My blood turned heavy in my veins. “W-what?”
“Franziska. She’s planning to ruin the show tonight, to ruin all of it,” Alexei pressed the palms of his hands flat against either side of his head, as though the mere thought of Le Papillon being interrupted that night was enough to push him over the edge. “They’ll kill her if she does, I know it.” He began smacking his hands hard against his skull in exasperation. “They’ll kill her and the show will be ruined.”
“I’m sorry...” I started, swallowing hard, as Alexei began to pace. A bitter realization was dawning on me. “You...want Act Two to happen?”
Alexei stopped mid-step, and I knew that I had made a mistake. He suddenly turned and looked me dead in the eyes.
“You don’t?”
I only hesitated for a moment, but that was all it took. Alexei backed away from me quickly, his eyes wide and reddened, his hands feeling for the door behind him. “No, no, no,” he said lowly. “You’re just like them. You don’t understand.”
“No, I—“
He wasn’t listening to me. Instead, he lunged into the ticket booth, rummaged around for a moment, and then reentered. Even in the half-darkness, I could make out what was in his hand—a pistol. Pointed squarely at my chest.
“Hey,” I said carefully, instinctively raising my hands from my sides. “This is a misunderstanding.”
I could see his hand was shaking, same as mine. I forced my focus to shift from the barrel of the weapon that could easily plunge bit of metal directly into the soft flesh of my heart, and instead met the eyes of the kid behind it.
He looked scared. But not of the act of violence he was considering committing.
I think he was genuinely panicking over whether or not Le Papillon would be ruined
“Everything will fall apart,” he said, his voice breaking into a small sob at the end of the sentence. He took a ragged breath. “Father said so.”
Apparently, even the threat of death can’t stop my investigative instincts. “Your father?” I asked, trying to keep my tone calm. “Who’s your father?” If the kid was still talking, he wasn’t shooting.
“Father gives money to Madame Taglioni. He gave her a place to perform. He gave her Franziska.” Spittle flew from his mouth and a stream of snot began to run from his nose. “All so we can have the Ballet.”
He said it like it was a fact. The same way I might defend my own need for oxygen for survival, if my supply was being threatened. “Why, Alexei? Why do we need the Ballet so badly? After all that it’s done to the dancers, to your sister?” And, what it was about to do to Emma, somewhere downstairs. The show was surely about to start, if it hadn’t already.
I wasn’t going to save her.
I wasn’t even going to save myself.
“Humanity needs to indulge.”
The suddenly leveled way in which he spoke brought me back from my spiraling. His hand, still gripping the gun, still aiming at me, had steadied. He used his other to wipe the snot and tears from his face before he continued. “We need to satiate our baser urges. The lower classes, they have their outlets—petty crime, illicit affairs. Temporary, unfulfilling. Vulgar,” he said the last word with an especially high dose of malice.
“But what are the rich to do? When their lives are already so saturated with luxury?” He paused, as though actually giving me time to respond to his question. Then he answered it himself. “Their indulgences have to be at a higher potency, like a seasoned drug addict seeking a new high.” He said the words with newfound confidence, and I had the distinct impression that he was reciting something that had been said to him many, many times. “Only the best, or go without.”
My heart was still pounding hard in my chest as he continued. “And so, the Ballet,” he said simply. “The most beautiful and most monstrous parts of humanity, consumed as a whole, for two nights out of the year.” To my disgust and horror, his mouth twisted up in to a small, serene smile, the same smile he’d given to me, back when I only knew him as the ticket boy.
“And it all culminates in a single, spectacular purge of evil—the burning of the innocent Farfalla.”
I felt quite sick. “But... even after what it did to Franziska?”
“I love my sister,” he said, in a voice devoid of anything of the sort. “We’re lucky, to have the Ballet in our blood. Something with such a powerful legacy.” He paused, and for a moment, he looked uncomfortable, almost ashamed. “She’s the more fortunate one, though. The father we share is a great man, and his wife, my sister’s mother, a great woman.”
At that, I was reminded of Mathilde, and how she had nearly sacrificed her life to expose the Ballet. So he and Franziska were half-siblings after all. “But your mother—” I started, only to be immediately cut off.
“My mother is a disgrace," he interrupted, his voice hot with pent up anger. "She took the name of Farfalla and squandered it, paying off that coward Arden to throw the performance.”
My mind traveled back to my conversation with Arden, how he spoke of Mathilde with a tinge of this same bitterness. 'She convinced me to ruin the biggest performance of my life.' The 32nd Farfalla having her wing ripped off with Prince Djalma’s crown had been no accident. It was Mathilde’s escape hatch.
Alexei continued. “She seduced my father for his secrets, abandoned me in this city, and took off” He spoke coldly, using anger to try to disguise the hurt and disappointment I could still detect in his voice. “They’re the reason I’m on the outside, why my Father left me out here, peddling tickets in this miserable alleyway. Out on the curb like trash.”
He was getting emotional again, his voice trembling, and he looked to be on the brink of unraveling. “The Ballet is a constant for us. In the same way humanity will never have a last act of violence, or a last piece of art. It’s a force of nature. And it stops for no one.” The hand holding the gun had begun to shake once more, when suddenly he looked at it as though he had only just remembered he was pointing it at me.
“But,” I said weakly. “You wanted to help her.”
The boy shook his head. “I wanted to save her from herself.”
I saw his focus flicker from me, to the gun, then back to the center of my chest, where a bullet would be buried if he pulled the trigger. A new surge of fear ripped through my body.
“Alexei, don’t.”
“It’s my own weakness that brought you here. You were an outsider, looking in on the bizarre and the strange. Like me.” He paused. “I thought you saw the beauty in it. I thought you’d see the beauty in this, too.”
He looked at me with pity in his eyes. “I’m sorry Sam. I thought you were different. But you’re just part of the problem. Just like my mother.” His bottom lip trembled. “Just like Franziska.” Then, he steadied, and his gaze became steely. He raised his gun. “Maybe she deserves to die too.”
My legs were shaking beneath me.
“Alexei—“
“The show must go on.”
A sharp pain, a white hot light—
Then, everything went black.
---
Credits
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