“I’ve spent long enough feeling that no-one truly loves me. Even people I love. Show me you do, sweet?” They are so close, here, and it is so easy to lean in for a kiss.
Lord Gazter leans in and kisses Eglantine. "I…" Lord Gazter’s face goes pale. "I…I think I’ve…" Lord Gazter stumbles across the floor. His arm bashes against the room’s furnace. A flame leaps up from his sleeve, but Lord Gazter is already unconscious and unable to do anything about it.
edited by Lord Gazter on 9/17/2016
As Gazter falls, Eglantine does their best to ease him safely to the floor, though they still have to smother the fire upon his sleeve hastily, before it can touch his skin. Only once he’s down do they carefully wipe their lips clean, and drink something from a silver flask that makes them grimace and cough.
Charm enough wearers of scarlet stockings, and sometimes you can hear whispers of tricks like these: lip paints that can drug someone into insensibility, and the ways to avoid knocking oneself out with them into the bargain.
True, it generally requires one look particularly feminine to get away with wearing them, lest it look incongruous, but Eglantine can present a feminine face here in the Brass Embassy without fear of being treated less respectfully. In that regard, the devils seem a little more forward-thinking than the rest of London, where Eglantine is more inclined to wear suits.
They purse their lips thoughtfully, before searching Gazter for weapons and binding his wrists and ankles so that he can’t move, but won’t lose circulation - another interesting trick one can pick up when one makes suitably scandalous friends.
What to do with him, though? Sharp brass claws hover near Gazter’s throat for a moment, then pull away.
Eglantine sighs heavily.
No-one will have to be cleaning up any blood in this room today. In the end, Eglantine merely leaves their erstwhile suitor there, with his jacket folded up like a pillow beneath his head, carefully bound, and with a hastily-written note tucked in his shirt.
'Barnabas,
I’m sorry. I had to. If I’d debated with you, I would have had to take your credibility in the eyes of the devils, and the danger you’d be in then… No. This is the only way. By the time you wake and get loose, the discussion will be over. Go home.
-Eglantine.’
edited by Eglantine-Fox on 8/27/2016