Recruited (backdated) [for Emma]

[takethegamble]

He wasn't a part of this world any more, the old houses with gingerbread lattices and brightly painted shutters, the brownstones crowding street corners and their small front yards decorated with faded statuary to patron saints and hoodoo loas, the dive bars spilling jazz and blues and billie rock into the dusty streets. There were entire cities dedicated to the dead here, fistfuls of cemeteries stuffed with cracked marble mausoleums and angels that would never fly.

No flowers would ever be put on white marble steps for Remy LeBeau. No one would light incense and whisper a prayer to Saint Gertrude or Michael for his damned soul.

Not in this city.

It was getting late and the tall old-fashioned street lamps lit on the high walls of the Lafayette Cemetery didn't do much about keeping the coming dark away. There were deep bruises of shadow in the narrow grassy aisles between marble houses that made the perfect cover for thieves and killers. Remy should know--he used to be one of them. Tonight he wasn't worried. Tonight the city, and he in it but no longer a part of it, was mourning.

Remy knelt in the grass in front of the imposing bulk of the Bourdeaux mausoleum, his trench coat fanned out around him and the damp ground soaking the knees of his jeans. He laid on the steps a single white trumpeter lilly, uncaring that it was just one in a landside of flowers that created a riot of color in the mostly otherwise dull winter landscape of the cemetery.

Bella wouldn't have cared if it had been one or a million, only that he had brought it.

"Didn' even steal it, mon amour," Remy said, smiling. "Thought you'd appreciate dat."

Around the thick stem of the lily a thin gold band caught the wavering yellow light from the walls shone for a moment. Behind sunglasses, Remy's eyes moved from the freshly engraved name of his wife (Bourdeaux, she had been buried as, not LeBeau) to his wedding band. It felt only appropriate that it stay here, since here was where his heart was.

Remy wrung his cold-chapped hands in preparation of what he was going to do. He did not plan on letting any looters take his last gift to Bella Donna.

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[takethegamble.insanejournal.com]

Remy knew that he'd done it for him, not for her. But in the end the dead were dead and everything done after they were gone was only for the living. Even so. Until time stripped down that house of the dead, the gold that he'd taken as a symbol of his love would stay there with Bella, melted into a circle in the marble under her engraved name.

She would have laughed at him. He wished that he could remember the exact sound of it.

Pushing his hands into his pockets, Remy headed to the main entrance. Thieves went over walls and through shadows and those were the places people who wanted to find thieves would look. Remy walked right through the pools of yellow light that made demon shadows out of the high, rusty front gates. He was still trying to remember that laugh but nothing, not even Bella herself stepping in front of him, would make Remy less than aware of his surroundings.

That made the next question; who loitered around cemeteries at dusk? Behind dark aviator glasses, Remy glanced at the blonde without the smallest shift of his head and walked on. He saw. He saw a lot of things. The hard part was bringing himself to care.