Chapter Text
When he felt as horrible as he did now, Flori took great pleasure in throwing rocks at the MP’s. He would sit over the edge of the brothel’s roof with his pile of gathered stones and wait until the evening patrol (somewhere between 5:30 and 6:10, never on the dot) strolled past. When they at last walked through the dirt and stone alleyway, Flori would pick up a stone and aim below the head. The younger ones would often throw it back twice as hard. Sometimes, they’d try and find a way up to the roof, but he was always gone before they would find what they thought was a rickety old ladder leading up to him, but actually took them straight into a one-legged old man’s apartment.
Yet it was difficult to chase a group of skittering Underground rats in their own nest. Stationed atop the roof, he and the other whore’s children would scream with delighted laughter when the rock struck home and sent an MP reeling.
Now he was alone. Alone, stoneless, with no patrol to terrorize as he so wished to do. He watched the little alleyway from above and pitifully kicked his feet to and from. A dark cat darted past and behind a barrel before on towards an unseen corner.
He knew he would have to go back to the brothel eventually. Back to clean up the wine he had thrown on the idiotic warrant officer that had leered over him and heaved against his cheek. How could he be blamed? Military police, especially their officers, were scarcely strapping young men.
When they first met, he had been serving drinks.
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The Maiden’s Dress was a damp, dark place in the impossibly lower sections of Roessel district. The neighborhood had been thrown together in one of the abandoned mineshafts that the lower districts were plagued with, reeking of coal dust and iceburst shards, Flori’s lungs reflexively exhaled whenever he returned from a day out in the main square.
By the time the MP evening patrol slipped in, Flori had been working since morning and was not expected to leave until midnight. The usual evening girl had fallen ill, and he foolishly volunteered himself as to spare her the grief of finding another. So, as she heaved over a bucket, Flori took only a moment’s rest before snatching a drink-filled tray from the bar and scurrying off. Summer nights were, arguably, always especially wretched if he were to be queried.
Roessel’s heat was humid and sweat-soaked when summer came to the aboveground. The mineshaft’s dust worsening it ever so, the military police assigned below tended to be vile. Scorned by their officers and sent below as punishment for not-so-subtle insubordination, they crowded uselessly in alleyways and flocked brothels. The “nicer” ones, usually, with their government stipend and none else to spend it on. No one settled with someone from the Underground, certainly not one from above. Flori scurried to place the tray of puddle colored drinks on the table. He forced the smile that old Wylmend had slapped onto him last night (directly after he had broken a man’s nose with a tray for reaching down the front of his shirt).
The two men at the table were ugly. Mud-brown hair fell in the younger one’s square face. He stared timidly at Flori, and his pale eyes darted down to stare at the flat chest. He wetted his lips and looked to the table instead.
“That’ll be it, then. Just wave me over ‘f you’d like another.” Flori urged either drink in front of the men when they took too long themselves. The older of the two reached out to earnestly touch Flori’s hand and he instinctively jerked it back. The man jolted back in turn with a cough of unsure laughter.
“Sorry. Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you, lovely. I just-” The younger one interrupted him with an hissed, “father,” that went unheard. “-how old ‘re you?”
“I’m not one’a the girls.” Flori blurted. “I uh… I just wait. I mean, drinks, that’s what I do. That’s it. I’m not one of the whores. Sorry.”
A common mistake, in truth. He may have been thirteen, but he was no fool. He and Lori were the youngest, prettiest things beneath the Maiden’s Dress. Wylemend made sure they knew so, too.
The older women were beautiful and experienced, but he and his sister were young, with untouched, tight cunts between their legs. Unmarred by childbirth and illness with all four limbs, their prices were listed at sixty thaler each until they were spoiled.
The cheapest girl was twenty kreuzer. Poor Grett was nearing forty-five, with a sore-covered mouth and no left arm beneath the elbow. She often stood at the laundry room’s window and shouted obscenities at passersbys until one came to join her.
The most expensive girls stayed expensive until their tits began to sag and they’d had a babe or two. Anies, with her perfect milky skin and long copper hair, had been worth forty thaler since Flori was six. He assumed she bathed in the blood of infants.
Until they flowered, neither he or Lori would be available. Lori called it to the beginning of spring. Still, they waited tables with their names and prices on the board nearest the bar, perpetual teases.
“You’re no whore, lovely. Whores don’t look like you. You look like you’ve got a mouthful of teeth and everythin’ on you. I can pay you more than whatever they pay you here.”
Table scraps. Flori fought the eyeroll that begged to slide across his face. Tips, if they’re kreuzer.
“I said I wasn’t a whore. I could get in trouble for that, you know. Plenty’a older girls that’ll know what they’re doing, sir. I can call one over for you.”
The younger one looked more and more mortified with every passing moment that they stood together. His upper lip trembled with sweat that dripped down into the watered down mug of muddy liquor. The older man released a frustrated, unsure huff and peered up with one last pleading glance.
“No. I-I just am trying to find somethin’ for my boy. You see? He’s near your age, lovely. T’ girls here are too old for him, but you aren’t. He’s just got his first job at the mines, and I wanna show him what women can offer before he’s too busy to do it on his own time. You understand, don’t you? I’ll give you…which one are you? I see the names up on the board right there. One’a them you, lovely? Just-”
Before the fool could go on any further, Flori felt his face burst into an angry red and he abruptly turned, snatching the tray away and hustling back over to the bar. He avoided a reaching hand from an offset table and leaned over to crane his arm down over the backside of the bar. Wylemend’s ugly old cat hissed at him, and Flori hissed back with what effort he could muster. It was not Wylemend that tended the bar, but his square-faced son with that mop of sweat-soaked brown hair.
“You know the old man’s gonna say somethin’ if you keep just-” Wilmar swatted at Flori’s hand when it reached for one of the metallic trays. “Stop, now. You don’t gotta keep just doin’ that, you’re the one that’s working in a brothel. Brothel-goers are lecherous, is’ in the job description.”
Flori made one more half-hearted grab for the tray, envisioning the delightful thunk it would make when bashed against a human skull. The dream, it was. To do such a thing unbidden. He knew his foolishness, though. This was simply the only way he could appropriately express the frustrations during the work hours. If he were elsewhere, he would have taken the tray and done the exact same thing that got him backhanded across the face the other night. Flori felt the residual sting and feel of his head jerking back despite the bruise now faded to near disappearance.
Yet, he was not elsewhere. He was at work. He was at work, and he would prefer to not get kicked out for the day and miss out on an evening’s worth of tips, so he pursed his lips, gave the edge of the bar a useless shake, and released a screechy, hushed shout in the direction of Wilmar that only he could see. The older boy did not spare him a second glance.
Flori was well aware of the ugly boy’s uglier father’s eyes on him for the majority of the night. He had even tried to get his attention at one point more, and Flori threatened to retrieve their useless security guard from where he stood outside. That’d put an end to the ceaseless staring. At one point, lazy-ass Moritz (the security guard in question) had come inside to ask for their cheap booze, and Wylmer grumbled and griped until he relented and remained inside to “keep the peace”.
Of course, it did not matter that at every other table a patron attempted to smile and draw Flori near with a hand on his hip or arm. They usually relented when he forced a grin and “playfully” swatted them away with too much force to earn a laugh from their table.
Moritz would only intervene if there was blood drawn or someone began crying. Even then, he would only step in for tears if it were one of his favorites spilling them.
Flori, who had once called him an old cunt, was not a favorite and never could be.
The rest of the evening was spent back and forth from the bar. In the last half hour of his shift, miners returning from wherever they came from rowdily crowded three tables together. An annoyed trio of MP’s came shortly after.
“You’ve got to pass my table to Christe.” Flori leaned his upper body over the bar. Wylmer, who’d clearly had enough of him for one night, glanced at him over the tops of his eyes.
“What? You want me to send Christe down here for one section? No fuckin’ way am I doing that.”
Ugh. What an asshole. Nicer than his father, and cuter too, but still as friendly as a dog with a rotten tooth.
“You- why? The MP’s like her!”
Wylmer paused mid-way into retrieving a glass and laughed, a brusque, too-loud noise that made a patron at the bar jolt in surprise. “No, they just don’t like you.”
As irritating as it was, he wasn’t wrong. Flori knew the group of officers (low tier officers, granted) well enough that he had to resist the urge to hunch down and shield his face by the back of his hand.
Most of the military police in the Roessel neighborhood knew him for less than fortunate reasons. The pale-haired one was in the square when the ring-seller’s son cut off his last little finger a year prior for thieving. The old man and the dark haired one he had seen on patrol a small handful of times. Flori had hit the pale-haired one in the head with a street stone. One of the officers was already on his way to the bar when he realized no server would come.
As soon as the officer turned to the bar to wave for Wylmer, he noticed Flori and paused. Back to the bar. Once his face had registered in his mind, the officer’s head whipped around with an incredulous expression.
“You! You’re the…By God, you’re the one-you-” His voice pitched into a startled, mildly offended laugh."”You’re the little rock-thrower! Do you work here? You- Are you a whore?”
“I am not a whore!” Flori squawked, harsher than he meant. He heard a low chuckle from Wylmer and ignored it as best he could. “I wait tables. What’re you doing here?”
What else did men do in brothels? He was here to get his cock wet and guzzle as much cheap booze that he was served until they cut him off for being too drunk. For someone that was routinely pelted with rocks, he seemed terribly eager to catch sight of Flori. He clutched a hand to his chest and whipped around to shout to his companions, only to eagerly reach across the bar and slide a sticky handful of coins towards Flori. Kreuzer, with the mint of some princess he did not remember the name of.
“Stop throwing those stones, and this is yours.” He grinned and puffed out his chest. How clever he thought he was. Flori quirked a brow and scooped the coin up even as the young officer grabbed back for it. He counted it in his palm and huffed.
“Really? I could make more by sellin’ the rocks. You don’t know how to bargain, do you?” Still, he pocketed the meager kreuzer in the pouch aside his dress. “Fine. I’ll leave you be. Hard t’ tell whose who. Awfully dark down here.”
The officer stared with a lackluster look of displeasure. Flori hummed and tucked his tray under an arm before at last dipping away to the table with the painfully cheap officer’s coworkers.
Flori did not bother smiling for long when he at last approached the table of MPs. He leaned forward, studying their faces, and decided that even within the brothel’s murky lighting, they all still had faces worth throwing rocks at. Flori cleared his throat. “Specials’ on the board. Anything ‘n-”
The oldest of the table held out coin in his palm. Twelve thaler. Flori did not like to take money from military police in the Underground, especially when they met like this. He urged it forward once more, this time with a vague look of amusement.
“For you, only if you promise to keep pelting the boy with shallow pockets.” Flori reached out, but the old man snatched it back in a closed fist. “Only him. Hear?”
The gall of the old man made Flori grin, but he tended to like when his snips were matched by patrons. They, in his experience, usually meant the least harm. They were actually just there for a cheap drink and didn’t try to stick their hands up any skirts.
“Heard.” Flori snapped the coin up as soon as the calloused hand unfurled. “You still want the drinks?”
The old officer (the uniforms were the same, but Flori could always tell) exhaled a hum of acknowledgement and eyed the specials’ board. Briefly, his eyes flicked down to the bar, surely noticing Wylmer’s lackluster rag swipes through the glasses. Sometimes he’d even wet the rag if a cup looked especially grimey. At least they used glass, and they almost always threw out cups with too many chips. The bar across the way used cups made of surface canal driftwood, Christe had told him. She even insisted that she’d gotten a splinter in her lip from them.
“How old is your barman?”
An odd question, but Flori shrugged. The younger one returned to his seat with a sideways glance to Flori.
“Dunno. Old enough, I suppose. What? You like em’ with a little grey behind the ears?”
If he wanted any good tip alongside what he'd already been given, Flori knew he had to work the table. Military police tipped the worst. As amusing as the men (men, as thus far only the eldest had really proved his worth. The others were just the usual bores he expected from a shift like this) were, the games would get old enough, and he had other tables to get to. Already, a group of dust covered miners sat irritably at a table, peering around for someone to tend to them.
“He seems to be younger than some of your drinks.”
“You want any of t’ specials or not?” Flori nodded towards the board once more, this foot already positioning itself to start towards another table. “I can give you more time, yeah? You need more time?”
The old man glanced up to meet his gaze. He looked, staring hard enough that it made Flori vaguely uncomfortable where he stood. He shifted from one foot to the other and glanced away. “I’ll give you more time. I’ll swing back around.”
As promised, he propelled himself away from the table (much to the behest of the younger men, who seemed irritable that their current commanding office had startled off the wait staff) and to the next.
Sweat-damp hair stuck in disgusting strands against his forehead by the time that midnight’s promised relief came. Flori wasted no time in releasing a noise of quiet exhaustion and tossing his tray behind the bar. Wylmar was shouting out of last call, spouting boorish sounding threats of banishment to specific patrons if they were not gone by the time he finished washing. Flori ran a hand over his face as he passed, and lingered near the edge of the bar. Wylmar turned up to glance and gave him a nod of acknowledgement.
“You’ve got’a shift tomorrow?” Flori leaned his upper body lazily against the bar. He reached down to tug at his skirts, grimacing when the underskirt stuck to his inner thighs with sweat. Surely they would be chaffed raw. Last time I take a shift for someone on a night this hot. “I’m going on downt’ get t’ cold water from those uh…wait’a second, sorry.” Flori adjusted his skirts once more, shifting awkwardly with a cringe before finally settling on raising the bottom just above his boots, tucking the fabric of one side into the cusp of his left boot. Horrendous looking, but effective. “I’m going downt’ get t’ cold water from the river. Some were saying it flooded up top with some rain or somethin’, so should be coming in awfully strong. Lori won’t come with, and I’m not goin’ alone again after the last time.”
Wylmar, who acted as though he was disinterested in everything anyone ever said to him, eyed the bottom of a cup shrugged. “Suppose I don’t have nothin’ better to do. What time?”
“Dunno. Seven? Whatever time I wake. You’ve got buckets?”
The brunette placed the cup where it belonged and gave Flori a look of mild displeasure and annoyance, which was, admittedly, not much different from his usual expression.
“You don’t even have a bucket? What if I was sayin’ no, ay? What if I said I’ve got’a shift and can’t do a thing with you tomorrow, or if I don’t have buckets?”
He knew that was a lie, of course. Wylmar could get out of any bartending shift he wanted if he shouted louder than his father could. Wylemand would never kick him out, no matter how belligerent or ungrateful he seemed for the ever so graciousness of his father not to boot him out onto the street. The only other barman came in once a week (at best) and moved at the pace of a lame tortoise. Perhaps it was the missing leg.
Flori grinned despite his exhaustion. “You don’t, though. Cause’ you just said you don’t got a thing to do, and I saw you hauling water with buckets last week. Did you lose em’ since then?”
Wylmar grunted, and Flori knew he’d won. He gave a wave (met with yet another grunt, which Flori mocked with an exaggerated one of his own) of dismissal and turned away from the bar, crossing over to the wooden steps leading upstairs. Two steps at a time he ascended, hustling up the landing and over the crickity upper stairs, stepping well over a loose board that had already been patched twice over. He certainly wasn’t risking scraping his ankle up again with his foot falling through it. He hurried past the girls’s rooms with his head down and a focus on the very interesting patterns of the floorboards. The thump of a headboard against the wall spooked him well enough to spurn him on and into his own room.
Beneath the Maiden’s Dress, many of the whores were mothers. That was simply how it was. A casualty of the job. The thought of himself in the same position caused sour bile to rise in the back of Flori's throat, so he hurried to his shared bed nearest the back against the wall and knelt to reach beneath it, grasping the little worn envelope tucked against the mattress and a bracing panel. It was stuffed full of various coins, and even the smallest few paper currencies he had collected. Knobby fingers fussed over the flap and he dumped the contents onto the mattress with a furtive look over his shoulder.
Selfish bitch you are. Wylemand would go easier on Lori if she had even the slightest bit of this coming her way. Flori pursed his lips and gave himself a steadying sigh as he began to separate the coins into their own piles. This nonsense of leaving the Underground had only come about in the last three years, and he’d almost gathered and stolen enough to make due for three stairway passes at the stairway just nearest the eastern mineshafts. Lori would understand his secrecy once the passes were obtained, as would their mother. What they did not know did not hurt them, for now. How could they possibly be angry with him for being secretive if it were for such a thing? If his saving and habits continued as they were, they would have just enough.
The thieving was the problem, Flori supposed. He had no personal qualms with it, but people did not often like when there was a hand in their pocket or slipping beneath a display case. Already, he’d been caught twice in the same square.
Only been caught twice.
Counted individually, Flori had fifty Raenher stacked neatly. He even found two more slips after grazing his head beneath the bed one more time just for good measure. Two separate stacks of rusty Kreuzer, a little pile of five Maler, and enough Thaler that it took him longer than five minutes to appropriately count all of it.
Two-hundred and sixty-one Raenher.
He counted once more just to be sure, and his heart quickened. He could not help but grin to himself, just a bit. It was much more than he thought without counting.
When would it be appropriate to tell his mother and sister? When Flori had the passes in hand, ready to go? Perhaps days earlier so that they would have time to pack their meager belongings and say their goodbyes. Their mother was insistent that there was little hope up top ever since Wall Maria had been kicked in, but she was simply being bleak. All it would take was a glimpse of what could be and then she would be thrilled.
Flori could see it clear as crystal. They would go above together, secure the paperwork. They could find a house, a shitty little place with scarcely enough room for them to walk, but it would be better than his mother having to work in a brothel and thinking that he and Lori would do the same someday.
He tucked the gathered funds into the envelope and slipped it under the bed, rising just as the door opened. Christe, Lori, and another whore’s son, Thenin, made their ways in, Christe and Thenin chatting the whole way. Sleeping in their shared room wasn’t mandatory,, but many had little else to go. Thenin had taken to disappearing every other night and claimed he was at the upscale apartments of an aboveground merchant whose bed he had taken to.
(“High class? Here? Whats’s so upclass, pale dust?” Flori had goaded him relentlessly for it, until the older boy went red faced and begged him to quiet himself. Girls would not understand, he had insisted.)
Flori gathered his nightdress from the bedside dresser and gave the trio a wave, but only Lori acknowledged him. She sat at the edge of the bed and crossed one leg over the other, tugging her dress down slightly as she went. Acting strange, she was. With her excessive glancing about and sitting uncomfortably, Flori could not help but laugh a little.
“Where’ve you been? Off walkin’ t’ street corner?”
A frequent joke they’d made. God, he couldn’t even remember why they said it. He vaguely thought of a jest they’d made years back at the sight of Christe and Thenin walking about the dirty cobblestone at strange hours for them, but the specifics did not come to him in that moment.
Lori was, for all purposes, prettier than Flori. It was insisted that they were identical until one got a closer look at them. Her hair was thicker, a sleek darkness of which softness he could never achieve. He eyed her round little cherubish face, and she eyed his bone sharp one in turn. Lori’s nose was even prettier, too, little and round like a cat’s as compared to the monstrosity that jutted off of his face in an ugly hump. Despite the depth of the love he felt for her, Flori could not help the jealousy that overtook him at the sight of her slender narrowness and sloped hips. How could they be of the same age, of the same birth, and her be so much better?
God, perhaps she was the reason he had no interest in ever being a girl or a woman.
“Not tonight. I’ll leave that t’ the boys this time.” Lori quipped back. Strands of hair fell over her thick eyelashes and she flopped back onto the bed. She was nowhere near as sweat-soaked as him, but her face was still red with exertion. Lori shifted and kicked her shoes off with just a hint more of lazy effort than was absolutely necessary and allowed them to clatter against the floor. “Wylemand needed help wit’ movin’ that bench outside again. Some man keeps pissin’ on it and he don’t-”
“Ew! Stop, no more detail. I’ve heard enough.” Flori huffed and gathered up his things. “I’m goin’ to wash. You washed your hands, at least?” Lori reached out with her sweaty palms and Flori squealed, jerking himself out of the way to avoid her potentially piss-tainted hands. She laughed, and he cast a nasty look over his shoulder as he retreated to the washroom.
By the short time that Flori had returned, Lori was gone. Again. His brows furrowed in mild frustration, but he simply dropped down onto bed with his damp hair and humid skin. He scooted far to the wall, his side, and fished down against the wall for his things. The wool stuffed doll Wylmer had given him when he was still little enough to play with those sorts of things had managed to worm her way against the wall and mattress, so Flori brought her up and sat her carefully near the pillow. He peeked over his shoulder to make sure that Christe and Thenin were asleep (Christe, snoring much too loud) before bringing her up to rest on his bunched up knees. He combed fingers gently through her thread braided hair and daintily checked the cloth scalp for any tuggage. Nothing had come loose, but it wouldn’t hurt to thread more string through her head sooner than later. Flori took the mock hair between both left and right thumb and forefinger and slowly braided it, squinting and hunching himself over in the dark. She had no name, but Wylmer had called her the lady when he’d first given her to Flori, and it had stuck with him since.
The Lady had been carefully treated, if Flori were to give himself any credit. She’d laid dutifully beside his pillow for nearly eight years, and only once had to have one of her eyes replaced with a button he found on the street. The other was painted on with surprising effort. He tied the new braid off with a strand of her own thread-hair and smoothed out her worn old pink dress. Unfortunately for her, she’d gone through the life of a pin cushion when he had been taught how to sew, and was speckled with the simple flowers (stem, two leaves askew, and then six tiny petals surrounding a plain center) he’d been taught. Now, he only knew how to sew the same flowers instead of repairing tears. The life of a seamstress would not be for him.
Flori dilled his finger softly over the latest miniscule flower on The Lady’s shoulder. He had, it seemed, been attempting to mimic a krokkus. Poorly. He brought her to his heart for just a split moment and then at last tucked her once more against the pillow and the wall. Water dripped from a loose strand of hair and onto the threadbare sheet. Where had Lori taken herself again? She had been terribly prone to disappearing at those such odd hours.
Whatever. She would come back when she wished. Flori shifted to his side of the bed closest to the wall and tugged the blanket up to his shoulder.
Flori woke when Lori took back to the bed. The mattress dipped beneath her weight and Flori glanced over his shoulder, roused from his lackluster sleep.
“Where’ve you been?” He grumbled and pulled the blanket up to his neck.
Lori’s voice trembled with a strange hissing noise of exertion. She laid her head down upon the pillow, and Flori felt her eyes boring into the back of his head. He furrowed his brows and craned his neck back further. “Lori?”
“I’m pregnant.”
Flori stared. He palmed at his eyes with one hand and turned entirely to face her.
“Huh?”
“I’m pregnant.”
“Oh.”
He turned back to the wall and attempted once more to close his eyes, letting the barking of a dog at a rolling cart lull him.
Pregnant.
Pregnant. Pregnant. Pregnant.
Flori’s eyes snapped open and he whipped his upper body to sitting. Lori didn’t look pregnant. Not in the slightest. Her stomach was flat as a board and her chest flat as a boy’s. Who could she have gotten pregnant by, he wondered. Why? Lori, as far as he’d known, had yet to so much as bleed. Wouldn’t they have begun around the same time? He thought that she was lying for a moment. A little joke that she would laugh and prod him in the ribs for believing. She did not laugh, though. Laying flat on her pillow, Lori shrugged.
“Yeah.”
Yeah? That was it?
Flori stammered for a moment, rambling over his own tongue before he stupidly spoke, “You got your period?”
Lori looked at him as though he were a fool, which he felt horribly as such. His mouth hung open as he gawked for several more silent seconds. Selfishly, Flori thought of the complication this added. They couldn’t take care of a babe in a place like this, nor would he be willing to. Mother hated children. Would they charge even more at the stairway if they saw Lori’s belly as swollen as a beetle’s shell?
“Wit’ who? When? How long?” Flori began to roll out before he could stop himself. “How’d you know now? You’ve been t’ a doctor or something?”
There were plenty of ways to fix this. Fungi were abundant near the gutters, and there were plenty of strange plants growing in the scattered patches of sunlight at the river’s edge. Surely something there would kill the seed growing in the seat of Lori’s abdomen. Flori sat himself up further and shifted impossibly near to his sister.
Lori, annoyed by his closeness, shoved at his hip with enough force to sting. He cringed when palm hit bone and jerked his lower body away.
“Are you stupid? I didn’ tell you a ‘ting ‘cause I knew you’d make’a big deal of it. I didn’t want no fuss or crying over some baby y’ didn’t even know about until now. I know t’ father, at least. Better than most here can say.”
Flori’s face flushed, and he felt a strange clutching at his heart. He had thought that Lori perhaps hadn’t told him of her first blood out of embarrassment. Then, he wouldn’t have blamed her for timidity. This was somehow his fault, though? Flori’s fault that his twin didn’t feel well enough to share such things with him? Perhaps he could be a bit dramatic at times, but he was sure of his right to feel such a way over this. Even with his face heated, Flori pursed his lips and pressed himself back to the wall.
“Who is it?”
Had she been working? Whoring? The thought of it made his mouth twitch downwards. Lori could be even bigger of a cunt than him, but he couldn’t stand the thought of her being shouted at by Wylemand for her pickiness with clients (she was, after all, so terribly picky with everything). Girls as pretty as Lori shouldn’t have to lay on their backs and take it with a grimace and teary eyes. She could still find someone up top, if that’s what she wished. If she wanted a baby, there were plenty of men that would fall to their knees for the favor of a girl such as her. Would they still do so, even when she had some Underground bastard clutched to her breast?
“Wylemand.” Lori answered as Flori gawked. She picked at the collar of her night dress. “Hes’ been kind t’ me, you know. I told him about the babe, an’ he wants to get married. He’ll take care of us, Mother too, 'f she’s not going to beat me over the head when I tell her.” She turned her face pointedly to him. “You stop being such a bitch, maybe 'e’ll even extend it to you. I’ll put a good word in.”
“Wylemand? Wylemand!? You’ve knocked your head at something. What the fuck is wrong ‘ith you?” Flori’s voice cringed as he did with a tightening of the throat. “Wylemand’s son is older 'an you! You know he left 'is first wife up top, all alone? That’s what Wylmer told me, and-”
Lori reared back to the edge of the bed and brought her hand up hard to his face. The back of her knuckles connected with Flori’s face hard enough to send his head slamming back into the wall. A yelp came from him before he could stop himself, but he was all too quick to reach forward and grab his sister by the front of her night shirt. Flori shook her once and she shoved his face up with a palm to the chin, and her bitten nails dug into the veins of his wrist.
“Get the fuck off me, Lori!” He screeched. Flori thought he heard Christe make a noise in her bed, but paid her no mind. Lori’s hand swiped to his ear to grab the little silver ring hanging at the side of his ear, but had the nerve to scream when Flori grabbed a fistful of her hair by the root.
“It’s my life!” Lori’s voice raised high enough to sting. “ ‘f I wanna marry an old man’ , I’m goin’ t’ fucking do it!” She screamed when Flori twisted the hair in his grasp. Lori’s hand went from ear to eye, and she managed to get a good nail scratch into the outer corner. Flori was rearing his foot back to kick her in the stomach before two arms hooked around Lori’s middle to drag her off, and another grabbed Flori’s wrists to yank him off of her. Thenin stood uselessly off at the end of the bed while Christe frantically pulled at Lori’s waist with panicked tears in her eyes. Wylmer, it seemed, had heard the commotion and come up to investigate, for he was shouting in Flori’s ears and prying his fingers out of Lori’s hair.
He released her at last and held his hands up in irritable surrender. Wylmer, who had wrenched himself over the end of the bed to reach them, hooked his arms under Flori’s and dragged him off the edge of the bed to standing.
“What the fuck are you doing!?” He snapped and shoved him back by the chest.
Flori and Lori both began their own howling at the same time, pointing at one another and attempting to step further again as they shouted.
“She was tryin’ t-”
“She hit me cause’-”
“She’s tryin’ to get-”
“Lori hit me right-” Flori finally snarled and shoved at Wylmer’s arm when it curled around him once more. He hit at it once, twice, and finally a third before he was released. Flori turned and shouldered past Thenin, slowing as he past Lori. Their eyes kept match as they moved, and Flori caught the corner of her mouth twitch. Lori spit a thick glob of spit at his shirt, and Flori dodged only by jerking himself away. He spat out a snapping “bitch” before surging out the door and slamming it closed behind him. It creaked on the hinges.