his scraggly front garden. Immediately, he felt the intrinsic, prickling feeling of being observed. Nick looked to the mansion's window. There was no one there. It was too dark by then, he couldn't tell if someone was there, yet he still felt easily observed.

As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Nick made out a figure standing at the threshold between his property and his neighbour's. A figure standing stock still beneath the shade of the trees. For a second Nick stood still as well, staring back into the dark, all startled animal, unhitched breath, nocturnal grandstanding.

"Hello?" Nick straightened up to full height. "Who's there?"

Someone cleared their throat. "Good evening," a well-trained voice came, like it was a pleasant evening out and not deep in the night in the bushes.

Nick recognised it.

"James?"

Chapter Text

Under the dusky expanse of the moon, the tops of maples silvered in a low sheen. Light dappled like black ink, swirled by curtains made of shadow. His eyes, hovering in the void where suit blended with night, shone as if a predator had taken ahold of the scent of blood. Bit by bit, as the veils of shadow receded, the clinging surface tension broke silently against him, and he walked out into the open.

Frankenstein approached Nick in the flimsy light. "What a coincidence," he said.

"Yes," Nick said. "Quite. It's a nice night for a walk."

"Indeed."

"Yes."

They floundered for a minute. Nick noticed something off about him. There was a strange, antiseptic smell to his neighbour. He smelled like the labs he used to pass back in Yale, chemically clean after experiments conducted with vaguely effervescent substances. Or perhaps a sterile doctor's office. Frankenstein was wearing gloves — not his usual white servant's gloves, but twine garden ones dusted with dirt. Nick had the brief, ludicrous thought he had been gardening.

"Your place, it's quiet," Nick said, starting again.

"Well, yes." Frankenstein looked to his house. "It would be strange to celebrate all the time…" He trailed off to a short, ensuing silence. "I was just looking through the rooms again."

"Again?"

His expression steeled, becoming guarded. But he quickly and consciously relaxed. "Yes, again. I was just looking."

Nick thought he meant a lot more than he was letting on. Frankenstein had that kind of quality about him: whatever look given or word whispered was personally and privately significant — if perhaps Nick took the time to lean in a little closer and listen a little more carefully, he could be invited into whatever fantastical world the man resided in and uncover that myth himself. What exactly had Frankenstein been looking for in all those rooms? What had he been doing in this late night?

Frankenstein quickly turned to face Nick, snapping out of his glamour. "Mr. Clerval, what is it that you desire?"

Nick's brows rose quizzically. "What? Well… Some sleep would be nice."

"I mean, is there anything you want or need? I can get it for you, anything—anything—Mr. Clerval."

"Like eternal life then?" Nick chuckled a little, but Frankenstein did not.

"Would you like that?" He dipped forward, anticipating his answer.

"What are you, James—the Devil?" Nick made a befuddled, amused face at him. "Look, it's just a favor." He softened his tone, aware of the tenderness of the matter. "I'd be happy to invite Daisy for tea." He shrugged. "And besides, what would I do with being immortal anyway?" He laughed.

"Ah…" Frankenstein looked to him, and, for some reason, even in the dark, his eyes still managed to catch the light; they reflected briefly like an animal's, shadow shapes emerging from the woods to catch the cascade of a car's headlights, "Thank you…"

The words were spoken so softly with a giddiness that Nick thought was impossibly endearing and almost naive, like Frankenstein truly had only gathered all of his wealth and his property in the pursuit of a lost connection, an old love. "Thank you," he said, voice weighted by an aching beauty.

Nick nodded. "What day would work for you?"

Frankenstein crested up with energy. "As soon as possible—I mean, what would work for you, Mr. Clerval?" He looked around, surveying the surrounding landscape and Nick's home. The craggy leaves, the vine-claimed porch, the jammed letterbox. "I'd—I'd like to make a few preparations, if that isn't too much trouble—get the grass cut, plant some flowers. Decorate somewhat."

"Oh, yes, that's fine."

Frankenstein seemed momentarily to swell forward with a gentle exuberance like that of a boy about to depart on an exciting and promised adventure. He looked up to Nick's house again, eyes glossing over the dark sky and watching moon. With a polite start, he asked, "Do you make much money, Mr. Clerval?"

"I make enough."

"If you'd forgive me," he said dismissively. "I may...you see—I happen to run a little side business. A sort of sideline. You understand do you not? You do sell bonds, don't you, Mr Clerval?"

"Trying to."

"Right. Well, it rather happens to be on the confidential side of things. Perfectly candid..."

"...Right, I'm sure it is."

"But you may be delighted to know it ensures a nice return on the side. That is certain. If you would be interested, I can—"

"—Perhaps not...I have my hands full."

"Well, I assure you, you wouldn't need to do business with any figure other than myself."

"James," Nick said. "It's a favor."

They came to a standstill. Their voices faded from the atmosphere like a closing door. A half-finished note.

"...A favor," he repeated robotically.

"Just a favor." Nick looked to Frankenstein. "You can make your preparations tomorrow, and I'll give Daisy a call afterwards. He doesn't have much to do. He'll be in the house. And he'd be available."

Frankenstein took pause at this, looking at Nick with a bewildering innocence. "Ah, yes." Then, "Yes," he said more confidently, standing taller and prouder. "Thank you, Mr. Clerval. You have my deepest gratitude."

Frankenstein smiled largely at Nick.

Nick thought it seemed so utterly false.

The smile pulled and faltered, seemingly unable to keep up whatever act the man was so thoroughly determined to perform. Like his own body betraying him. He fidgeted nervously on the spot, opening his mouth as if to say something, but then stopped himself. As if he already knew how insincere he sounded, how damningly superficial he had been, to offer his money and business or whatever other excess he had and not cared for. Had he truly thought of Nick so lowly? To be bought and sold — that was the way Tina dealt in things. He would think the insinuation hurt his image now. How should he continue to keep up the act, Nick thought.

Frankenstein walked aimlessly around the unkempt yard, saying nothing, until he found the fence between their properties. He leaned on it, quietly taking off his garden gloves and throwing them behind his back. After a while Nick mirrored his actions, walking up the creaking stairs of his porch and then leaning upon the rails there.

All hint of a smile was gone from Frankenstein's face. The fidgeting disappeared, his frame relaxed and open. He looked, all of a sudden, like an entirely different man. Like the owner of The Barbershop Bar. Like the distant party host who disappeared people in the night. Like everything anyone had ever said of him.

Nick, all of a sudden, knew he was the man who stood in the dark of the window, between the half-drawn curtains, looking out. Watching Nick.

"You're right," Frankenstein said, no longer the smiling, dashing, good neighbour, because they both knew there was no such thing as that on this earth. "You're right, Mr Clerval. I'm not from the Midwest. I'm not from around here."

Nick scoffed, shaking his head amicably. "Of course not." 

Frankenstein's lips turned up. "Was it the voice? I did say I studied abroad."

"It's not the voice," Nick said.

"My name? My presentation? The mansion?"

The storybook name, the long, untrimmed hair, the strangely old-fashioned mansion. Caught in a lie in a fast, yellow car. Nick waved it all off. "...I'm not sure what it is. Think of it as an intuition. I know Tina wants to collect me. I know you have a need of me. I know Daisy is my cousin, and I care for that man no matter what anyone thinks."

Frankenstein watched him, drinking this all in, a thousand times more entertained than any of his parties had ever done for him. If he was surprised at Nick's brazenness, his rude honesty, he did nothing to show it. In fact it seemed to please him, to be spoken to so plainly, fearlessly. A veil had removed between them both, and Frankenstein only said, "You know I am the worst kind of man. A liar. A deceiver. You've heard all those lovely rumours about me, the swindler, the criminal, the killer."

Frankenstein lifted off the fence, facing the ugliness of these accusations not only void of shame, but with smug, unmistakable hubris. He cut through the overgrown grass, walked below the porch, and looked imploringly up at Nick above.

"So why do you so wish to help me?"

Nick regarded Frankenstein. He leaned lower down the wooden rails. "Just because."

"...Why?"

"There's no why."

Frankenstein thought about that. He craned his head, bearing his neck. "Please. I must know."

"Well, you shan't."

He shut his eyes, defeated. "I'll tell you," he started, "I'll tell you one truth about myself. If you can tell me why."

Nick peered down at him. "Is this Truth or Dare, Mr Frankenstein? Are we children spinning bottles in dark closets?"

Frankenstein's mouth parted, he looked away shortly, taken aback. A funny sound floated out of his mouth, another nervous huff. He seemed, for the first time, speechless. But now Nick was given an opportunity, he couldn't let it pass; he felt suddenly ravenous for any shred of truth coming from the man made only of lies, each more beautiful than the last. Finally, he asked.

"Do you love him?"

Frankenstein's face changed. His expression became more and more flustered, more and more animated, clawing, even fearful, until it went suddenly placid. Like a blank, white sky. Like a finished storm.

The man who had everything, without a single thing to lose.

"Yes."

Frankenstein looked Nick starkly in the eye. "Yes. I love him."

Nick nodded.

It was as if Frankenstein had forgotten why he'd even fought to answer that question, when his eyes widened as Nick said, "A deal's a deal. I know you lied. It's already so impolite of me to point it out." He laughed, bowing his head so that his short bangs dangled in the night air. "But that doesn't make one—what did you call it? The worst kind of man?"

Frankenstein crossed and uncrossed his arms, just listening.

"Everyone has secrets, Mr Frankenstein. And I am good at keeping secrets."

"Is that all?" Frankenstein asked. "You are good at keeping secrets. That is the only reason you are helping me?" His eyes narrowed perceptively. "A deal's a deal. You must tell me the truth."

"Afraid that I would lie?" Nick said. "You don't have a very high opinion of me at all."

"No." Frankenstein shook his head. "No, it is the very opposite, Mr Clerval. I assure you."

Nick's lips quirked upwards. "One night...I saw a man at the end of a dock."

Frankenstein's demeanour startled. He swallowed nervously, as if caught red-handed in some obscene act. As if it were somehow illegal to stand on the end of one's own dock.

"I think," Nick said, tipping his head to one side, "I think he was looking for something. Like he had spent a lifetime looking for something. I want to help that man find what he is looking for."

People were made of multitudes. When he said he wanted to know Frankenstein, people at those glowing parties always cooed, Which one? The sorcerer, the charlatan, the gangster? The war hero, the scholar, the party host who disappears his guests? And here Frankenstein had smiled at him, sharp-fanged, and said, Who am I? A swindler, deceiver, killer. But Nick had seen him that very first time in West Egg: the man who stood and stood at the tip of the dock, doing nothing but looking. Almost unbearably vulnerable. Enchanted by a tiny, red light across the bay at the end of someone else's dock.

All Nick saw was a lonely man.

Nick could understand that.

"It's late, James. Good night," he said, ending their clandestine conversation.

Frankenstein quietly deferred. He dipped his head once, turning to leave. "...If nothing else, I'm glad it's you I had to relinquish my secret to," he said. "Sorry I kept you so long. Good night."

He did not cut through the grass. He stepped back on the overgrown pathway, inclined his head at Nick, and began to disappear himself from Nick's sight. But before Frankenstein could cross back upon the threshold, Nick called after him. "Daisy will certainly come to tea if I call him. That's as certain as the sun will rise this morning! Don't be late."

Nick made his position clear.

He would reunite with Daisy.

Frankenstein turned, but Nick couldn't see the expression on his face. "Of course, Mr Clerval. Of course."

There was already a carnival of activity the next morning before Nick had even stepped outside to greet the day. Several gardeners were at work, cutting the grass, planting hydrangeas, and bringing in even more flowers and plants, bursts of color arranged elegantly at their feet painting a royal path to his door. To Nick's surprise, Frankenstein had also joined them, getting on his knees in the dirt despite still wearing that plain, formal black tailcoat as he simultaneously planted and instructed the others in specific ways that Nick suspected would not matter terribly in the grand scheme of things.

"Good morning!" Nick strolled up to Frankenstein, a mug of coffee warming his hand.

Frankenstein looked up from his work. "Good morning, Mr. Clerval." He stood up, brushing himself off despite miraculously not having any dirt or dust on his body. "I hope I haven't disturbed your sleep."

"I get up early."

"That is good," Frankenstein said with no particular emphasis and no particular interest, like he was still waking up. The intimacy of shared secrets and moonlight of the previous night vanished beneath multitudes and mundane busywork. He looked around at the work already done: roses, crane's-bill, yarrow, serpentine vines crawling up an archway Nick didn't remember having. The weeds had already been banished from his porch, and the letterbox cleaned up like brand new.

"I think it would be appropriate to start on the interior now. What do you think, Mr. Clerval?"

"There's more?"

"Does it bother you?" Frankenstein looked at him with concern.

"No, do what you must." Nick stepped to the side and gestured to his door with a flourish.

One floral arrangement after another paraded down the path to Nick's doorway into his home, colors and sensations akin to impressionist paintings of meadows in bloom at the Metropolitan. They radiated, trembling with romance brought to life in spectacular, unreal ways.

Frankenstein ushered the workers in from behind. "Please be careful with that," he called as he skillfully balanced various little desserts with one hand and a porcelain teapot and cups with the other. Nick stumbled back with an apology as his nose brushed a soft white flower, catching its delicate, sweet scent.

He followed the parade in.

Frankenstein quickly placed his share of delights on a kitchen counter before hurrying to the small, intimate living room with a homey fireplace and arching windows that generously poured in the light of the day. "Here, please," he demanded of everyone.

Frankenstein came alive before them all, floating with force. He knew just what he wanted and where he wanted them, moving as if in pursuit of a vision he had agonized over for months, or perhaps even centuries. In Frankenstein's mind, Nick was sure, was the soon to be made memory of him and his lost love; a love Nick was exclusively privy to, and everything—sight, sound, and scent—needed to be perfect. Flowers overtook the very walls, saturating the air with their perfume, encroaching and consuming. When at last everything was set to his specifications, a breath-bated stage, he dismissed all except for Nick and himself from the house.

Nick, dwarfed by the presentation, eyed the tray of sweets. Across every available surface was the sprawl of tiered plates upon which cream and scones and cakes and mousse sat brightly.

"Those look nice." His asinine comment fell limply in the face of such grand preparations.

"Oh, yes." Frankenstein seemed hardly to notice the compliment as he looked around. "I haven't made those particular cakes in a while. I hope they're alright. Would you try one for me, Mr. Clerval?"

"Gladly." Nick reached forward for one of the cakes—strawberry. "It's wonderful," he mumbled through a mouthful, which earned him such a radiant smile from Frankenstein that he wondered if he had accidentally said something else entirely more colorful. Frankenstein appeared as if personally invested in such small indulgences. Not wanting to be terribly rude, Nick quickly devoured the rest of the cake. "I didn't know you baked. Don't you have people to do that for you?"

His smile stilted for a short moment before Frankenstein relaxed again. "I'm rather particular about these sorts of things, Mr. Clerval." He shrugged and grew suddenly distant. "I've been doing it for a long while."

"How long?" Nick asked.

"Who knows?" Frankenstein said vacuously, completely untruthful, and Nick huffed at it, as if he had the right to be vaguely but politely offended.

"Do you happen to have a kettle, Mr. Clerval?" Frankenstein asked.

Nick answered in the affirmative and walked over to a high cupboard to retrieve the item in question. Frankenstein took the kettle from him with a "Thank you."

"I'll go invite Daisy," Nick decided as Frankenstein began heating the water for tea, and left his company for the living room telephone. One dial tone and butler later, he was on the line with his cousin.

"Don't bring Tina," Nick warned him.

"Who's Tina?" Daisy replied innocently.

At a quarter until four, the sky began to darken; at five until four, it was raining. Frankenstein peered out the window from the kitchen but did not seem to mind the dreary weather, humming softly no tune in particular as he began to steep the tea. At two until four, they both jumped at the sound of a motor turning into the yard.

"I'll go bring him in," Nick told Frankenstein. "You stay dry inside."

A rain-beaten blue Coupé, handsome in its charge, rolled into a stop before the porch, and the footman hurried out with a rug and umbrella, shielding Daisy as if from the zealous camera shutter of the press. Daisy stepped down the vehicle, ran a hand through his hair, and raised his head.

"Cousin-mine."

The curl of Daisy's lips dipped easily into a smile. He looked up at the overly dressed house. He stopped a moment, taken in by the sheer magnitude of work that had gone into prettying up the small cottage.

"I was not aware you were a gardener."

"I'm not."

The rain bounced against the umbrella, soft percussion to announce Daisy's entrance onto the scene as he stepped forward with cinematic grace, unbothered and untouched by the downpour. The weather itself seemingly deferred to the eminence of his presence.

"Am I a hostage, Nick, or why did I have to come alone?"

"That's the secret of Castle Rackrent. Tell your chauffeur to go far away for a long while."

"Come back in a long while, Ferdie."

They went inside, and Nick watched Daisy turn in the living room; he stepped in and gazed at the encompassing set piece of flowers, his eyes caught at the sight of them. He turned slowly, marvelling. "Were you the one who did this?"

Nick, instead of answering, looked expectantly down the hall at Frankenstein who was staring at him with a face that was a little gooey. He breathed as though he was reverent of the very air, it being the same that Daisy graced with his charm. Nick nodded at him then motioned at Daisy with his eyes. Frankenstein approached. He stood there before the arch, looking at the other man whose elegant frame was silhouetted by the soft light of the window such that he appeared like a deity.

Frankenstein's lips parted, and his brows were drawn so that a tender tragedy sunk deep into his features — a hopeless revelation and simultaneous relief, a dam of unspoken secrets behind his eyes, kept only in check by a necessary vanity. A word silently died on his lips and then floated listlessly to the floor like dust: old, dirty, forgotten. There was a man, who stood in the light of the window. Daisy, a paragon amongst the countless others that Frankenstein had painstakingly arranged in that humble room, watched the rain in the glow of that window, and Frankenstein watched Daisy as if he had encountered something profound—and terrible.

In the second Daisy turned around, time suspended itself; Frankenstein took one long step after another, marking decades or perhaps even longer with each footfall, as he walked straight out of Nick's door and into the rain.

A slow moment of confusion passed before Nick's legs carried him outside as well.

Outside, Frankenstein was silently leaning against a beam, letting the rain utterly soak him. Still as a statue, he looked like a dead man, his eyes downturned and looking somewhere, far, far away. He began to laugh softly, drained and broken, until he simply fell silent again.

Nick was careful in approaching. Perhaps he was afraid that he would ruin Frankenstein's silence or break his trance too readily. "What happened?"

Frankenstein was slow to notice him and slow to respond. All his energy, in an instance, burned out, and his very words plodded laboriously through the mud.

"That's not—he— I, I don't know him." His expression contorted. "What was I thinking? Of course that's not—"

"What's gotten into you?" Nick fought past his hesitation. He reached out, taking a strong hold of Frankenstein's shoulder.

Frankenstein flinched.

"Daisy's already in there. The tea's already made," Nick said.

Frankenstein stared. He stared at Nick with tenuous fury, as if unsure if he should be convinced of Nick's absurdity or his own. Despair mounted upon him, weathering his barely held countenance, which he maintained only through the aching determination of a man clinging to his final vestiges of self control. But as he stared, the futility of such grand despair dawned on him. His turmoil stooped to a low point and he was reduced to the rational thought of what was before his eyes. Nick stood in front of Frankenstein, staring back. He held out the umbrella. Nick himself was beginning to be drenched from the rain but his investment in Frankenstein made him, too, numb to the downpour.

Nick did not understand all that Frankenstein had hoped Daisy to be, nor did he grasp the sheer magnitude of his disappointment, but Frankenstein did not need him to understand. And now, abated, he no longer expected him to. The spell of that moment was broken when Frankenstein turned away to be distracted by the garden. Nick turned his head too, eyes roaming over the perfectly manicured lawn, the flowers, the shrubbery. In the rest the transformation from prig to libertine was complete.

With heavy quietness, Frankenstein looked up again. "Mr. Clerval...Do you recall what I had told you about the worst kind of man?"

"That he is a liar and a deceiver?"

Frankenstein nodded. The corners of his lips curved upwards with the slightest hint of bemusement for Nick being able to remember such fleeting, unimportant conversation. "And the worst of them all is one who deceives himself."

Nick pondered. "So are you the worst, James?"

"What do you think, Mr. Clerval?" Frankenstein's expression brightened paradoxically. He allowed himself a smile. "I should like to know your verdict."

In the clear summer rain, Nick watched Frankenstein, every languid rise and fall of his chest, every shift in expression under his eyes; the way water fell from his long, golden lashes and the soft ruefulness in the pull of his lips.

"I think you are."

Frankenstein hummed. "I think I am as well."

Nick knew he himself was neither the worst of men or the best of men. It was a difficult thing to be either of those things, but at the juncture between him and Frankenstein, both soaked through by rain, Nick thought he could at the very least be someone and do something—at the crossroads, a turning point. Nick knew then, he wanted Frankenstein to walk back into his home and into that room with the flowers, and he wanted him to have his tea with Daisy and have what people called a damn good time.

So, Nick, with brusque exuberance, marched back to his front door and yanked it open for his guest expectantly.

Frankenstein looked at him with the eyes of a deer in headlights. Then, a calmness overcame his expression, a gentle smile. Almost to resignation. He took a breath and stepped in, water running down his face, his suit, his shoes; it left a river on the polished wood floor. For a second, he paused, and, to Nick's eyes, hesitated once again, like Daisy was something taboo, but then Frankenstein stood straighter, taller, and with a quick, stiff hand, brushed his long hair back, wicking some of the water to add to the river below him as he turned to that cozy, floral arrangement again. With a breath to futilely calm his nerves, Frankenstein walked past the arch of the living room, deciding that he would indeed be the worst kind of man. For the day at least.

"Who is this esteemed guest?" Nick followed Daisy's voice with his ear, as airy and soft as the speaker, as it drifted down the hallway in polite amusement.

"I was...in the neighborhood"—seeing as he was indeed Nick's neighbor—"and thought to stop by," Frankenstein made up rather lamely.

Daisy's voice revealed no indication he noticed the weakness in Frankenstein's excuse. "It's cold outside," he said simply.

"Are you cold?"

"No."

"Do you like the flowers?" Frankenstein tried again at conversation both hopefully and trivially.

Daisy took a breath. "They are beautiful." He smiled coldly. "But I dislike gardenias. They are much too sickly sweet, don't you agree?"

"Ah."

With bizarre, habitual swiftness, Frankenstein bowed his head only to realize the strangeness of the gesture and snapped himself straight again. Then, with amazing tenacity, he proceeded to pluck every gardenia from their vase, gathering them all up in his arms.

"Please excuse me for a moment," he politely said and then walked out of the room and past Nick and out the door to dump the offending flowers in an undisclosed location behind Nick's home. He returned moments later as if nothing had happened.

A plodding silence followed that endured horribly. Unamused by listening from the hall, Nick welcomed himself into that room to see Frankenstein standing like someone had misplaced him by the mantelpiece, his hand outstretched to rest on an old clock in a flimsy imitation of suave dignity. What came to him as fluently as birdsong to morning now eluded him as fully as that same song at nightfall. His eyes were trained on Daisy's face as if it held secrets, assessing, and hunting.

Nick cleared his throat.

Frankenstein blinked and looked at him.

"The clock. It was just working before. I don't know why it's suddenly stopped ticking," Nick said. It was a vague attempt at conversation that was poor even for the disinterested plants in the room.

"Oh…" Frankenstein then took on an uncharacteristic interest in the clock, tapping violently on it. The clock ticked backwards, and Frankenstein suddenly withdrew his hand, eyes wide, as if he had burned himself—Nick did not know static could occur in such humidity. He also did not know electricity came in such hues as purple. Then, embarrassedly, Frankenstein hit it on the side as if to stop the backwards ticking. His attempt was successful at the cost of cracking the wood and breaking the glass of the clock face; a small piece of wood flew in a graceful, mocking arc that landed unceremoniously on the floor.

"I'll...get you a new one," he said before resigning himself to sit stiffly on the chair next to Daisy.

A short, rasped sound came from Daisy. Then another, a smooth, reverberating piece of joy—a contented laugh. He laughed until he felt compelled to cover his smile, effectively snuffing out the laughter enough to speak.

"Daniel Buchanan," he introduced. "But my friends call me Daisy."

He leaned over familiarly, reaching out his hand. Frankenstein lingered a moment. Belatedly, as if a light bulb had appeared in his head, he realised Daisy had meant to shake hands — he took it with some difficulty.

They shook hands.

"Frankenstein." He cleared his throat. "James Frankenstein," he corrected.

Daisy smiled understandingly — much more understandingly. It was one of those great mysteries of life, a curl of the mouth, shine behind the eyes, that seemed to hold you in confidence against the entirety of the universe, and ignored all that was out there in your favour. There was no hesitation, and no such thing as error — if you had providence for such a thing to be directed at you, it was irresistibly and deservingly yours. It understood you a degree more generously than you'd dare regard yourself, believed in you just as you would like to believe in the best, and assured you of their conviction in you. The way Daisy smiled at Frankenstein was one he could not possibly do another, even in his dreams. 

Daisy brightened then leaned in closer. "Then tell me, James, are you a friend?"

Frankenstein looked at Daisy as if he were witnessing a small miracle with a restrained and quiet awe. "I am," he murmured, and there was a reverence in his voice, those two words an intimate, indecipherable confession.

Nick clasped his hands together. "I'll go get the tea—"

"I'll help." Frankenstein quickly stood up, pushing his chair back scratchily as he did so. He followed Nick out of the room and into the kitchen.

Nick made a face at him.

"What are you doing? You're leaving Daisy all alone in there," Nick whispered as he placed the teapot on the tray.

"...I don't know what I'm doing, Mr. Clerval," Frankenstein said, perturbed by himself, but there was undoubtedly a smile turning his lips, both comforting and confounding. It seemed as though he were engaging in something reckless—being unflappably indulgent. He seemed, to Nick, more human than ever.

The deserts and the teacups drifted in order to the tray.

Frankenstein looked at Nick with those eyes again, taut with some unspeakable emotion both terribly intimate and perplexingly impenetrable—a friend and a stranger. He stared for a moment and then gave Nick a firm nod.

"I will take the tray," he said firmly and held out his hands.

Nick smiled and handed the tea over along with all of its accessories. Satisfied with the exchange after watching Frankenstein walk back into the room, Nick thought it would be appropriate to take a short stroll outside and leave them to their quietly unmentionable rendezvous.

The lawn, cut with a paranoid perfection, now boasted several primordial marshes from the damp, uneven terrain beneath. As Nick stood under the unenthusiastic protection of a tree, his arms wrapped around himself and his coat, his eyes fell on Frankenstein's house, which took up most of his view. Against the gray sky and pouring rain, and without the party lights, streaming guests, and constantly rising and falling music, the mansion seemed to sigh longingly and wore a somber, shadowed expression. Short of the rain, it was silent, and Frankenstein's home, with its severe towers, stood in a stately manner, bored and waiting for some miraculous turn of events.

After half an hour, the rain began to lighten, and there were peeks of sunshine through the gray clouds. Nick took this opportunity to hurry back into the house. Upon stepping inside, there was a warm, intimate hush. Frankenstein and Daisy spoke quietly to each other, their voices rolling over hills and valleys, sharing frivolous and sunny secrets, but Nick vaguely suspected that they were talking about nothing at all. Daisy wore his gentle smile, a little laughter erupting here and there in a way that was both utterly charming and utterly meaningless, while a life was breathed into Frankenstein with every polite sound exchanged. The warmth and ease in Frankenstein's demeanor as he leaned in closer to pay worship to whatever world those two had created for themselves completely eclipsed his earlier nervous embarrassment.

They sat close, such that they willed in an air of promise. Frankenstein seemed enchanted by the conversation. A plate of desserts sat forgotten between them.

Finally, Frankenstein took notice of Nick.

"Mr. Clerval," he said. By some personal deviltry, Frankenstein managed to imbue every sort of fellow feeling into just those four syllables. He spoke with an embellished camaraderie as if greeting an old, unexpected friend that did not exist in this world, but it was a practice of Frankenstein's to spin worlds from his words. His uncanny abilities seemed to return to him.

"It's stopped raining," Nick informed him.

Frankenstein looked to the window as if breaking away, momentarily, from that world that he and Daisy had created for themselves to realize for the first time that there were twinkles of sunshine breaking through the clouds, casting its golden glow through the window.

"What do you think of that? It's stopped raining." His voice was only above a whisper, like he had spoken from a distance in the fog.

"I think it's perfect," Daisy uttered, his voice wonderful.

Tenderly, Frankenstein looked into the distance, far past the window and over the waters of the bay. He reached out, stopping short of touching the glass with his fingertips. "Do you see that?"

"See what?" Daisy stood up and stepped closer.

"The red light. Across the bay."

"What is it?"

"...It's a docklight."

"Is it? I've never noticed it before…"

A silence fell upon them as they gazed at things that did not share meaning between the occupants of Nick's living room.

Then, after a long or short while, Frankenstein turned around to face them both. An infuriatingly charismatic smile perched on his face. "I'd like to invite the both of you over to my house," he announced with the air of someone who said any thought that happened to land in his head the moment it got there. "For a grand tour."

Daisy agreed enthusiastically, and Frankenstein was just able to contain his doubt. 

"You're sure you want me to come?" Nick asked.

Frankenstein faced him fully. "Of course, Mr. Clerval."

Nick felt himself smile in return.

The three of them shuffled out of the room and out of the house, abandoning all of the laboriously prepared decor for greater and grander things; more than what Nick's own home could possibly hold. Leaving behind a tableau of life without the living, the tea still warm on the table, the cakes still on the plates, they fell under Frankenstein's charm and approached the cursive iron gates of Frankenstein's colossal constructed paradise. The Cadis Mansion loomed out of the light. 

Daisy and Frankenstein stepped ahead of Nick towards the house, hardy with optimism at the light-lined structure of the mansion. Beyond the curves of the gate, they could see the sprawling courtyard, ready for its next bounty of guests to be welcomed into its marvelous maw. The sunlight tipped against the towers and the peaceful trickle of the fountain out front were captivation distilled. The logic in this change waned in Nick's mind. Again, it was beauty beyond reason. Wonder in austerity. As beautiful and fascinating as Nick saw it the first night he gazed upon the mansion, sitting on his boxes...

Nick pulled his gaze away.

His eyes fell on Frankenstein's back.

They fell to the shape of his silhouette against the gothic pastime. He walked in line with Daisy, fluidly in step. The stark contrast of Frankenstein's golden hair against the black shadows of his tailcoat, Daisy beside him, was just as captivating.

They set upon the mansion like that.

Chapter Text

In the courtyard garden, Nick watched as they admired the flowers. Daisy reached forward to lift a soft white blossom onto his fingers like lifting a lover’s face. He smiled down at it, and Frankenstein smiled at him. With an abrupt pinch, the flower was snapped from its stem, the plant cracking under Daisy’s fingertips. Proudly, he tucked the blossom into his pocket, wearing it like an emblem of Frankenstein’s home as their host ushered them inside his illusive dwelling.

Without the constant thrum of the parties, the house revealed itself to be capricious and chimerical. Detailings of unusual animals and unrecognizable scripts catching Nick’s eyes and weaving into his imagination, presenting to him the mysteries of the nature of their origin, and, more vitally, that of their host, who led them deeper into the house and throughout its many rooms, all perfect, luxurious, and sterile. Only Frankenstein’s energized tour and their noiseless footsteps echoed back at them through the long, painted halls. There was simply nothing else that existed to be heard. 

The shadows of the bird, coiled around the chilled, ashen fireplace, shifted under the golden cast of lamplight as they entered the room. Perfectly arranged books, seemingly never opened, still adorned the palatial walls of shelves, but atop a dark console table Nick spotted a strange phenomenon—a newspaper advertisement, the corner of the page creased. A single instance of imperfection within the silent, seemingly immortal house. A sign of life. He wandered casually over to peer at the page, only for it to be swiftly snatched from his field of view.

The paper shuddered and snapped upright as Daisy flicked his wrist. He held it an observant distance from his face as if to better take in its details in much the same way as one would admire the bewildering architecture of the castle they now occupied. His lips tipped upwards and his eyes lifted brightly. He turned to Frankenstein, tilting the page towards him. Quiet voice full of the sweetest kind of wonder, he said, “They’re handsome, aren’t they?”

Frankenstein looked at the article as if he were seeing it for the first time. Curiosity drew peculiar shapes in his expression.

“The collars…the shirts…” Daisy whispered, the careful ache of his tone implicating something Frankenstein suddenly understood with great clarity.

He smiled as well, mirroring Daisy. “They are,” Frankenstein said.

With a delicate finger, Daisy flicked the folded corner of the page. “Were you intending on purchasing these for yourself?”

“Not in particular; I was only perusing.”

Daisy pivoted then, holding the pictures of the Arrow Collar men before him in a way that allowed him to look at both Frankenstein’s visage and the print in the same moment. “You’d look just like these strapping men—just as impressive.” There was a pause, taut with anticipation, the silence a side effect of Daisy reconsidering his words, eyes searching between the images he held in his hand and their host juxtaposed to them. “No…”  Smiling, he lowered the paper and tossed it with perplexingly gentle disdain back onto the table. “You’d be even better. Those men, they’re just something dreamed up by some painter somewhere.” He turned to face Frankenstein. His every motion from the sway of his dark hair to his light footsteps possessed a compelling mystery that Daisy seemed to have so easily mastered for the sake of perpetually keeping his audience in bated breath. “But you, you’re right here. You’re real.” He stepped forward, dipping close to their host as his fingers took a hold of the end of Frankenstein’s black ribbon.

The fleeting touch of silk upon skin was soon only a mere memory as he breezed past him to wander into other interesting parts of the house. “Or so I like to believe, James.”

Frankenstein’s fingers lingered over the end of his ribbon.  They ghosted upon Daisy’s elusive touch before tucking it back behind his suit jacket. He followed after his guest dotingly.

Nick gave a final glance back at the so expeditiously forgotten paper and at the painted men who forever gazed at each other with a harrowing sort of intensity and intimacy that were only possible in works of fine art, forever clad in their mercerized cotton and fine silks.

They emerged into another drawing room, this one strikingly plain. The walls were of dark wood, and the furniture was sparse: a single heavy wood table surrounded by expensively embroidered overstuffed chairs. Nick peered around, wondering what it was Frankenstein wished for them to see in here that they had not already seen in more magnificent incarnations in other areas of the house. 

Daisy walked up to the spotless window, as spotless as any other Nick had seen so far in the bizarrely untouched house, devoid of any life apart from the three of them wandering about.

Frankenstein watched him step in front of the window, expression brightening. When Daisy placed his hands on the windowsill, completing the picture, something wondrous overcame Frankenstein. His lips parted only to say nothing. He observed Daisy like a painting, eyes taking in how the light illuminated his face, how his reflection superimposed his image onto the city in the distance, how he leaned forward just a hair’s width from the glass.

Nick stood in the glow of the window, drawing back the curtains to reveal his own little cottage and his little toy porch swing. He was struck by how familiar the sight was to him, despite having never been in this room and in front of this window before in his life. Deja vu scratched at the back of his mind like a grain of sand. Nick realized then that he had passed within that distance before, a stranger looking up at a house and into a window occupied by an even stranger silhouette. He wondered how his own shape would look if another were to pass at this moment and marvel at Frankenstein’s house in the same way Nick had.

“What do you see?” Frankenstein asked.

“Nothing,” Daisy answered. He turned around, facing his back towards the rest of the world. He smiled that beguiling smile. “I’ve been everywhere and done everything,” he told him. “And all that’s out there, is nothing—nothing I want to be a part of.”

Frankenstein was bluntly shaken from his euphoria, the wonder in his eyes dimming and diminishing until it bordered on reproach. His posture took on a stupor, and Nick was reminded of that pitiful image of Frankenstein utterly soaked with rain outside of that pitiful cottage seemingly scornful of perhaps the entire world but of himself most of all. However, Frankenstein hastily regained his cheer, smiling as well for Daisy’s sake. “Perhaps so, but there remains much for you to see within here.”

Daisy drifted away from the window and towards Frankenstein. “There certainly is,” he said.

“The master bedroom,” Frankenstein introduced as he shoved open the doors forcefully. The dull tick of a clock against the far wall greeted them upon entering. A king sized bed with plush crimson sheets rested in the center. Steps to either side of the elaborately gilded headboard led up to shelves upon shelves of fabric, black and white only, a checkerboard that stretched to the ceiling, everything folded and pressed to military neatness.

The monochromatic patterns of the room imparted upon Nick a surrealist impression, the rows and rows of black and white appearing particularly unreal to him. He stared up at them. To Nick, it looked like madness. It looked like obsession. “It doesn’t seem like anyone’s lived here,” Nick commented.

“It belongs to the master of the house, “ was Frankenstein’s automatic reply.

Daisy gave him a bemused look. “Aren’t you the master of the house?”

The answer should have been simple, but as a beat of silence and then another passed, Frankenstein’s demeanour was punctuated with uncertainty. As if being pulled in two different directions by two different forces. 

“Those up there”—Nick nodded to the stacks of strangely colorless fabric in the fanciful room—“ What are they?” he asked in place of their host’s silence.

“Ah…” Frankenstein smiled slightly, his eyes lighting up, relieved to be freed from his conundrum. Taking a few long strides, Frankenstein swiftly ascended the steps and ran his hand across the shelves, sliding them over the fabric. He approached a row of white, and, after a contemplative pause, Frankenstein flung his arm out in a wide, dramatic arc, sending the fabric flying and fluttering down to the bed so that they made their grand entrance into the scene.

“Clothes!” Daisy cheered as he went up to the bed and grabbed one, feeling it between his fingers. “They’re so soft.”

“I like to think I’m a rather good tailor.” Frankenstein looked up at the endless pattern of black and white. “It’s...a pastime.”

“You made these?” Nick inquired.

Those secretive and melancholic eyes gazed over Nick, pausing just long enough so that some kind of connotation was suggested but never revealed. That was just the kind of man Frankenstein was. He looked at him, then looked away, a wistfulness overcoming him, his smile tipping into a familiar sadness. “In my spare time,” Frankenstein said.

“In your spare time? All this? James, I’m afraid to tell you, your clocks might be running a bit slow.” He wondered what else their host was capable of. 

Frankenstein had the mystical quality of someone who had stepped out of every idealistic connotation of a man, just as unreal as his home and the parties he threw in them. It was no wonder there were rumours.

His smile picked up, becoming a little more honest. “Perhaps they are, Mr. Clerval.” Then, in an impulsive flourish, Frankenstein tossed shirt after shirt down at them. They lost their folds as they descended, one after another, like the wings of angels, until they landed unceremoniously in a heap.

“You don’t seem to wear these. Who are they for?” Daisy questioned, genuinely curious.

Frankenstein turned to place both hands on the wooden railing, looking down at him wildly, achingly. “They’re for you, if you want them.”

Daisy looked down at the shirt in his hands, running his thumbs over the newly formed crinkles in the fabric. “No...they’re not,” he said, smiling up at Frankenstein.

“But they are ,” Frankenstein insisted. He grabbed another handful and flung fabric into the air once again, caught in the fervor of undoing all of his tedious work. “They’re all for you!” For the first time, laughter burst from Frankenstein’s chest. It was a grand, resonating sound, the notes echoing in an empty room. Frankenstein laughed like there was nothing conceivable that could make him happier than to indulge in Daisy like this. 

Daisy held out the shirt by the shoulders, its sleeves draping downwards. He and Frankenstein exchanged a glance. Daringly, Daisy stripped off his jacket and exchanged his own crisp collared shirt for the soft billowy touch of Frankenstein’s. His inky hair contrasted against the stark whiteness of the cloth. The looser open collar exposed the delicate line of his neck.

Frankenstein looked upon him, wonder stuck, captivated, moth to flame.“It’s a perfect fit,” Frankenstein said.

Daisy looked down at himself. “So it is.” With methodical grace, he reached down to pull another shirt from the bed, feeling it between his fingers. “How funny, they’re all the same.”

Quietly, like something cracking deep beneath the glaciers, Frankenstein’s demeanor stilled and then changed, smile without meaning, laughter without joy. “You’re right...You’re right...How funny…” His voice ached of desperation.

Daisy stared up at him.

“I must be losing my mind,” he murmured. He gazed upwards at the mosaic of shelves, clutching a single shirt in his hand. “Countless shirts no one wears in a room no one uses.” The words tumbled out of him, scrambling to be heard even if no one could really understand what he truly meant by them. All of the novel sights Frankenstein presented, it was only Frankenstein who knew their connotations. Something broke behind his expression, fleeting, and then obscured as he carelessly discarded the final article over the railing. Shadows fell across his face as it fluttered down. He turned away, and Nick could only see a fraction of the smile on his face, utterly mirthless. “I think I’ve lost count.” The meager tremble in his voice was just as confounding and magnetic as the rest of the house.

The warm glow of the late sun streaked across Daisy’s face, lighting up his dark brown eyes into a golden hue as he and Frankenstein looked at each other. In them both was something deeply lonely. Daisy smiled.

Frankenstein sighed. Straightening, he ran a hand through his hair, tousling it back in perfect ways. The last of his laughter slipped from him quietly, and relief softened his eyes.

Their silence was comforting.

“I should be going,” Daisy said at last.

Frankenstein descended the steps. “Right now? But I have yet to show you everything.”

Daisy shook his head. “I best return home, before the rush hour ,” told Frankenstein all he needed to know, Frankenstein, who followed every alluring lilt of Daisy’s voice with astute attention. “We will see each other again, James.”

A drop of surprise dissolved into understanding. “Of course,” Frankenstein said. “Then, I will see you off at the gates.”

Daisy’s crisp collared shirt lay forgotten on the bed.

Discarded atop the pile of unfurled fabric was the single white flower he had plucked. Nick picked it up as they left the room.

They stared on as Daisy slipped into the passenger seat of his car and was whisked away with a light trail of dust. The car sank into the far distance like the hazy ending of a dream.

Nick looked towards his own lonesome house that suddenly appeared even more reclusive to him now, and he found himself loathe to depart so soon. He turned to face Frankenstein, who seemed readily able to read the vague hope in his expression and he immediately offered, “Mr. Clerval. You’ve done very much for me, it is the least I can do to trouble you with tea and something to eat before you leave.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course.”

The deep notes of Frankenstein’s voice was welcome enough, and they found themselves in a warmly lit kitchen. It had the makings of home and was furnished with a table just large enough for two wicker seats to face each other. Looking around, Nick gathered that this kitchen was the one for Frankenstein’s personal day to day use. Of all the rooms and showstopping sights, all of the empty, embellished scenes, he had finally encountered something lived in. A kettle was already on the stove when they walked in.

Frankenstein beckoned for him to have a seat. “Do you have a preference for tea? Any kind, Mr. Clerval.”

“Earl Grey, perhaps?”

“Right away.” Frankenstein shifted, stopping shy of dipping his head. The flame of the stove flickered quietly to life.

Shortly after, Nick was brought to attention by the clink of porcelain being placed in front of him. Painted blue roses laced around the teacup offered to him. Nick hummed in slight amusement. “I’m starting to get the impression that you might like flowers, James.”

“The same to you, Mr. Clerval.”

“What do you mean—“

Nick was silenced by Frankenstein’s hand smoothly plucking the white flower from him. It slipped easily from his fingers, twirled in Frankenstein’s careful hold, and then was placed into Nick’s breast pocket. In the small kitchen, Nick suddenly found the silence incomparably companionable between them, giving him the impression that the space had been prepared just for him. Frankenstein smiled at him with eyes that made him believe that even the sky as well was painted blue just for his enjoyment.

“James, I hope I’m not being too presumptuous, but, may I ask you a question?”

“You just have.”

Nick blinked.

Frankenstein’s lips tilted upwards. “Go ahead, Mr. Clerval.”

Nick refrained from fidgeting with his hands and willfully maintained his steady attention on Frankenstein. “Are you all right?” he asked.

Mild surprise overtook Frankenstein’s posture. “Of course I am. Why would I not be?”

Nick leaned forward, lacing his fingers together and looking up at his host imploringly. “In the bedroom, when you tossed those shirts—“

“It shouldn’t take very long to fold them again.”

Taken aback, Nick allowed himself a sneer, entirely and comfortably impolite. “You know that’s not what I mean, James.”

Frankenstein paused, his gaze bright and assessing. Then he sighed with the fondness of a friend, as if Nick somehow knew him better than he had any right to. “Of course, Mr. Clerval.” Frankenstein refilled Nick’s tea with the smooth practice of an afterthought. “I was only a little sentimental,” was his answer.

“Over shirts?”

Frankenstein nodded, gentle confidence so charismatic, Nick could only allow himself to become possessed by it. “Over shirts.”

However, unexpectedly, Frankenstein’s expression sharpened into such jarring and open hostility that Nick barely prevented himself from recoiling, horrified that he may have unwittingly offended his host until he noticed that Frankenstein’s eyes were focused on something entirely behind him.

“How did you get in?”

Whoever Frankenstein addressed spoke in a strange language that rose and fell in tones Nick couldn’t recognize. He spoke quietly and efficiently.

Nick turned around in his seat.

He was possibly the most frightening man Nick had laid eyes on. Towering and cloaked in black, like forest shadows, he wore a snug mask that covered his lower face, framing his sharp gaze. His hair easily reached past his hips despite being tied tightly back in a ponytail, and it swayed silently with every subtle movement. He could have very well stepped out of the midnight pit of the woods as a silhouette to lead lost travelers straight into a yet undiscovered version of hell.

It was completely appropriate, then, that the man was an acquaintance of Frankenstein’s. He gave Nick a long, hard look once over and then returned his attention to Frankenstein.

Frankenstein sighed. “Even so, please knock next time. And speak English. It’s rude to speak another language in front of my guest.”

Frankenstein glanced at Nick apologetically. “I’m sorry, Mr. Clerval. This is Ragar. Ragar Kertia. He’s a friend.”

Ragar nodded at Nick once, but it made him no less intimidating. The quick tilt of the man’s head brought his eyes from the shadow and into a streak of sunlight. They glimmered, and Nick could have sworn they were red, but Ragar straightened and his eyes cooled unexpectedly to blue in the shade. By some trick of the light perhaps.

“Shall be discussed is important business,” the man said.

Nick’s eyebrow quirked at his peculiar speech.

Frankenstein took on an edge, smirking harshly, a sharp expression that cut his face in belligerent, alien ways. “What business could possibly warrant you breaking into my rightful home?”

“Frankenstein—” Ragar caught himself then, quickly going silent and staring at Nick before saying anything more. 

He looked back at Frankenstein. “Tell your guest to leave.”

The afternoon sun still shone through the window, reflecting on the chandelier so that drops of light glittered across the floor. 

“Mr. Clerval can stay as long as he wishes, Ragar.”

Ragar stared at Frankenstein, who seemed immune to the unspoken reprimandation he so directed at him. He was unbothered, and basking in it. 

Then, Ragar turned on Nick. “Leave. You should leave.” 

“I...pardon…”

“I said,” Frankenstein enunciated, dragging his highball glass across the table. But before he could say anything further, Nick intervened. 

“James…” Nick carefully stood up, feeling utterly misplaced and intrusive. He smiled apologetically, lowered his head apologetically, breathed apologetically. “Thank you, thank you for everything, but I think it’s about time I head back anyway.” He glanced at Ragar with the intention of politely saying goodbye to him as well, but when Ragar turned to him, steely, passive, unreadable, Nick decided that he would rather not risk offending the man with his salutations.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Mr. Clerval.” Frankenstein regained his gentleness. “I hope I haven’t…”

Nick shook his head and smiled. “I’m right next door,” he said, looking at Frankenstein in the eyes to make sure he heard and knew what he meant.

“Ah, yes...of course.” He nodded. “Good bye, Mr. Clerval.”

“Bye, James.”

He left, hearing slivers of that strange language slip back into their conversation, and by some divine intervention, Nick found his way outside without getting lost. 

Without thought, Nick found himself wandering onto his neighbour’s dock. 

He glanced across the bay, seeing the red light on the end of someone else’s shore, shining bright. It blinked like a star. Then he looked back towards the gargantuan mansion. It was no longer a paradise for hundreds, nor a public party facility for the masses. It now held a secret, as sure and intangible as the red light at the end of Daisy’s dock that once held a secret.

Nick wondered what meaning the red light now possessed. Giving Frankenstein’s home one last glance as he came back to his own cottage, Nick pulled the flower he’d given him out of his pocket. He then rummaged through his cupboards and filled a glass with water. He set it in the living room, placed the flower in it, and stepped back to pass a moment. 

The flower was one amongst the many that still perfumed his room, but this one—just this one—was Nick’s.

“…It is a perfect replica,” Ragar started. “I feel as if I might see Lukedonia if I were to look outside the windows.” 

His heel clacked against the floor intentionally, as if Ragar amplified the sound of his usually silent presence to assert himself. “How remarkable it is. I have travelled very far from Lukedonia only to find myself again in this house.” 

He lifted his hand to trace delicate fingers along the crown moulding of the wall, his touch lingering and observant, like he wished to confirm for himself that the mansion was just as real as his eyes led him to believe. Or perhaps, distressingly, he was only seeking imperfections—flaws in Frankenstein’s memories and the reconstruction of those memories—anything he may have overlooked. The tip of Ragar’s nail caught against a knot in the wood. He pulled his hand back and glanced at his fingers.

Frankenstein continued on, not deigning him with a response.

Ragar stepped after him. His footfalls turned harried. “You have not returned my calls.”

“I can ignore your incessant jabbering as I please.”

Ragar fell silent, his expression as blank as the history of the house they now occupied. When he next chose to speak, he looked out the windows that they were passing, frame by frame. The sun was beginning to set upon the strange, unfamiliar lines of a city that also did not know him. They casted long shadows against the dark wooden panels of the opposite wall. “Will you not invite me to tea?”

Frankenstein’s lips flattened into a frown. His voice remained carefully levelled, though his words were no less callous. “Why should I?” he asked, not caring for an answer.

Nonetheless, Ragar answered him. “I have come from abroad. I have crossed the great sea. I have travelled for many days and nights. And you have not even offered me a greeting, let alone a drink, or a seat, or…”

“Bold you can get those words past your mask,” Frankenstein replied curtly.

Suddenly, at doors that looked like any other set of doors in the sprawling mansion, Ragar’s footsteps came to a standstill seemingly without a thought.

Frankenstein stopped a few steps ahead of him and turned around to look at him, seeing recognition in his eyes.

Ragar turned to the doors.

Frankenstein opened them.

They had arrived, before even noticing, at the simulacrum of the room where one would have usually found the master of the house staring out of his one special window. Frankenstein’s legs had taken him here, automatically retracing steps like he had done countless times before, once upon a time. The routine was ingrained in him even now.

Ragar’s presence whispered past him, and he comfortably, conceitedly, took a seat by the low oaken table.

It was pride that compelled Frankenstein to complete the motion. So he left wordlessly, the sound of his footsteps clicking further and further away from the room until he arrived at the kitchen again. He returned to Ragar before long with his tray of tea. They sat across from each other as Frankenstein poured for the both of them. Merely a formality.

Ragar picked up his cup and, on novel occasion, was the first to speak. He kept his voice calm and low, sterilely inoffensive. “What are you doing here, Frankenstein?”

“I can ask the same of you.”

Ragar looked at him. “You have made yourself known. You have built a counterfeit of his house. A property you have no right to. A legacy you are no longer bound to.” He looked at Frankenstein flatly, as if passing down judgment. “Lukedonia has summoned you.”

“Summoned me?”

“By order of Lord Raskreia.”

Frankenstein glared at him, the hostility in his expression set like stone. “I don’t answer to your Lord.”

Tipping his mask down, Ragar sipped at his tea and hummed a single, quiet note. “Perhaps not.” Infuriatingly, his lidded eyes became tender with nostalgia, as though the thought of Frankenstein’s impertinence was a familiar and happy pastime; and this he could indulge. It incensed Frankenstein. Ragar said, like an exhale, “But you have trespassed on that which is not yours.”

“Why did they send you, a clan leader? Why not some Central Knight who knows how to take the train?”

Ragar lowered his cup again. “The mission to secure your return, I volunteered.”

Frankenstein’s brow quirked at him. “Why?”

“I believe you already know the answer to that question.” Ragar set down his cup, softening the clink of porcelain with one delicately extended pinky. “I have answered your questions, Frankenstein. Will you return the favor?”

Frankenstein leaned forward so that his forearms rested on his knees with his fingers interlaced. Belligerently, he smirked and repeated, “ I believe you already know the answer to that question. ”

This did not seem to amuse Ragar.

Frankenstein dropped his smile. “Master has still not been found. I have built him his home here. He’ll see it, one day. He will see it and he will know his servant waits for him.” Suddenly, like embers leaping to flame; like a shoreline pulling into a rip; like a heretic, calling out to divinity who could not hear him, he was overcome with emotion.  Frankenstein clasped his fingers together, tight as if in mindless prayer. His voice became quiet as his gaze drifted downwards. “He will see it, and he will know he belongs. Master will return home, will return to me, Ragar. You know this.”

“...Frankenstein.” Again, Ragar picked up his tea, not to drink from, not to satisfy thirst that did not exist, but simply to occupy his estranged hands. To go through motions he knew was civil. “Do you think he will find you in this place, of all the possible places in the world? Do you think he will simply walk into this farce of a house?”

“ You’ve found me, haven’t you?”

“...I had not taken you for a fool when you had resided in Lukedonia, Frankenstein.”

His temper leapt, a hot, blinding spike through his chest, emotions Frankenstein could not name. “It was foolish of me to have ever resided in that pitiful, traitorous hellhole.”

Ragar’s expression twitched. The rapid ignition and conscious dousing of fury — there and then gone, dispelled like steam in the air. He took a breath, appearing to steady himself again in contrast to Frankenstein’s visible rising tension. Quiet and careful, he started, “You must know by now, Frankenstein…”

Frankenstein said nothing, daring Ragar to complete his thought.

“The Noblesse—we have done all we can to return him, but he is gone. He has been gone for a long time.” Slowly, Ragar raised the cup to his lips such that it obscured his mouth. Steam still rose to curl around his face. “Sir Raizel is dead, Frankenst—”

The cup flew out of his hand and crashed loudly into the far wall from the force of Frankenstein’s strike. It shattered in a small explosion of porcelain and tea. The jagged pieces fell to the floor, a few shards scraping far enough to tip against Ragar’s shoe.

“How dare you…” Frankenstein stood over Ragar. His shadow fell over him. His back faced the light of the window. “How dare a dog of Lukedonia tell the retainer of the Noblesse his master is dead?”

Ragar stood up as well. He raised his hand. For a single wavering moment, it remained still in the air, unsure of itself, fingers poised to touch Frankenstein’s shoulder with obscene gentility.  As if he understood a semblance of what he was doing. Some humane consolation. A warm gesture from cold, inhuman hands. But that second passed, and Ragar went to his mask, tugging it upwards in practice of inanity.

“He is not dead, Ragar,” Frankenstein told him, voice betraying the violence of his ire with its unnatural placidness, uncanny in its calm. “He is not dead, and he will return to his home, his things, his servant. And I am as sure of this as I am sure that the sun will rise tomorrow morning.” Frankenstein stared on, unyielding, with all of the pride of being the Bonded of the Noblesse.

Frankenstein raised his arm. Ragar pulled back, bracing for the hungry black void of Dark Spear and the sense of rot and decay it always brought. His muscle memory tensed in defence, but the violent bolt of lightning never struck.

Silently, the air glimmered red, and there was, unmistakably, Raizel all around them, ghostly and all encompassing, the ancient pressure of his powers filling Frankenstein’s lungs and sinking into his blood. In soul, he and his master embraced perpetually, and it would be Frankenstein who would die before they parted. Out of nothing, without a disturbance, without even a ripple on the glasslike surface of the one remaining cup of tea, Red Spear coalesced in his hand, weightless. It shimmered, glorious in color, breathtaking.

“Cadis Etrama di Raizel lives,” he promised.

Ragar stared at the soul weapon in gaunt recognition, with eyes as wide and shocked as a doe. Then his gaze flickered, fighting against the urge to lower his eyes before the presence of such authority. He held Frankenstein’s stare with some effort and snuffed out his own quiver of noble power that had risen in response to the sudden shift in the atmosphere. He would not lay a hand against him now. 

“Do you see, Ragar?” Frankenstein murmured, victorious.

The realization of what Frankenstein was doing to himself seeped into Ragar’s eyes like dread. “Stop this.”

“Stop what? Proving you wrong? Proving Lukedonia is nothing but a traitorous snake pit? Does it hurt your pride, Ragar? Does it wound you?”

“Enough.” He reached forward as if to grasp his arm, but Frankenstein pulled back.

“My master did nothing but serve you with his flesh and blood within an inch of his very life, and in his one moment of need, you abandon him. Like he is nothing. Like he is less than nothing. Like he wasn’t even worth your fucking time.”

Amidst the simmer of hysteria, Ragar moved too fast for the eye to see, trapping Frankenstein’s wrist in a vice grip. The Red Spear was held between them, seeming to sear his very breathing, seeming to breathe itself. 

“I yield! I am wrong,” Ragar said firmly, voice raised just above Frankenstein’s. “That is enough. Release the Red Spear, Frankenstein.”

Frankenstein said nothing. Slowly, the weapon melted away, pressure equalized. Once again, they were calm. They looked at each other, both thinking the other mad.

Ragar withdrew his hand. “You would waste your life to prove a point?”

“Gladly, to show you—” 

Frankenstein suddenly clamped a hand over his mouth. His brow creased; his eyes swam with dizzying nausea. Abruptly, he faced away, tilted his head down, and coughed, shoulders shaking. For an instant, the rest of the world seemed so very distant to him. Drops of blood escaped in between his fingers. A few dripped to the once pristine floor, now appearing miles and miles away below him.

Frankenstein took a few trudging steps towards the door, hand still pressed over his mouth. 

Ragar followed. Close behind, he reached out. His fingers touched Frankenstein’s shoulder. They were brushed away.

“Don’t…” Frankenstein’s hand trailed from his face, revealing the smear of blood across his chin and lips. “Don’t touch me.” He turned towards the door.

Ragar’s fingers curled at his sides.

They stalked deep under the house.

The cavernous hall amplified their silence; haunted loneliness echoed in its vastness. Between the clerestory and ribbed vaulting above them, the ceiling was painted—a wonderful mural, its splendor and color bewitching. Hallowed beasts soared through heavenly clouds, emerged from the white break of the waves, and roamed an ancient earth. Kartas and Legasus were present, but there were others that could not be found, that had been erased from the history of the house.

“It is incomplete,” Ragar noted.

“It is perfectly complete,” Frankenstein insisted.

Statues of gods none could remember—that perhaps never existed—towered over their slow parade with indifferent stone eyes.

Beyond the painted hall, resting underground, always beneath the tremble of the parties was the sanctuary. Past the grand metal doors embossed with a familiar image of a god, goddess, or some other symbol of divinity, was the gathering place of lost and weary souls: people who had, by some misfortune—or perhaps very fortunately—been assigned Frankenstein as their target. They had wandered into the house and were swallowed up.

Cells with translucent walls that swam with Dark Spear’s color stretched on and on. Brutal cold and electrified, they were immoveable regardless of how much the prisoners clawed at them, even if they did so until their fingertips turned bloody and black. They would tire eventually.

“Frankenstein, let me out!” they wailed.

“When the higher-ups hear about this, you’re dead,” they cursed.

H-21, J-37, 38, 39, and so on and so forth. Their codes were written on the walls next to the cells.

Ragar eyed the captives as they passed. “So this is what you have turned his sanctuary into.”

“Oh?” A woman quirked her eyebrow up at the sight of him. She lounged apathetically in the chair provided to her. Nearby against one of the walls was a shelf with a smattering of books and an ashtray. “What’s this? The Frankenstein, hurt? A once in a lifetime event; I must be lucky.” She nodded at him. “That blood’s not going to wash out of your white shirt, Sweetie.”

Frankenstein ignored the noise, focusing instead on the sound of cold water in the sink as he washed the blood from his hands and face. Its pale color swirled down the drain.

“How many do you have imprisoned here?” Ragar asked.

“Thirty-four. Used to be thirty-seven.”

“Thirty-seven attempts on your life.”

Frankenstein dried his hands and turned around.

Ragar’s hands were at his sides but poised to strike, engulfed in the red inferno of his aura. He became a mere blur, silently closing the distance between himself and the cell with the woman labeled J-56. Then, he was stopped, on a dime, held still in space and time, hand of black fire around his slim wrist.

“Ragar, what are you doing?”

“I am helping you dispatch these criminals. As you have clearly failed to do so.”

“No. You are not.”

The woman in the cell looked over him, wicked confidence behind her eyes that were now leveled at Ragar’s. She stared at him as if she knew secrets that had yet to be shared, stared at him with birdlike eyes as if he were prey. “Oh, we’ve got a vicious one,” she chimed dismissively, a smirk twisting her lips, as sharp as talons.

Ragar’s eyes, wide and affronted, darted from her to Frankenstein. “You are protecting them?” he realized with nearly dreamlike disbelief. Then he looked to all the other cells. “You are protecting Union ?” He turned back onto the blackened hand holding him. He looked at it, weighed and measured, expression unreadable. Collecting himself, Ragar withdrew his arm from Frankenstein. “Is it futile of me to ask why?”

“It’s none of your business what happens down here, or, frankly, what happens anywhere on these grounds.”

A long moment passed in which Ragar methodically stepped back to better gaze upon the entire scene—upon Frankenstein, something quietly horrified flickering behind his eyes. “This is not you, Frankenstein.”

Frankenstein sneered. “Don’t presume to know me, Ragar.”

At this, Ragar’s expression twitched under his mask; his brow creased strangely. He exhaled, lowering his eyes slowly to the spots of red stark on a white shirt. “I had not realized I would find you in such a state.” Ragar looked at the floor, expression openly and aggravatingly considerate. Softly, he sighed. He pushed down his mask. “Have you found Sir Cadis Etrama di Raizel?”

Frankenstein reeled. He said nothing.

"That is what I thought.” Ragar said.

Then he pulled up his mask, straightened out his clothes, and turned.

“Leaving?” Frankenstein blurted. “Just like that?"

“Just like that.” Ragar said. “You introduced me to your neighbor as your ‘friend’…based on this, I will leave you be.”

He stepped away.

“For now, friend.”

J-56 leaned back in her armchair. She smiled coyly up at Frankenstein, her lips dashed with fresh red lipstick. “So…is he crazy or what?”

Frankenstein, who was sitting and blindly gazing down at a flickering screen, whipped his hair back and gave her a defeated, guarded look. Mechanically, he pulled the IV needle from his arm and straightened his sleeve.

“Oh come on, he’s the first guy you brought down here! Of course I’m interested. Why’d you let him go?”

“He isn’t an assassin.”

“Isn’t he?” the woman said as she lounged in her armchair. “Could’ve fooled me.” She got up, rummaged through one of the drawers in her cell and retrieved a cigarette. She wiggled it between two fingers, as if signalling a waiter. 

Frankenstein yanked himself out of his seat. The cell barrier reacted to Dark Spear’s energy, letting his arm through as he lit her cigarette with a spark from his fingertips. J-56 took a long drag. Some of the others — the latest incarcerated — still screamed in the background, rattling in their cells, wishing glory to the Union and death to Frankenstein, yet to tire of it; but Frankenstein and J-56 ignored this. 

“What’s your connection with Lukedonia?” she asked. She looked him up and down derisively. “You’re no noble.”

Frankenstein frowned. “You know not even that but were sent to kill me?” 

“Does it look like the Union gives a single shit about us?” J-56’s eyes popped as she said it. She took another drag on her cigarette, blowing it out towards the purple barrier of aura. The smoke sizzled against it. “So you haven’t found what you’re looking for?” 

“It’s none of your concern.” 

“Hm. Guess not,” she said. “He’s right you know, your noble buddy. It seems clear to me,” she said, eyes darting down the long line of cells, as if she and the others had discussed this in their downtime, “Whoever you’re waiting for, they’re not coming.” Another puff of her cigarette floated in the air. “How long have you been waiting?”

Frankenstein pulled his eyes away.

She shook her head pityingly, but without mockery; there seemed to be no more of that in her, after being here for so long. “That long, huh?” Then, she smirked with an easygoing sort of camaraderie that was a largely rare sight in this day and age. She looked, suddenly, as if she understood something about Frankenstein, something that Frankenstein hadn’t felt comfortable confiding. “How pitiful, how wondrous pitiful.” She laughed, raising her head. “Have you ever heard that before—from that one play?”

Frankenstein remained silent, only peering at her from the corner of his eye.

Her smile gleamed.

But the moment was over. Her lips pressed flat, J-56 leaned crassly forward, close to the barrier. “Keep your eyes wide open, Frankenstein. Or one of these days one of us Union rabble will kill you.” J-56 tipped her ash into a gilded little ashtray.

Frankenstein’s eyes flickered up. The smile on his face set like a grimace. “A threat? Really?” 

“No. A warning. You’re kind of out of it, Frankenstein.” 

“Ever since that one party!” one of the others called out. 

“You never would have let someone get the jump on you like that,” another called. “You’re going soft, Frankie.”

“Call me that again and I’ll feed you uncooked carrots for the rest of the week!” Frankenstein called down to him.  

J-56 snapped her fingers, vying for his attention. 

“Get rid of Lukedonia boy before he gets rid of you,” she said. “Otherwise who’s going to fix my deep seated physiological issues?” 

“The noble is hardly a problem,” Frankenstein said, frowning. “Better him than some Central Knight I’d have locked up right next to you.” 

“My, with all your hate of Lukedonia, I wonder why the Union even hates you. Shouldn’t you be working together?” 

Frankenstein whipped his arm, blowing out J-56’s cigarette in one go. “We are done here,” he snapped.  “Your time is up.” 

Chapter Text

Not far away from the crystalline lights, beaming into the sky like warning beacons, was Jordan’s house: a quaint, asymmetrical Queen Anne revival inherited from her parents in the shipping trade. Nick zoomed up to Jordan’s in the roaring yellow car — courtesy of Frankenstein, of course — and played the gentleman by taking her hand to guide her down the vine-kissed steps. Jordan, long past the icy days of lounging on the couch, a harsh judge behind a magazine, allowed Nick to play the part, and held his hand, and pretended she was not tall enough that they could not comfortably link arms. 

Six o’clock sharp, the gates to the Cadis Mansion opened and the guests, like magpies to shine, came pouring in to get their promise of light. The party, as ever, was larger than life. Yet there were differences, and the piranha of press and ever winding mill of rumours, like everyone else, noticed; its outlandishness seemed to have grown by a lightyear, its fantastical attributes expanded dizzyingly into the far distance of the already stupendously expansive property. There were more lights, there were more stars, there was even more moon; and there was, undoubtedly, more black magics casting lovelorn spells like a thousand fae collided. Their dust rained down over the hundreds of pairs of eyes that looked upon the castle in open-mouthed enchantment. 

The entire city piled into automobiles, speeding away — and this did not matter, as the officers on down time were on their way speeding there too — into little new West Egg for their weekly carnival, their glittering garden of delights, and the ever-inviting allure of the fact that fun was a virtue here. That pleasure was a virtue here, as was gluttony and authenticity and spectacle. To let loose, to forget. An otherworldly impossibility of taking, never needing to give. No fruit was forbidden here. As the castle was alight once more, all its spires and turrets seemed warmly open-armed, welcoming all those ragged and well-dressed men, the have and have-nots, in deep embrace, but now Nick knew better than to fall prey to that same, mass love spell. 

Nick was privy to an even more impossible truth: that all this wonder and beauty was for one single man, crafted from nothing, by one single man. Or perhaps, the party’s host was more illusion than man by now, letting anyone who cared to have their say on who or what he was speak it into reality. Nick would like to think he was the only one who had successfully glanced behind that illusion. But Nick knew, the night was not for the hundreds of sparkling guests, the night was not his — it was Daisy’s, and Daisy’s alone. 

Nick and Jordan cut through the grass, using a hidden path from Nick’s garden to Frankenstein’s. When they ducked beneath the cypress trees, scrambling out from a curtain of greenery, they giggled like school kids on the run, doing something mischievous. She was in a mood, giggling wildly as she pulled Nick along, the least cynical he had ever seen her. Jordan was wearing a gorgeous drop-neck dress, with her beloved heavy-set earrings and short bob of hair. He was in the nicest suit he owned, a live flower plucked from his own still-thriving garden in his pocket. He had no idea what had put Jordan into this mood, but he basked in it all the same. 

“Now this is a party, don’t you think?” she said, glowing. “Should we hit the fountain?” 

Nick realised too late that by ‘fountain,’ she did not mean the picturesque Italian fountain next to the outdoor barbecue, but the gigantic, tiered fountain of alcohol. Jordan got onto her tiptoes, slid the top two glasses from the champagne tower off the peak, and filled them up from the fountain. 

“Woah, woah, Jordan,” Nick laughed, as she refilled hers again quickly. “Please, we have all night.” 

“We do,” Jordan agreed. 

Nick went to scout out some food for them from the chef’s area, and before long they found themselves sitting at the edge of the actual fountain, listening to someone sing as they ate. Jordan popped a canapé in her mouth before reaching for her small clutch purse. Nick anticipated her movement, opened her clutch to find her vitamins, and popped it open to dispense two into her hand. 

Pleased, Jordan patted him on the cheek, though a little hard. “A darlin’.” 

“You’re absolutely giddy today,” Nick smiled. 

“What? Am I not allowed?” Jordan teased. 

Nick shook his head, sighing theatrically as if he couldn’t win with her. 

“Okay, okay. It’s James.” 

“James? What about him?” 

Jordan smiled in an almost venomous way. “I love gossip, you know that. But now I’ve had my fill. I’ve got him all figured out. Hahah! It’s all a bit…anticlimactic. Just a bit.” 

She turned to him excitedly, like wanting to recapture the innocence of their first meeting in a party very much like this. “Remember! Mr Frankenstein is teaching the ultimate sewn-together partygoer to sing in there.” 

“See how he never shows up to his own parties?” Nick added. “I imagine he’s horribly disfigured and woefully ugly, and his only escape is other people’s husbands.” 

Jordan laughed a splitting, high-pitched laugh. “People go into his parties, and they don’t come out!” She laughed some more. Slowly, finally, she collected herself. “He’s such a beautiful man, with that hair and those eyes and all this. All this. This splendour for Daisy…” 

She seemed withdrawn, after a moment. 

“Gosh,” Jordan said. “I almost fell for it, too.” 

These parties were like a venus flytrap. Its host built from nothing an intricate, golden, alcohol fuelled facade, and those who funnelled in between the great gates were drawn into the web. They were caught in it, within his sphere of influence, where one James Frankenstein pulled the strings like some fictitious character come alive, larger than life and lie. 

But Nick knew rumours were always spun from a seed of truth. He seemed sinister. By now, Nick was aware that no average Joe could have amassed the wealth his neighbour had through good, legitimate means. He’d gone underground to a world of speakeasies, filled with rich, powerful people, and met the friend with the mask and the scowl. Gangsters and politicians and morally corrupt people. And he looked away from these things, not really bothered about it, deep inside. 

James Frankenstein, and that touch of danger he presented, admittedly, was irresistible to Nick. The hundreds of guests might be lured by a big fantasia of a house, the latest sensational performers from Broadway — but Nick was lured here by the man…standing in the light of a window…

Nick looked there now. There was no one there. This seemed suddenly strangely out of place. Like the script was wrong, somehow. Nick reached into his pockets. The cold kiss of something metal brushed across his fingers; the cufflinks were still in his pocket. He’d forgotten they were there. 

Suddenly, a partygoer came hurriedly up to Nick, waving a picture in his face. “Have you seen this man?” she cried, possessed. “Jimmy! Marlow! Jimmy Marlow! He’s my man! Have you seen him?” Nick shook his head strongly. The lady moved on then, and like a war widow wandering the streets, continued to call out at anyone who would listen. 

Nick turned yet another blind eye. 

So too did Jordan, Nick thought, as she shrugged off whatever was plaguing her in that moment. Nick was suddenly and vehemently reminded that Jordan only brought women here because she was separated from her beloved. And now in the place of other women, Nick was here instead. She gave him again the impression of a hunted animal, licking her wounds. 

“...Are you thinking of her?” Nick asked. As soon as the words came out of his mouth, he regretted it. It was insensitive. Rude. 

But Jordan turned to look at him with sad, dreamy eyes. “Always.” Some partygoers rushed by, shimmering bright in their costumes, loud and rambunctious, but neither Nick nor Jordan noticed. She leaned to her head to the side, gazing at him shyly. "...You'll wait up for me tonight. Right?" 

Nick nodded. "Of course." 

She huffed, contented. Then she got up.

“C’mon,” Jordan said soberly. “Let’s go see Daisy.” 

Through the milling crowd of people entering the mansion, Nick managed to spot Frankenstein before he did him. He was in his signature black tailcoat, again almost indistinguishable from the army of servants other than the long bow fastened tightly around his neck. As people rushed past him, he stood still, waiting for someone Nick knew would come. 

“Excuse me, Sir, the food?” one guest asked, gripping his arm. 

Frankenstein startled out of being a statue, looking uncomfortable. “Just ‘Mister,’ please. Right over here on the left, and also up the stairs.” He waved one of the guides over with a flick of his gloved hand to take over. 

“I hear there’s a pool here. Could you tell me where the pool is?” 

“Follow this path,” Nick said loudly. He moved to gesture largely, “Right this way, follow and you’ll reach the courtyard, where you cannot miss it!” 

It was as if a huge weight had shed off his back. Frankenstein beamed at Nick, thankful for his intervention, however small it was. "Mr Clerval."

“Remind me,” Nick asked in a carefully put-upon, obnoxious voice, “what time are the synchronised swimmers to perform? Will there be sea lions to watch? Dolphins?” 

Frankenstein’s lips quirked up as he said nothing. He seemed clearly overwhelmed by the occasion. 

“Hey, cheer up, James,” Nick said. “I know you’re nervous. But Daisy’ll come.” 

“I know, I know,” Frankenstein said. “Of course he’s coming. It’s just…I hope I know what I’m doing.” 

“Do not we all?” 

Both Nick and Frankenstein swivelled around, startled by how close the voice pricked against their necks. Nick paled, he was once again in the presence of the friend. He seemed different. Instead of that strange, black gown he’d been wearing in Nick’s first impression, he stood tall in his double-breasted, open-front tailcoat in a striped, washed-out blue. 

For a lack of a more apt description, he looked, and held himself blatantly, like a gangster. 

“Some party, isn’t it?” Ragar Kertia said, his accent heavy and intoned. He said it as if mimicking a series of sounds rather than anything else. 

“Ragar?” Frankenstein said, at a loss. 

“Mr Kertia!” Nick waved. “Hello.” 

Frankenstein’s look of disgust seemed to amplify the longer Ragar stood there, doing nothing. Ragar tipped his head, gesturing towards the hubbub of people and performers. 

“I…” he stammered, “I do mean it.” 

Ragar’s Carolina-blue form fidgeted a little. He acted as if he was uncomfortable being seen, and there were far too many eyes out in any direction, and everyone was staring at him, specifically, with nowhere possibly to hide from it all.

“It is a wonderful gathering.” 

Something was happening here. Nick remembered the altercation that happened the day he met Mr Kertia, how he wished Nick would go away so he could talk to Frankenstein alone. It seemed to him there had been a falling out, and perhaps Mr Kertia was just a bit shy, unsure if he should be here. There was tension between them — the tension and substance of an invisible shared past — a different secret that Nick was not a part of, and would never be, invited to. This revelation stung a little. Was he hurt, that he could not be friends with Frankenstein like Ragar Kertia was friends with Frankenstein? A jealousy over degrees of friendship? Nick shook these thoughts away. 

Frankenstein simply shut his eyes, sighed tryingly, and turned back to Nick without heed. Ragar’s thinly veiled apology, it seemed, was accepted. 

At this point, Jordan puttered up to the three of them standing in the doorway, offering the plate of canapé’s she’d snatched from somewhere. “Found Daisy yet?” She stopped at Ragar, looking him up-down a second. 

Ragar dipped his head towards her. “No. The one called ‘James’ has been waiting for ‘Daisy’ for almost two hours,” he commented. 

Jordan nodded absently. “Jordan. Jordan Baker.” 

She held out her hand. Ragar studied it as if she were obscuring a hidden weapon. 

“Kertia. Ragar Kertia.” 

Then they all stood in the middle of the path, waiting for Daisy, when suddenly the thick, fragrant smell of gardenias wafted through the air like an invisible shroud. 

Hand in hand, walking down the corridor with leisured grace, unlike the others who charged around them, were the Buchanans. The incoming crowd seemed to part like some red sea, onlookers already noticing the difference between the rowdy, unrefined pretence of the city, or the new money West Eggers, and the Buchanans who were the royalty of East Egg. 

Tina’s distinctive crystal heels clicked against the floor like bullets, holding herself in that lofty way that made others wish to move out of her path on the street, or avert their eyes as if blinded by light. Her hair had been fashioned into tight finger curls like wind-fashioned waves in white sand, her white-blonde head accentuated with an aigrette headpiece made of white jewels. With each gunshot step, her legs kicked up the sheer folds of her gossamer gown, which floated back down with ethereal grace. She wore one single ring atop her evening gloves: her diamond wedding ring.

Daisy was dressed in magnificent, warm burgundy, fitted with a dark cravat; his hair was slicked back again, neat and orderly, and it gave his usually soft face a more measured, angular look. Nick was again reminded of the old stars of Hollywood, their monochrome smiles, their transatlantic voices, their heroic, grandiose feats, and their brazen masculinity; every part of them carrying the dark and attractive tint of Romanticism. Hand in hand, they seemed the perfect couple, coordinated in their step. Beautiful and untouchable. All the eyes of the room seemed to be turned towards them, deifying them, a hundred incarnations taking shape in private minds. 

“Nicki!”

Tina directed her winning pageant smile at him.

For a few misplaced seconds, Nick had no idea why she’d singled him, of all of them, out. But then it seemed inevitable — who did Tina know here? Who did she perceive was on her side? Jordan who was a fellow, deathly loyal to one Daisy; two tall, handsome strangers; or Nicki, the man who once shared an understanding within the confines of a conversation taken on a train, in a small apartment party. Nick felt almost a rude jab of guilt, for always thinking ill of her, for failing to obey in his father’s words, not taking into account her multitudes. 

“Nicki-dear, are you done staring?” Tina chuckled. 

Nick stepped forward. This time he captured her hand smoothly, with ease of practice, and leaned to kiss it. “Tina! It’s good to see you.” 

It really was. It felt good to the eyes to see her. She looked, more than ever, like the girl in advertisements — the girl — with her angelic smile, and perfect hair, and perfect lips, holding compact mirrors, or laundry detergent, or home-cooked meals, or a new Chanel purse; the girl New York people look up and see on high billboards, the girl all American women wanted to be, but could never achieve — but not for lack of trying, of course. 

Nick glanced to the other end of their small gathering and realised at once that Frankenstein took no notice of any of this. Frankenstein’s eyes were struck wide, his mouth parted almost indecently, his mind seemingly elsewhere; far, far away. His attention was all on Daisy. 

Daisy, for as long as Nick had known him, had always taken particular pride in his presentation, but tonight was also different on this count. His eyes held a sense of melancholy, like he too had a favoured person to go up to, and he communicated a want of flinging himself into their arms, and saying their name, but he refrained; and to refrain was to be hurt. Daisy seemed also aware of his effect on those around him, the small crowd gathering, but he seemed determined not to care.

“Um, James,” Nick braced a hand to Frankenstein’s back, bringing him to life. 

Shaken, Frankenstein broke into a well-trained, amicable smile. He greeted them both. “Welcome to the Cadis Mansion, Mr Buchanan, Mrs Buchanan.”

Stricken, the light in Tina’s eyes went out. They iced over quicker than a candle flame smothering. She recognised who this was: the man from the speakeasy. The man who refused her so viciously it was as though she’d acquired a burn from the sheer incomprehensibility of it. James with the deceitful winning hand from poker, who walked away from the pot. Nick’s acquaintance with the inadequate taste in wine. Tina’s romp scouting for handsome men gone deeply, deeply awry. 

And James Frankenstein knew this too. He met her glare with a warm, warm smile; excessively warm, warmer than it had any right to be. He was going to receive her with full honours, being the ever graceful host. And then, in the midst of this already loaded scene, something even more bizarre happened — like lightning striking the top of the Empire State Building, turning it azure, or pigs flying across the strait—

Mr Kertia hobbled two newborn fawn-like steps forward and dropped to his knees. 

“…Cadis Etrama di Raizel…” he breathed. 

Tina’s eyes flickered from one incomprehensibility to another. Daisy stared. 

Guests cut between Mr Kertia and the Buchanan’s, between Nick and Frankenstein, and between Jordan and Nick. Not everyone had cared to sightsee, most paused momentarily and went back to the high spirits of the party, chattering as loudly as usual. The background and foreground were once again cluttered by partygoers, people singing drunkenly, gossiping as they did, meanwhile Mr Kertia was still on the ground, head raised reverently upwards as if towards a Virgin Mary.

Then Mr Kertia fixed himself up, propping up one knee so as to look proper, one fist pressed to the ground, the other parallel on his knee. He straightened his back, knelt like a knight before his lord, and looked at — at Daisy. 

“It has been a long time, Sir Raizel. Ragar Kertia greets you.”

Nick’s mouth opened confusedly. The way he looked at Daisy — it was as if he were someone else to him entirely. And Daisy noticed this. Daisy, sharp as a knife, stared down at Ragar Kertia without the slightest incline of the head. 

“…Have we met?” Daisy rasped, his deep voice soothing the air around them. Kindly and soft. 

Frankenstein went and stood in front of Mr Kertia. 

Nick had been too busy gaping at whatever the hell he’d just witnessed, he hadn’t caught the quivering tension in Frankenstein’s form, the mounting anger in his shoulders alone until now. Fleetingly, Nick locked eyes with him, and he did not know how to act when he saw the same hateful, iced-over eyes of Tina in Frankenstein. Nick felt as if heat was radiating off of him, static collecting in his own clothes. If Nick was affected initially by Mr Kertia’s demeanour, he was terrified now. Not of Frankenstein, but for him, his friend, and what consequences this out-of-time gesture could mean. Nick did not know, and did not understand. 

“Please, may I take your coat?” Frankenstein asked. 

“No. There’s a bit of a chill tonight,” Tina said. “I’d like to keep my shawl.” 

“Of course. This way.” 

Mr Kertia’s face, half-masked, looked as if someone had told him the world was wrong, his mother was dead in a ditch, and it was precisely his fault. His dejected eyes made him look less like a pointed blade, and more like a kicked dog. Nick went up to him, unsure if he should pull him up. He was worried about putting his hands on the man at all. But Mr Kertia clambered to his feet in an instance. 

A small group, well-oiled on alcohol, chattered between them — and between one instance and the next, Mr Kertia seemed to have vanished into thin air. One second and Nick could have sworn he was there, and then he was not. Nick’s brows flew right up. He looked from side to side, then to the others. But no one else had noticed.

“So, is this part of the opening act?” Tina said airily. “I feel quite welcomed. Truly,” she said, but seemed unsure of it. 

After all this had transpired, Nick turned to follow Frankenstein and the entourage, when he was faced by Jordan. 

“...So...what’s wrong with the gangster man?”

Frankenstein led them on a short tour of the fair outside, recalling the names of every shiny thing, introducing the Buchanans to famous chefs, aspiring royal ballet protégés, the editor of Vogue magazine, and even Miss Gilda Grey herself. Daisy seemed thoroughly enchanted, wading through the crowds with captivated eyes. He embellished all the delights of the garden with his presence; wherever he went, the party became tailored certainly for him and him alone.

He always brought an air of sophistication to all around him. For Daisy, the aura of grace and aristocracy came effortlessly, even when he exclaimed at everything with adoring fascination, “Why, what is that, James?” 

“That looks like a bit of fun.”

“That was the greatest hors d’oeuvre I’ve had the grace to sample!” 

“Oh that is just wonderful. Isn’t that just wonderful, Tina?” 

Tina seemed to float on his arm to every new endeavour in that same impassive, at-arms-length attitude. “What? Apples?” 

“Candied apples,” Frankenstein said. He waved to the server, who scuttled over with a lipstick-red tray of them. “Care to try?” 

Tina shook her head politely, but her eyes betrayed her. She looked down on the candied apples as if they were not fit for human consumption, let alone her. 

“Could you ever begin to believe,” Daisy exclaimed, “I’ve never had such exquisite candy.” 

He’d directed the question at Tina, but Nick blinked in genuine bemusement and uttered, “Really?”

Daisy took a single, delicate bite, and moaned — actually moaned — Nick thought perhaps he'd never tasted such a juvenile, fair-ground thing after all. Nick, before each moment passed, was truly convinced Daisy had never seen such a gorgeous courtyard, or such delicious caviar, or such sparkling Wilson Automobiles, or such important-looking turrets. That is, until Nick remembered that this was not the first time Daisy had been here. 

But still the party embroiled Daisy in endless amusement. There were a thousand shiny things lined up to take a bite out of, and Daisy left the apple for something else almost as quickly as he’d come to it. Soon after, Daisy linked arms with Jordan, unlinked from Tina, and strutted away with her to watch the Olympic diver flip off the phenomenally high diving board. They joined the ring of screaming audience members dotted around the pool. 

Tina didn’t follow. “I don’t fancy getting wet,” she explained, and went to sit beneath a parasol with her head held high, her fur and chiffon shawl wrapped tightly around her. Frankenstein stood beside her awhile, then pulled up a chair from the opposite table.

“May I?” he asked, as if this were not his party, and he did not own everything here.

Tina said nothing. She just waved her hand at him, vaguely permitting.    

Nick stood between the pool and the parasols, unsure to which side he belonged. The diver, dressed in scandalous clothes even for a pool, jumped steadily off the board, flipping many times in the air. Daisy clapped. Jordan was nowhere to be seen. Some of the crowd wolf-whistled after the splash. The diver was a man, and Daisy, emboldened by the others, whistled as well. Nick pretended to marvel at the diver like the others. 

After a long, uninterrupted silence, Tina spoke. “So you’re Frankenstein.” 

“I am.” 

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” 

“Pray tell, when?” 

Tina’s lips pulled into a line. “Never mind.” 

Frankenstein smiled satisfactorily. “Are you enjoying yourself, Mrs Buchanan?” 

“Oh, to the heights of pleasure , James,” Tina replied, and Frankenstein looked even more satisfied. 

“Perhaps we should play another game.” 

“Hmm?”

“Of poker. Or roulette. I hear roulette is your favourite, is it not?” 

Tina nodded icily. 

She hated this. It seemed to Nick she hated that Frankenstein knew the fact she adored a game of roulette more than a game of poker. Such a small thing — but it was incendiary, to her. It was a glimpse into the actuality that Frankenstein knew her, looked into her credentials and accessed this mundane but personal information about her — she looked probed. She looked almost threatened that she knew absolutely nothing about him, but he knew this arcane thing about her. He was a no one to her at the speakeasy, but now he was here, acting like he was someone. She didn’t like it. 

Frankenstein gestured amicably to the tables and tables of roulette they’d passed on their tour of the house. 

Tina crossed her legs, staring right past the diver, right past the wish-wash of colours and streamers. “I’d rather not play roulette against another wave of old, fat men.”  

She liked roulette, yes; but she hated to fight for the right to like it. Just like anything else in her business, even within the board of her executives. It was in this moment that Tina seemed to realise she did not come upon her own terms. Evidently, she’d been begged by Daisy to attend those self-important, tabloid-bait parties on the termite mound that was West Egg, the part of the island infested with those fascinating New Money types. Nick briefly wondered what Daisy had had to say to persuade her into coming. During those Chicago brunches — they seemed so long ago now — Tina wouldn’t even be seated next to a bourgeois couple. He wondered if, to Tina, this was just another display of unabashed perversion. 

Between conversation, a server walked dutifully up to Frankenstein with a bottle of wine. “Ah, yes, Walton. Appreciated.” 

But Walton came closer, cupping his hand on Frankenstein’s ear to whisper, “Mister, Philadelphia is calling. It’s the…the ‘bars’ on the south side, they’re—”

Tina’s white-blonde head lolled to one side. 

Frankenstein shook his head immediately, cutting the server off. Business did not leave him alone, either. He smiled, though this time it seemed pointedly unnatural. He presented the bottle before Tina. Her brows flew up pleasantly, but then she controlled herself, begrudging in her surprise. 

“Chateau Lafite Rothschild,” Tina read aloud, perfectly level. “ My, are you full of charm, Mr Frankenstein.” 

“Please,” Frankenstein drawled, “Just James.” 

“Right, Just James.” 

Frankenstein raised his glass of Rothschild to hers, and they clinked emotionlessly in the middle. 

For a moment, as if she’d forgotten herself, Tina crossed her legs again in a distinctly unladylike-manner, as though she’d forgotten she was wearing a gown and not pantaloons. If the ‘Tommy’ Nick had sat with in Yale ever survived her years clawing up the vast expanse of the Buchanan empire, crowning herself heiress, she appeared here. 

Tina lounged under the parasol with her wide-brimmed glass of stupendously expensive wine when she looked lazily up at the crowd. Her eyes slowly widened, then widened and widened. 

“Where’s Daniel?” she asked. 

Too busy listening in on others’ conversations, Nick faced back towards the crowd. Daisy had disappeared. 

The first batch of gold and chrome confetti had already fallen, and now its glinting vestiges refracted the light. Among the roaring crowd, one noble stood at the peripheries, shunted to the side for his lack of starry-eyed reverie or infected human condition. Completely still, Ragar Kertia stood in the crowd, staring blankly.

He was so very far from home, the only noble within possibly thousands of kilometres in any direction. He had travelled long and far into this new and alien world, knowing what he was doing. Knowing why he was here, the mission he’d elected to complete, the friend he was supposed to bring back for questioning — and to safety, out of view from accusing Union eyes. And yet…

Loud noises and busy people drowned out Ragar’s thoughts, bleeding into his consciousness. They clung tight, alcohol-laced potency so obtrusive. Jimmy, Jimmy Marlow! Seen him? But then a silence enveloped him like a phantom swept down from above, whose deep, rasping voice, almost familiar — almost —  brought his mind back into exhaustive focus. 

“Hello,” the phantom said.  

Ragar blinked, eyes darting down without moving his head. 

“…Hello.” 

The phantom smiled. In his mind, he’d said hello to him, and so Ragar had answered, but not in the same tongue. Ragar had not mastered this speech as Frankenstein had done, he relied on the notions of the mind. He cleared his throat, tried again.

“ Hello. Sir…Daniel,” he said. Yet he had made another mistake. How rude was he for not recalling his name without pause?

“You may call me ‘Daisy,’” he said kindly. “My friends call me ‘Daisy.’” 

Ragar swallowed hard. This was progressing too fast. Friends, already? 

“…It shall be as you say. This one’s forefathers call me Ragar.” 

“Ragar? What a nice ring that has. It’s certainly nice to meet you again.” 

Daisy made a deep, approving sound, and beamed. Ragar’s brows scrunched between his nose. He could not delude himself as he did before — but for some tormented, detached moment — he was back in Lukedonia, eight hundred and something years in the past, standing before his Noblesse. Daniel Buchanan, the man Frankenstein had been vying for, the reason he threw these inane, excessive parties painting a target on his back, putting himself in more danger than he’d ever senselessly had, looked terrifyingly alike to his Noblesse. A mirror-sure resemblance. A still life portrait of the past. 

Ragar shifted uneasily, averting his eyes. 

“So? Are you enjoying this?” Daisy asked. 

Ragar knew Daisy expected him to say an affirmation, give a polite answer, so he did. “Very much so.” 

“Huh. It’s kind of crowded.” 

Did he want the truth and not a thinly veiled lie? How was Ragar to tell? 

“…There are many pairs of eyes here.”

“Oh yes. Far too many,” Daisy said. “Always looking. Always staring. Always judging, silently, all of them penning verdicts in their head. People are always looking at me. Looking towards me. At what I do. Who I’m with.” 

Ragar resisted the urge to pull at his mask, which was actually dampening with perspiration. 

A server carrying glasses of different coloured refreshments skirted the edge of the crowd, coming up on Ragar and Daisy. Daisy stopped them with an, “Excuse me,” and held out a hand to present the glasses to Ragar. “What’s your poison, Ragar?”

“I do not ingest poison.” 

“Of course not. I mean — which of the colours look nicest to you?” 

Ragar hesitated. Lukedonian beverages were not made from the same stock. He took Daisy’s advice and picked purely upon appearances. 

“This one?”

“It seems a little dim,” Ragar thought to say. “Prithee, yes.” 

“I can fix that,” Daisy sipped a little of some white wine. Then he took another glass of red wine and poured them until they mixed. “I’m quite fond of rosé myself. I like the colour. It’s good to look at.” 

Then he thanked the server, took the pink-tinged glass, and offered it to Ragar. Daisy took the other half of the unblemished red wine for himself. “To dear James, who fills us with alcohol, and brings us new friends to meet, and good cheer to go around.” 

Ragar mirrored Daisy and raised his own glass into the air. “As you say. To...dear James.” 

Daisy tipped his back; Ragar flung his over his shoulder into the camellia bushes. 

“Hmm…it’s good wine.” 

“It is as you say.”

They stood side by side, shoulder to shoulder as the music intertwined like threads into seams of an omnipresent veil, capturing them finally along with the crowd. Ragar shut his eyes and listened, catching the repetitive tunes and compiling them into colours and senses in his head. 

“Ragar?” 

Ragar awoke with a start. He looked into the brown eyes of Sir Raizel. 

“Yes, Sir?” 

Sir Raizel smiled. “Who do you see, when you look at me?” 

Raizel looked regal and inviting. His eyes deceived him, yes, but Raizel’s luminosity lured Ragar into a false sense of security, with false closeness, and softness that was clinical, self-inserted. He filled the gaps on his own: the feeling of soulfulness in him that the real Raizel lived and breathed, with gentleness and compassion that was ever-present.

“You…I…”

Raizel leaned forward, chin and cheek touching Ragar’s shoulder, leaning up towards him. “Is it good? What you see?” 

Ragar blinked and blinked. All he saw was Raizel, his Noblesse, his liege, and he felt commanded.

“…Yes.”

Daisy smiled. He nodded his head thoughtfully, looking, at once, nothing like Cadis Etrama di Raizel. Ragar’s insides reacted strangely. He was not crushed, instead he stood vehemently emotionless, lost in the numbness that came and receded with the flux of being intimate. Of knowing someone, and then unknowing them. The invitation had closed. 

Out of nowhere, a strong hand clamped down upon his shoulder. 

Ragar’s eyes flared red. His bearings were dishevelled, disillusioned, and in a short, deft movement, Ragar grabbed hold of the hand that had touched him. 

“Ragar. Can it. It’s me.” 

Ragar focused back into reality, looking at Frankenstein. Then he looked down. Frankenstein’s wrist was enclosed in Ragar’s, who held him with enough force to crush iron bars. Frankenstein seemed calm and relaxed, but his expression was bitter. After a moment of staring, Frankenstein finally moved to shake himself free from his grasp. His sleeve was slightly charred from noble aura. 

Daisy had detached from Ragar, his hair slightly out of place from leaning on his shoulder. Pulled out of his radius, Ragar recovered. He looked at Frankenstein with confused, stupefied eyes. 

Frankenstein’s lips curled into a smile. “My friend,” he said mockingly. “May I borrow Daisy for a moment?”

Ragar said nothing. Frankenstein led Daisy off, into the crowds, into the sea of dancing, singing humans, until they became too small to see. He still did not understand what he was feeling, standing there, touched by ghosts.

As Frankenstein led Daisy to the outskirts of the party, Nick spotted them in the crowd. Frankenstein made way for Daisy, bearing the brunt of the guests pouring out from every section at the song’s conclusion, until they came out into a sparse courtyard directly below Nick’s. The quiet area was lush with couples, smokers and others longing for escape from the luridness of the celebrations. Nick, as if on a balcony, watched Frankenstein say something to Daisy, his brow lifting in humour, and watched Daisy speak richly back, his eyes half-lidded in smile. 

They chatted amiably. When Frankenstein dipped his head in another concession to something Daisy had said, Daisy leaned forward and, slowly, chastely, touched his face. Nick, standing in the light of the party, behind the gothic, marble rails above, watched on. The music from the bands still drifted through the air. It gave what he was seeing a strange, tinted feeling — as if he were watching a silent film, accompanied by music directing him how to feel. The music was upbeat as Frankenstein’s mouth parted, as he stepped back in hesitation. Mismatched emotions. 

It was then that Daisy spotted Nick. Frankenstein spun. Both of them broke into soft smiles; Frankenstein waved as if glad to see him. But then his eyes tilted left, and went hard. Nick turned in that direction — only to see the stunning, silver form of Tina walk down the stairs, sick of the humdrum going ons of the party. She was heading towards the lower courtyard, where she could see everything. 

Nick’s eyes locked onto Frankenstein’s. Frankenstein’s to his. For an unspoken moment, they each held their stare. 

Then Nick moved. 

“Tina. Tina!” he cried, pushing one partygoer clean out of his way, and then crashed into another, smashing a drink onto the floor. 

“ —Hey!”

“—What the hell are you—”

Nick pushed past them. “Tina! I’m over here!”

It had worked. Tina looked up, saw him calling. A relieved expression crossed her face before she practically veered in his direction. Now she retraced her steps, fighting her way back up the stairs to the top courtyard. 

Nick couldn’t help himself but glance out of the corner of his eye. 

Daisy and Frankenstein had begun their escape. Frankenstein had his hand, white-gloved, against the dark burgundy of Daisy’s suit, pressing into his back. Daisy leaned into the touch, leaning so far until his dark hair rested on the cascading sunshine silk of Frankenstein’s. 

They walked away like that together, towards the steps into the garden. 

In that moment, as they walked away like that, towards some place away from the champagne and roaring crowds, towards their own secret little world, Nick found himself thinking himself in another man’s shoes. In his head, he was replacing Daisy with himself, having Frankenstein put his white gloved hand to the black velvet on Nick’s back, and Nick’s brunette hair tangled with his sunshine hair, and—

In Nick’s eyes, undoubtedly, was that green-eyed look of want. In Nick’s heart, that absolutely aching, tugging desire of wanting something he could not, and could never have. He turned sharply away, not wanting to even look at their backs the way he would look at them thinking the way he was right now. Like Tina. 

The fragrant, sugar-sweet smell of gardenias drifted through the air again. A coming omen. 

Nick swallowed deeply and took a breath. He only needed to neatly fold this secret into his fist, and hold tight until it smothered. His very own, obscene, tiny, secret. And he would never ever tell. 

“Nicki.” 

Tina approached. Nick steeled himself to be courteous, kiss her hand. But she did not ask that of him. Instead, she took a champagne off a passing servant and handed it to him. Nick took it obligingly. 

“None for you?”

“Oh no, Nicki-dearest. I’m afraid if I have anymore, I’d be quite the drunken wife. And that’ll be unbecoming of both of us.” 

Tina’s face was suspiciously red, her tight curls disrupted in places, and her chiffon shawl crumpled and creased. She pulled it tightly around herself. Despite the fur hemming, it seemed only to be eye catching, another statement of prestige rather than truly practical. Her skin was red where the gown had bitten into her. Yet she maintained her majesty by going through the motions of smoothing out her skirt as if it needed smoothing at all. 

“It’s funny…Daniel has wandered off somewhere. Probably going on a little spree,” she said calmly; nothing was wrong. 

“Ah yes. I’m a little lost myself. Where has Jordan gone, anyway?” he lied, and did not really care right now. 

Tina was performing comfort and pleasure in a context where that could not be plausible, because she had been abandoned by her husband in this sprawling, lit-up labyrinth designed to lead her lost and astray while her husband fooled around; and Nick was part of this design, had just executed his function. Here she was, relieved to see him because they were a thing others called ‘friends,’ and here he was, betraying trust he didn’t know she had for him. It reminded Nick he was just another man witnessing the life’s work of an intimate illusionist, that he had been left to assume the extraordinary all on his own, all the while Tina willed herself not to shiver from the night’s freak chill. 

Nick paused. He turned his drink in his hands. 

Then he balanced his drink on the rails, whipped his mangy, bourgeois suit jacket off his back, and hovered it over Tina. Tina was taken aback. Even she wasn’t sure they were this close. But then she slid her performative shawl off, accepted Nick’s pity, and then stood there silently, warmed by what was unspoken. 

After a while, Tina pouted. “Look at all this. What a zoo.” 

“It’s quite a lot to take in, isn’t it? I never get used to it,” Nick said. 

Tina laughed, her voice jingling money. “If I lived next door to this, I’d have buried James under a mountain of nuisance suits. It’s just as well I don’t.” 

Quickly, Tina’s face dropped. She looked meekly over to Nick, as if not aware she’d taken a dig at him until after she’d said it, and was truly worried about offending him. 

“Well,” Nick raised his champagne, “if nothing else, the free food and booze must be worth something!”

Tina’s laugh jingled through the air again. She laughed and laughed at his lousy joke, until she stopped breathlessly. Tina smiled sadly. “C’mon. Don’t act like I’m a fool. You can ask me.”

Nick balanced his glass on the rails between two thumbs, fiddling like a child. “Ask you what?”

He couldn't bear to look at her. Her luminance seemed wonderful even this late, if a little pathetic. Perhaps it was because she was with Nick, in the small recesses of a large party, and the anonymity that this afforded her gave her comfort; her luminance shimmered out, and she stopped trying to be a city of five million people’s sweetheart. Tina leaned on the marble rail and slumped.

“Ask me why I’m not with Daisy.” 

Nick looked up. He’d not heard her call him that for a long, long time. He didn’t think he ever would again. 

“Ask me why I’m wandering around, all alone, looking so beautiful.” Tina scoffed, spitting a little over the rails. “Just because I’m beautiful — that doesn’t mean I’m a fool, Nicki.” 

Nick stopped. His own pity and guilt had reached the end of its line. There was a pitched, resounding metallic ringing in his ears, the sound of urgent, cheating telephone calls, ugly dinnertime spats, of blood splattered all over a nice Persian carpet of a ruined, partied-out apartment. Nick, his head recoiling back onto the veranda, back beside Daisy telling his ugly truth, back collecting the thoughts of his cousin’s pain, felt himself surprisingly angry. 

Nick turned on her. “Fine. Why isn’t Daisy with you?” 

“You don’t know what it feels like,” Tina drawled, “You don’t know what it’s like, to be a girl, and have enough — enough to marry for love. But know that your love has married your money.” 

She was drunk. Or at least, more drunk than she made herself appear. But it must have been so, so tiring, fleecing a city of five million people who were convinced she was the gold standard of woman. That she was successful and feminine and happy. That everything went as easy for her as easy it was for her to look the way she did. She had everything she so wanted: a life of luxury, a husband who loved and doted on her. She seemed to break from the pressure of her bonsai tree wires.  

Tina’s eyes filled with tears. It took every inch of her self-conquering to not let them spill and ruin her face. 

“…If it feels so bad,” Nick said, “then why did you make him marry you?” 

“Make him?” 

Tina raised her head, her back curved into a crescent. “I can’t make him do anything.”

Tina “Tommy” Buchanan was no damsel. Buchanans always got what they wanted. She fended off revolving scores of executives and directors at the roundtable everyday without a sweat, but she was shaken in the throes of this party. There had only ever been one thing that could get under Tina’s skin. The only person who mattered to her, and in turn the only one who could dent her where it mattered. People were made of multitudes. They do things like clawing for power, fighting their hard-won battles for a seat at the table, collecting things and people, and then go and marry for love. Go to a party, hold their husband, face the strangers who lured them here. Not knowing just how alone they were. How utterly friendless. 

She spoke to the sky. “I always fold. I always fold when it comes to him. I do everything he says. Everything he wants. I do everything — everything for him.” She sucked in a breath. “I moved my entire life in Chicago because he just didn’t like it there. Didn’t like it.” Tina laughed softy. "When Pamela was born…Daisy was god knows where," she whispered. Her eyes trailed to Nick's. "...With god knows whom. But I said to the nurse — it doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter, because she looks like him."

But Nick didn’t care. He set his jaw. His fear of Tina, rescinded. “I know about The Menagerie.” 

Tina’s eyes flickered up. Tears ran down her face. “You do? Oh.” 

Instead of being horrified, implicated, criminalised, Tina actually…calmed. Like a swell of relief had crested over her shoulders, as if the strangling, crippling fact that she was a conspiracy to arson all in the name of controlling her husband was too much to handle alone, and now Nick knew. 

“Oh. Oh, I’m glad you know,” Tina said. “I’m glad.”

“It wasn’t the first time, was it?” Nick accused. 

“No. We moved to Chicago from San Francisco. We moved to San Francisco from Louisville. And on and on and on.”

Every time scandal struck, they moved, drifting here and there like insomniacs. The Menagerie, the latest crack in the glass, drops of water in a sea of scandal. So they fled. 

“I’m glad you know,” Tina kept saying, and Nick had had enough of her revolting secrets, her obsessive, controlling iron grip. He wanted none of it. 

Nick said, deadpan, “You disgust me.” 

Tina froze. 

It was clear by now that the two of them were talking about completely different things. 

“…Nicki,” Tina said, her voice smaller than he’d ever heard it, and yet, more like Tommy than he ever remembered. Without glaze, without the jingle of money. “Nicki. He cheated on me in The Menagerie.”

‘It was an accident,’ was what Daisy had told him, what Jordan was so sure of, and what Nick was about to parrot. But just before he could open his mouth, Tina’s eyes locked onto something beyond the rails, going frightfully frigid. She was immobilised by revulsion and shock. Her expression grew angrier and angrier until it went suddenly, abruptly calm. Like a blank, white wall. Like a switched off television screen. She looked like a woman who had just decanted of everything left to lose, and almost too calmly, too languidly, accepted this. 

Nick turned to look. 

There was Daisy, pinning Frankenstein to a tree, kissing him with utter abandon. He kissed him with reckless, aggressive force. 

Daisy knew Tina was here. Nick had tried to cover for him. 

Daisy’s eyes were wide open, his mouth working on Frankenstein, and Nick could see he was searching for Tina, eyes locked and provocative. And when he was sure she was watching, he kissed harder, if that was even humanly possible, taunting her above on the terrace.

A deep, terrible roar went through Nick’s ears, the sound of blood pounding through his veins, a river of doubts, and hot, jealous rage, and he was dizzy and reeling and his insides curdling into sick. The rest of the party still swirled around him, guests talking, music playing, harshly disregarding the way Nick’s world was privately tilting on its axis, overcome. In his revelation, Nick was forced to consider the notion that had been so ludicrous not a moment before.

That The Menagerie had never been an accident. 

What if, Nick thought, he hadn’t been collected by Tina. He’d been collected, masterfully, by Daisy. 

Chapter Text

Fifteen minutes ago, Frankenstein disappeared off the garden path.

He walked purposefully beneath an ivy arch, off the neat cobblestone pavings, into the concealing shade of the trees.

With a breath, he turned back with a measured look.

Daisy followed some cautious steps behind.

Their eyes met. Frankenstein said nothing still. They went on this way, footsteps crunching in the undergrowth, Frankenstein looking back every few steps to see him; and when assured the other man was following, he continued further off-path into the teeming garden.

Love songs drifted through the air, a-flit like dreams upon a leisured current; an idol he couldn't put his finger on was singing on some distant, shimmering stage. There was an unusual chill in the air that blended into and perpetuated night's enchantment. The last swimmers, lashed by a cold gale, had already retreated from the beach, and the dotted paths of their footprints trailed along the fine sand through a slip in the trees. Frankenstein turned back, his gaze searching. Daisy, impassive in his countenance, followed closely. Frankenstein went on, pausing intermittently to look back, then continued.

From this distance, even the floating rounds of cocktails that permeated the grounds as rhythmic and regular as tides did not reach. Here at the outskirts, the entirety of the sky and clouds above could be properly seen to be illuminated by the Cadis Mansion, and the air alive with isolated, cursory chatter and remote laughter. The mansion, in the eyes of its caretaker, had never seemed as complete as it did now — the myth of perfection so closely at hand at this moment it mattered.

Daisy wandered about the edge of the garden, his eyes turned towards it. He wandered and wandered, moving restlessly, turning his head every which way to marvel at the sight, at the mansion, and Frankenstein felt in that moment like a beast to a rapturous feed, felt that spike of pride fill his chest. Pride: such was his fatal flaw. His arrowed heel. Yet he did not cast it aside as he watched Daisy in his awe. Strips of light bled through the canopy of trees, meandering across Daisy's back. When Daisy finally stopped and turned around, his face was dappled in it. He seemed to glow. In this light, his suit seemed to look different — supersaturated in deep, vibrant violet.

"James?"

"Yes, Mr Buchanan?"

Frankenstein stepped forward dutifully.

Daisy smiled with ease. He looked at him with intent. "There's no one here."

"Indeed there is not." Now it was Frankenstein's turn to smile. "I trust you have found some enjoyment in my humble party."

Daisy's smile withered a little, and Frankenstein's heart seemed to press inwards on itself. Quietly, with much subdued sadness, and as if he were embarrassed to admit it, he said, "I haven't had this much fun in years, Mr Frankenstein."

Frankenstein watched Daisy's face fall in some reprimand, surprised by his own admission to truth. His words hung solitary in the air, a novice's mistake in this game of gentility. Daisy let in a precarious breath.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Look at me, getting so…sentimental on you. You just want to have a good time, we all just want to have a good time, but I just…"

"You're free to do as you please," Frankenstein said quickly. The weight of the night seemed to fall on his shoulders now — he had thought Daisy was happy, he was proud under the impression he had done something good. "And…and you're free to feel as you please."

Frankenstein's head spun towards the mansion. "What has displeased you? How have I offended you? What is not to your liking? "

"Mr Frankenstein."

"I'll change it. I'll correct it."

"Mr Frankenstein."

"I'll make it so that it pleases you."

"—Then please me."

Daisy reached out his hand.

Frankenstein paused, eyes drifting to his splayed fingers — his invitation to dance — with astonishment.

If Daisy was disparaged by his pause, he did not show it. He held out his hand, the offer obscene.

Frankenstein took Daisy's hand.

Frankenstein took the lead, one gloved hand clasped to hand, the other to Daisy's back. Daisy pressed his arm into his shoulder, and they glided away in waltz. The song from the stage, muffled in the distance, guided their footfalls — a lady's vibrato singing Dinah Shore.

It's not the pale moon that excites me

That thrills and delights me, oh no

It's just the nearness of you…

Their feet moved. Frankenstein guided Daisy upon the undergrowthed floor, leading the box waltz. Daisy followed the footwork with light and methodical ease. He was a good dancer, and Frankenstein knew this; he'd seen him dance the foxtrot some months ago and remembered every detail. So Frankenstein abandoned the box, began waltzing unrestrained across the grounds. Daisy followed impeccably, leaning into the dance with nary a thought. They spun in slow circles, rose and fell in song.

It isn't your sweet conversation

That brings this sensation, oh no

It's just the nearness of you

When you're in my arms and I feel you so close to me

All my wildest dreams come true...

Daisy's intent eyes never left Frankenstein. Frankenstein held his gaze. They parted at a beat, and Frankenstein stood to a rest with their hands still linked before coming back. But when they did, Daisy's arm clasped Frankenstein's back, then traced up his shoulder, into his neck, until his fingers were sifting through his hair. Daisy combed back Frankenstein's hair until his hand found his cheek.

"I did have a good time, Mr Frankenstein. I did," he said. His face softened. "…You remember what I said to you at the window, in your mansion?"

Frankenstein remembered everything. Every word, every moment, and every soft-spoken look that he saw more than the other man could ever intend. But he shook his head in courtesy. He and Daisy swayed together slowly.

"I said I'd been everywhere, done everything, and all that's out there is nothing — nothing I want to be a part of." Daisy raised his head and looked up at him. He looked regal and dignified in his stature. "I wish I could have done everything on earth with you."

Frankenstein was struck. A mass of joy, triumph and guilt stirred in his head like a storm drawn over. His lips pulled into a smile, past its well-trained edges — some stony, artificial conditioning — into something softer, and inadvertently real.

"…I am yours to command."

Daisy stepped forward, leaned in with careful poise, and touched his lips upon his.

Frankenstein froze.

He stood sedately as Daisy parted from him.

Daisy studied him. There was a beginning of a smile, but it faltered, didn't fully blossom, and splintered into an ignoble end.

"What's wrong, James?"

Everything was not right.

"…I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking."

Daisy's lips reflected the soft light wetly, and it drove Frankenstein to ruin. He wanted this — he wanted this so much — so incredibly much. He wanted this like he wanted nothing else in his entire life. He wanted to take his hand and kiss it, he wanted to embrace him hard and be held in return, and for him to accept his audacity, and he wanted to fall to his knees and worship, and love, and be. Soft throes of music swam in the atmosphere, a new song dawning upon them. It was quiet, and comfortable, the setting so sweetly nostalgic, but all Frankenstein could feel was the hairs at the back of his neck pricking, a bone-deep feeling of unease enveloping him. He had been waiting for someone. Someone special, beloved, and missed. He spent centuries searching for him. It was all so splotchy. Everything felt like a mess of colours and people and places — Frankenstein had been waiting for someone so faithfully, because he was alive, and he was coming back, and Frankenstein was sure of this; he had to be sure of this, he'd told Ragar he was sure of this.

Out of this haze, Daisy's face eddied and swirled out of the mess of his thoughts.

Frankenstein had said words not meant for the ears of the man before him; he had said to another person he was theirs to command, had let treason pass his lips. Such was sacrilege of the highest order, death not so harsh a sentence. He wasn't thinking: this was a lie. A white lie, maybe, a half-truth, he was not thinking what Daisy, Nick, or Jordan thought he was thinking. He was not thinking about paltry love, a young man's game, the last thing on his mind was the pleasures of flesh, or company of one esteemed as a prince. He was not even thinking about Daisy.

Daisy was in front of him, beckoning to him, welcoming wantonly. But he was only existing in the most abstract sense. This was beyond rude, but Frankenstein had no mind to be concerned about that. This was uncomely, but there was no one here who could possibly begin to understand why. Daisy had turned around like a favoured memory stirring from the depths of Frankenstein's well of thought, and in that moment there was only him and Raizel. Just for a moment, one shuttering instance, Frankenstein was not all present.

Frankenstein was back in Lukedonia, seven hundred and seventy seven years younger — he was a servant, nothing but a vessel for the will of his master to move, to bend and use; he was his bonded again, a sword and shield, a familiar a noble could summon between him and his enemies — Frankenstein was thinking about this. In him swelled the pride and power of his bond, a sacred link a thousand years strong. In him was the purpose he'd found and was devoted to, the only constant of his life.

But Frankenstein was a bonded with no master. He was nothing more than liegeless vassal. Nothing beautiful he could ever build or make or do will paint over the fact that he was, at his core, abandoned goods. And his sanity, for just a moment, slipped.

"What's wrong?" Daisy asked, pulling Frankenstein back beneath the canopy, back into the perfect wilderness of the garden.

Frankenstein looked at Daisy, seeing the consternation in his eyes. There was an iridescent quality to him. Daisy only looked like this at certain angles, in certain light. Frankenstein had already trained himself in how to look at him — because if he looked at him right — he looked just like who he was looking for.

"Is it me?"

"No! Of course not."

"But it is me," Daisy said.

He took a step forward. Without thought, Frankenstein stepped back.

"Isn't it?" Daisy asked.

Frankenstein did the only thing he could and averted his eyes. He turned away curtly. "I meant to tell you tonight to leave her. I can protect you, Daisy. If you let me help you, you can leave Tina behind. You don't have to live according to her wishes. You don't have to live under her thumb. You can live the life you want to live."

Daisy's eyes widened perceptively. "With you?"

Frankenstein hesitated.

"…I'd place you somewhere safe. Somewhere where she could never find you. A chateau in the countryside. France. Belgium. Anywhere. But the point is, you'll be happier, being your own person. It's your choice."

But Daisy who hadn't heard a word Frankenstein had said came up to him. Abandoning all manner of courtesy, he grabbed Frankenstein's arm and pulled him forcefully back to face him.

"Who is Cadis Etrama di Raizel?"

"Wh—" Frankenstein reeled. His mind flickered red, a bolt of Dark Spear shocked up his spine, every soul in him jarred in concert. "…What did you say?"

"I said," Daisy enunciated, "Am I Cadis Etrama di Raizel?"

"…What? — I…no…"

He advanced.

Frankenstein stammered, his heart racing in his chest, turning away again, but unable to restrain himself as he turned back at breakneck speed. It was as if something was flashing in his mind, the answer burning clear as day, then vanished suddenly into a thicket fog, forgotten. The obvious seemed less obvious. His view of the world marred before his eyes.

Who was this man in front of him? Why did he know that name? He looked like him. And he sounded like him.

Raizel advanced on him again and Frankenstein, in his stupor, retreated spastically. He stepped backwards again and again, stalked by a ghost so real he was backed into a wall. His shoulders hit a tree, and he was again shocked out of his reverie.

"No?" Daisy whispered, deep and rasped. "No indeed. I'm not him." He breathed in, breathed out — but when next he breathed in, there was something gorgeous about him. He had an extraordinary gift for the intrinsic, the human thing called desire, and a romantic readiness; he dispensed starlight to recreate the longing eyes of lost loves, and he leaned into Frankenstein again. "But I can be. For you."

Daisy paused. His eyes shut. His mouth was parted, unbearably close but unwilling to close the gap — wanting Frankenstein to make the move he yearned for. Wanting Frankenstein to choose for himself.

He had been waiting for someone, Frankenstein remembered. Standing in a window, looking down at plumes of appearing and disappearing people, waiting and waiting. Growing old, and weary, and into a horrible, reprehensible man. He was not in Lukedonia, he was thousands of miles away, hundreds of years in the future he'd dreaded most. But Frankenstein's life had been just like smoke, like chasing smoke spanning out and painting ever-thinner, ephemeral wisps in the sky; like he was watching his life speed by from the vantage point of a fast, yellow car, from behind a pane of glass as everything meshed together like traffic lights on a wet, miserable day, and on and on. Missing him forever.

He had been waiting for someone. To him, everything up to this moment was so Frankenstein could reach this point where he'd promised himself they would meet again — but when he'd gotten here, he had already missed him. Like he had passed him by. And here Frankenstein was. Still waiting.

Maybe he never came. Maybe he was not coming.

Daisy's eyes opened. The moment had lapsed, and he politely moved away.

In a short, deft movement, Frankenstein clasped his wrist.

"Wait."

Frankenstein's lips trembled as he nodded close, and kissed Cadis Etrama di Raizel.

Raizel kissed back. He put his hands on him, touching everywhere, tracing his face and going down to his chest. He yanked his clothes open, the buttons popping. Raizel grasped his shirt and lifted him off the tree, forcing him mindlessly backwards until he hit another, until they were drenched in light. Party chatter roused around them, but all Frankenstein could hear was the sound of their breaths, tangled and heavy. He kissed Frankenstein again and again, and Frankenstein kissed back with reckless abandon, uncaringly, collapsing and whimpering into Raizel's hold.

Then they kissed some more.

Back upon the terrace, a set of accusing eyes looked down upon them.

The midnight hour had struck. Nick knew this as a little line of light shot high up into the air and exploded into glittering saffron, like stars invited ever closer. Fireworks soon filled the heavens, their bombastic echo reverberating in the stonework and terrace balustrade. The countdown had happened without them somewhere far away in the riffraff of celebration. Cheers and whoops erupted all around, outrageously loud and joyous.

There was a woman, who stood in the light of the party, awash in changing periwinkle and cherry shine, looking below the terrace. Her name was Tommy. She watched intently. Watched wantonly, as if loathe to miss a single detail. Nick had caught her light eyes icing over before, going green, starved and wanting, but now there seemed to be nothing in them at all but stark acceptance. The rising tension in her face had already dispersed, some fervent drama unfolding into a quiet, withdrawn conclusion. She stood like a slim, stoic mannequin. Like she had been accused and treated for hysteria.

Tina, in an almost unbearably calm fashion, looked away from her husband's affair and smiled contently at Nick. Her voice was as sweet as arsenic. "You know, what was it that Frankenstein did again?"

Nick, still shaken and rooted to the spot, just stared at her. He stared at her petulantly, as if this were a situation in which the only sane thing to do could be raging and screaming. It was as if he expected her to stomp, cry out, perhaps pull the roots of her hair, writhe in agony — but she politely refused.

"…Pardon?"

"Daniel whispered a little something in my ear, though I do forget. I hear some silly things coming from all sorts of people. Drugstores, was it? Was that what he does? He owns some drugstores."

She slipped off Nick's jacket, ambled close, and pressed it gently back into Nick's hands. Then she slid her shawl back on. Tina reached for her purse with some amount of desperation, rummaging for that tiniest spritz bottle. Then, completely inanely, she began to apply Buchanan No. 6.

The effect was immediate.

The charm tirelessly applied once again resumed, even if the artificiality of this movement was at odds with the sheer opulence of the fragrance. Again, she was the girl. Good to the eyes. Eliciting images in the mind: well-wishes, envious appraisal, eau de parfum. She gave Nick a look that suggested she did not have to pretend in front of him, they were passed that now, yet she put on her face as an act of reassurance — or charity. For the good of Nick, and to ease both their egos.

"Yes," Nick said belatedly. He also turned away from the gardens, stoically recovered. "He owns drugstores. A whole lot of them in town and out."

Tina tutted. "That so?" She tilted her head up. Fireworks bombed above, showering them in lurid colour. The smell of smoke and gunpowder began drifting their way. "I could have sworn he owned a few bars too."

Nick tensed. "No," he said. "I don't think so. Used to be a doctor, or something like that. That's why he went into the pharmaceutical business. That's right," Nick said, as if a light bulb had happened upon him, "Ever since the armistice, it's been a lucrative thing—"

"Everything's been lucrative since the armistice," Tina snapped. But she digressed, combing back a lock of stray hair. "He owns bars like the Barbershop."

Nick shook his head as coolly as he could manage. Asserting himself strongly for the first time, he looked Tina in the eye and gave her a stern look. "Those are rumours. You shouldn't believe everything you hear, Tina. You ought to know those second-page, column piranhas. They'd say anything to have a story on their hands."

But it was too late to ease them out of this conversation. Tina had withdrawn into herself, regarding everything in vaguely critical, business-like fashion. She leaned in to Nick, looking no longer fascinated, "You know, most New Money types are just bootleggers who hit it big from the gutters. Liars and cheaters of the most deplorable sort."

The word deplorable dragged in her tone. She turned her head, briefly distracted by a bolt of firework. She followed it with her eyes severely. "I knew something was wrong with him the second I saw him in a place like the Barbershop Bar. 'New money'…what a farce. What a…beautiful word to mask such hideousness. 'Drugstores'…how sophisticated."

Tina smoothed out her dress, seeming a force of habit, before wrapping her shawl around herself tighter. "I'd like to find out more about him. What he does. Who his contacts are. Where the dough comes from."

She turned to leave.

"He's not a bad person."

This outburst was caught by Tina between her picket fence of teeth. Startled, and riled, and without much thought, Nick had carelessly voiced his thoughts. Tina turned on him. But all she did was give him a sympathetic, almost chagrined look, like Nick was a child who didn't know better — like he was a poor, swindled fool. Daisy's backwater cousin, easy pickings.

Tina went to him and touched his hand with more gentleness than he thought she was possessed of. "Don't be fooled by him, Nicki. He's not your friend. Don't mistake his opportunism for friendship. And don't mistake his posing for sincerity."

She patted Nick on the hand before leaving him on the terrace.

Nick remained as he was, lingering alone in the slowly amassing crowd. Cheers and whoops continued to sound beside him. People were still mesmerised by the things in the air, watching the small fortune of fireworks explode in their brilliance, but Nick could pay no attention to this. His mind felt as if it were stuffed full of cotton, gone soft and dishevelled.

Nick's eyes drifted down the terrace, back into the gardens and into the neat wilds below. There, Frankenstein and Daisy had parted. Frankenstein's back was towards Nick, his shoulders arched in some apprehension. He seemed riled. Daisy still had his hands on him. They drifted from their perch on Frankenstein's face down to his arms until their fingers entwined for a moment. They stood close, like in some garden of eden. Nick could not hear what they were saying.

Frankenstein let go first.

He did up his remaining buttons. Bowed low. Then he departed quickly to attend to some integral business.

Daisy stood there a minute longer, watching him leave. Suddenly, and shrilly, he turned his head to the terrace above with a face that could only be described as one of sly self-assurance. But his deep satisfaction evaporated as soon as he saw who was above the terrace.

Daisy's mouth worked. He grinned innocently at Nick.

Nick, for the first time, was not placated nor reassured by his cousin's disarming smile.

Instead, Daisy just waved up at him, and began to make his way up the terrace.

All the events of the past came rushing back to Nick like a surreal dream on a Coney Island roller coaster, standing on the knife-point of a great wreck, anticipating the fall; like soldiers caught in friendly crossfire, blind in the trenches, a whirlwind of thought amid noise overcame him.

Nick shut out the white noise of the party, concentrating inwards. Tonight, Daisy had pretended to be enthralled and pretended to discover this party for the first time when in fact he had been here six months ago with one Jordan Baker. This he knew. He had pretended because Tina did not know about this recent liaison until tonight. He knew also the reason Jordan had brought him here those months ago in the first place: because she had been convinced by Daisy his life was puppeteered by his demanding wife, and Jordan led him here to experience freedoms he could not behind his wife's back. In fact, Frankenstein's party was a fleeting alternative, because the haven the two frequented had been burned down. Jordan hated Tina not just because of her prejudice against the fellows, but because she was angry Tina was cheating upon her beloved friend, Daisy.

These were things Nick himself had easily accepted. Things being taken at face value, the sins of a simpleton. He had stood resolutely on the side of his defenceless, innocent cousin and believed in Jordan as she so believed in it herself.

Tina was right; Nick was indeed a child who didn't know any better, a poor, swindled fool.

Jordan was so spurned on Daisy's behalf because of Tina's affair. Tina had resorted to an affair because she was spurned her husband had been flaunting his disposition towards men; because rumours were power, and Daisy understood this better than anyone in the country. A rumour could make a man, and end a man, and even create a man who did not exist. So Tina had burned down the Menagerie because she had caught Daisy there in his affair. There was no innocuous kiss. There never was.

An image pushed itself to the surface of Nick's mind: Daisy kissing Frankenstein, pinning his back upon the tree, pushing his fingers through his hair, yanking back his neck. Wide eyes coolly watching the terrace above, knowing exactly what he was doing, and wanting to be seen. Wanting to incite.

Why did Daisy have an affair with another man in The Menagerie? Because he wanted to get back at his wife.

He against her, and now she against him.

Louisville to San Francisco to Chicago to New York.

Every time scandal struck, they moved.

"Cousin-mine," Daisy said kindly, as he reached the terrace. "Wait with me, won't you? James said he'd be back very soon."

"What were you just talking about?" Nick said tensely. "...I mean, he seemed a little upset," he diverted. "Didn't seem too eager to leave your side."

Daisy shifted. His face wilted a little, turning pensive. "We were just talking about the garden. There are no gardenias here, did you know that? Not one in sight. Isn't that strange?" Daisy placed his hands in his pocket, looked down at the streamers on the floor. "It's not strange at all," he answered himself. "I hate gardenias. He remembered. No one has ever remembered something so trivial as that for me before."

Whatever Nick's outward expression, it was not enough to hide the rapid changes in emotion he'd endured this night. Daisy was aware his answer had not placated him. With a sigh, Daisy looked away. So too did Nick.

In the terse rest, they stood apart.

Daisy sighed again. He looked a little disconnected from all the party fervour around him, a vision of austerity in a sea of tumult. Unlike the turbulent eyes Nick had seen in him before, his secrets seemed to come like driftwood caught in a steady current, stranding itself at the end of the line. "He offered for me to run away with him."

Nick's eyes flew wide open.

"To a chateau in France. Or Belgium. Please. Don't tell Tina," he said in a level voice. "Not Jordan either."

"I — of course not!"

"They would hound me. For the exact opposite reasons."

"But then—"

"He just asked me. Gave an offer. That's all. Nothing else."

"Nothing else?!" Nick all but cried. "Well — what did you tell him?"

"I didn't say anything." Daisy raised his chin. "He said he'd wait for me. He said he'd wait all the time in the world. And I don't doubt him."

"So?"

Daisy's eyes twinkled. He smiled kindly at Nick. "So let him wait."

Nick stood there, dumbfounded as Daisy resumed watching the last fireworks putter into the now smoky sky. He clapped half-heartedly, making a satisfied sound deep in his throat at the last sprinkle of embers.

"Daisy," Nick said, "Daisy. If you don't mean to be with him, you have to refuse him."

Daisy spun around, his brows flitted up high as if Nick had said some wonderful jest. When Nick's expression did not change, and laughter did not break, Daisy's large grin narrowed into a soft smile. "Refuse him? I can't do that, Nicki," he said. "Don't you know him? The way he stares at me...it's like I'm another person. He's in love. He's head over heels on the floor. He'd do anything for me, even without money, he'd pay any price. He'd lick my shoe, if it would please me." Daisy's deep laugh never left his throat. "If I don't be his, I have to refuse?' What kind of logic is that? I might as well twist a knife in his chest." Daisy raised his head. "Am I that cruel a man, cousin?"

Nick shook his head. He stepped back. "I'll tell him."

"No, you won't," Daisy said fluently. "...You don't have an ounce of cruelty in you," he whispered.

Nick, for the second time in the night, was speechless.

Daisy sighed, deeply, in some acute lament. Then he dropped his arms upon the railing, resting upon the stone. "...I was just like him once. Falling in love. Head over heels. So easily." Daisy laughed. "See all these bright, precious things...they always fade. And they don't come back."

Nick did not look at him. His eyes roved around the party, searching frantically for a familiar silhouette, searching for Frankenstein.

But he was nowhere to be seen.