(complete) Sex, intrigues, lies - the Game is like normal politics, just that now people lose their brain over it. Macbeth meets House of Cards and Game of Thrones in a fantastic ride to the Brexit referendum battled out in the reality TV show envir...
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They had sat for hours in the old subway train going nowhere. At some point board games had been brought out. In the end, they could all claim to have been beaten by a horse, fair and square. But despite the laughter and joy that brought the air around them to fizzle like the soda they had switched to, Matis couldn't shake the feeling that Flo said good bye. Not with words. But there was a melancholy with which he looked at them when he thought they weren't noticing.
Finally alone with Justin, ensconced in the arms of the other in the privacy of their bed, it wasn't the wild tumble that Matis had imagined, when they had made up in the Maison's garden. Things tumbled, but they were words from their tongues. They came from the darkest corners of their hearts and heads, described their greatest pains and fear, and found their counterparts in the words of the other. The dam once broken, lone hours of despair dripped, trickled, and washed into the open, giving slowly way to the hardest, because most fragile things to share: hopes and desires.
They had fallen asleep in the wee hours of the morning, as exhausted and feeling as alive as if they had gone ten rounds between the sheets. Their feeling of satiety was different though, deeper, because the share that they had of the other, had nourished acceptance of themselves.
When Matis went to see his parents at the Browns not much later, he felt not the joyful spitefulness he had experienced at first, when all he had wanted, was to gloat in his parents' disappointment. After the last night, he didn't need the kind of reassurance that could be gained from it.
As they had nothing else to give him personally, all he wanted from his parents now, was a line, finishing the chapter, and a promise that they would let go for all of their sake. Every step that brought him closer to his parents' suites however, made him more aware of the feeling of foreboding, gnawing on his new-found confidence.
Vlad sat alone with a newspaper over his opulent breakfast that he had the staff serve him in his room. Matis guessed that Mathilda had not yet risen, though she could well be already otherwise occupied now, that she had to fill the title of Duchess with life again. Though still wrapped in a dressing grown and slippers, matching pajamas underneath, Vlad had the world at his fingertips on his laptop at one side, his phone on the table, and the TV that was running on some news channel without sound.
He folded the newspaper and put it back on a stack of other newspapers and correspondence when Matis entered the room. "Look who it is," he chuckled. "The lost son crawling back home. Missing your family already?"
Matis had grown up an orphan, believing his parents to be dead. Just as his father had believed his whole family dead for more than thirty years. It had all been part of Mathilda's plan for punishment of her husband, after he had accused her of infidelity and treason, in league and bed with Guthrum.
As a child Matis had always wondered how it would be to have a family, had dreaded the fact that no one ever had picked him to take home. Since he had learned of his parents, he felt lucky for the years he had without them. The night before had proven that another kind of family had adopted him as he was. His loyalty to them came easy now. "How could I when I have them around me at all times?"
