Chapter Text
Mike feels as if he should scoff at the shear scope of the cluelessness of Gardener Woods, he knew her to be naïve but never this dense. She had seemed smarter than this; than to let her insecurities get the best of her and overwhelm her senses. After all, after all, after all lovely Miss Gardener Woods knows her wits and her tongue- or at least, she knows the intricacies of such things around people she loathes such as the clever Thief Peirson; he's heard the things she's spoken to him when both of them thought they were alone in the endless halls and halls and halls of the hellscape that is the foundations of one, Oletus Manor.
Sometimes Mike feels like she would've done grand in the curtains and tarps of his claimed home roots of Hullabaloo Circus. Then. Then she pulls shit like this and he's forcibly and promptly reminded of why, exactly, she'd stumble, tumble and choke on one of the supporting ropes when pitching a tent.
Sometimes, sometimes, sometimes .
It feels like that is all his approximations of time is now that he is trapped here, in this eternal and infernal sprawling and consuming manor owned by one, Baron DeRoss. Baron DeRoss who promised everyone's dreams. Everyone's dreams but his, it seems. And what a bitter reflection that is. He could’ve been some sort of genie, harbinger of magic or even the capital ‘G’ God for all Mike cared. It’s not like Baron DeRoss will let him achieve what he arrived at this horrible place for. He may have come on the biddance and promise of the letter and dragged along the Mercenary Subedar, who arrived based solely on the word of himself who had found Murro. In big or small strokes, he had done his job. He arrived here thinking it would be little more than a gateway to his sweet revenge on Animal Tamer Natalie.
Mike finds that he simply cannot wait until he can deliver her the just desserts she has sewn and reaped on a platter served cold.
Oftentimes it feels as if he's trapped and sometimes (most times), in interchangeable and partial payments, even though Hullabaloo no longer exists, he still finds himself in it. The memories seem to demand his sanity and his trust in payment of remaining branded beneath his eyelids, shining so brightly, whenever he closes his eyes. In the end, despite how terrible he knows Hullabaloo to have been to those that they had taken in when they didn’t achieve the same fortune as Mike had, he misses the circus in all of its bright, warm, exhilarating, wonderful and terrible, horrible, wretched and corrupt glory. There is a strong chance that he is merely looking at his memories through a rose-tinted lens. But. But, there is no reason not to, there is no reason as to why he should hate Hullabaloo and everything therein when it was his home.
And Mike cannot make or bring himself to hate everything that had transpired with the same sort of vigor and spite that Weeping Clown Joker, Animal Tamer Natalie and Murro have cultured and nurtured. He can somewhat understand it, because Mike has experience putting aside his feelings and experiences to at least try to understand why people feel or act the way that they do about certain things. This doesn’t mean, really, that Mike can fully fathom any of it. Not when something that is so important to him can be so loathsome to seemingly everyone fucking else.
Mike breathes out through his nose as he listens to the whispers of Gardner Woods and Doctor Dyer fade as they get further and further away from him. Focusing on the unfortunately quite pretty carpet that he’s fairly sure is in a persian style he counts the weaves as he works himself down. There is fifty-seven on a single side of the small diamond that rests beneath his feet. The wood flooring is coated in a dark varnish and he doesn’t have a single clue into what type of wood it would be, the baseboard is painted in a dainty just barely off-white and the wall paper above it is of a tasteless floral pattern in greens and browns. Rather rustic feeling over all, there is another piece of molding halfway through the wall, the same off-white as the baseboards and cutting off the tasteless brown-green floral. Creating a segway that is going into a more basic and plain almost-yellow wallpaper with no pattern and the molding along the ceiling is once again the off-white color. There is a table next to his door, resting beneath a landscape painting of a lake, the table is made of the same wood as the floor and it has a small lace doily in the exact center with an obnoxious yellow-white ceramic vase full of lilacs and orange lilies.
Feeling slightly more grounded Mike drops his hand that was ghosting over the brass handle to his allotted room. Spinning on his heel, he slowly makes his way back down the hallway and into the foyer where he sees a pink-cheeked Perfumer Nair sashaying her way into the gardens where he suspects Woods and Dyer to have gone not even moments prior.
“Hey! Vera!” He calls out waving a hand at her in an overly dramatic way with big sweeping motions that would have been more fit for happening on the Hullabaloo stage and not in the middle of the staircase between the foyer and the door to the kitchen which leads out to Woods garden.
Her nose wrinkles in response and his grin grows, it has little to do with her annoyance and more to do with what is expected as he is still feeling wrong footed about what he had overhead about Woods and her admittedly idiotic but hilarious actions against Professor Diruse. As to why he suddenly feels so agitated about the fact that Diruse, for all Mike doesn’t care for the lizard, is getting slighted by almost the entirety of the manor he doesn’t know. But what Mike does know is that he feels oddly bitter about the whole thing.
Perhaps it is at the thoughtless nativity that Woods had displayed so brazenly in a public area. Even if she had thought it was private that doesn’t mean that Mike was the only one to have overheard her conversation with Woods. And well what he did hear makes for some excellent blackmail material, Mike doesn’t doubt that if he doesn’t cash out on that rather soon, someone else will find out. There is only so much one can do to cover their tracks in this house, after all. Much like how Nair who is looking down her nose with heavily lidded black charcoal eyes at Mike stopped, momentarily by his holler. She smells faintly of flowers and more strongly of Euphoria. The floral likely is a rather sad and pathetic attempt at covering up the smell of the drugs.
However what she doesn’t seem to know is that when someone inhales a substance that fucking much there is little they can do to get the smell off of them. Off their skin and hair and out of their clothing as it has claimed every atom of it all as home.
“What do you want, Mike?” She breaks the silence that they had settled into. Mike had been smiling at her so wide that his cheeks hurt and though she has spoken, he doesn’t drop it at her thick and venomous tone that hangs off of her throaty french accent. It feels somewhat like he’s won something stupid and trivial when he gets her to question why he is here in the first place, her hand curled up next to her face and the other resting on her hip. Her gloved digits are curling into her hip and she spreads out her stance for stability, either because she learned at least something from the manor games or because she cannot show the unsteadiness she has from a side effect of the drugs Mike doesn’t know. Though he doubts Nair has learnt a single damn thing from the moment she had set foot in the manor.
Leaning forward on the banister, Mike laughs. Pushing the air up from his stomach and out of his lungs causes his chuckle to echo along the walls and paintings of Oletus. “Can’t a guy just say hi, Vera? You’re making me all sad here!”
“With you? No.”
Letting out a low whistle, Mike shifts on his feet bouncing back and forth a bit.
“Woooow… Low blow, Vera. Low. Blow.” A small dramatic pause as he faux pouts at her, watching as her brows crease and lip curls in more irritation. “You know, I don’t always want something from people.” He grins at her for a moment before cutting her off as she opens her mouth, her lips painted red today, pulling back further and revealing the lipstick smudges on her teeth, “buuut… You are right today, Vera Dear.”
He pulls back off of the banister and makes his way down to where she is standing. “I’ve heard that there is a newbie among us, again! And you being, well, you- I was hoping that you’d have heard something.”
“I haven’t heard anything.”
Mike pauses, it is possible, after all, that she simply hasn’t. Though it is far more likely that she’s just unobservant enough to have missed the fresh blood. But he takes what she’ll give and lets out a long sigh, “well, have you seen anyone who might’ve?”
“Joseph’s down the hall, talk to him and stop bothering me .” She gestures vaguely in the direction of the foyer.
“Right-o, Vera Dear, Right-o!” Mike bounces off in the direction she indicated leaving the perfumer in the dust where he can faintly hear her muttering French profanities.
Though it seems that Nair is a bigger idiot than even he thought because the man that stands looking like a lost duck in the middle of the foyer is decidedly not Joseph. There are similarities, sure, Mike will give her that. Though the similarities are almost exclusively the man's hair. The rest; bodybuild, clothing, posture and general demeanor, certainly are not.
“Are you the alleged butchered and eaten newbie?” Is out of Mike’s mouth before he can think better of it all.