DISCLAIMER: "Bayonetta" and all associated characters and likenesses are the exclusive property of Capcom. Used here without permission. It is a fictional story made for purely entertainment purposes. Any relation to events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

1: The Human's Side

It's been nearly ten years, and Luka Redgrave still hasn't forgotten her.

How can he? Every piece of the story reminds him of her; every sliver of evidence that brings him closer to the truth entire of what came to a climax that fateful day ten years ago, when the skies and a usurper god almost collapsed upon Vigrid and her sister cities across the globe, prompts his memory to recall the frightening and beautiful Witch who made his heart and loins stir despite what he believed at first to be her nature. He'd been wrong – she hadn't been responsible for his father's death, after all – but even his learning that, knowing that, confronting that, did nothing to keep her close, or sway her from her affections to his own.

She was and always would be of a different world, on a different plane, possessing of a different, greater destiny from mortals – and men – like him. But it's been a long time since he's enjoyed her particular brand of company, and he can't forget her, no matter how much he may desire that in his saner moments.

It wasn't always like that, of course. At first, there were meetings aplenty: to talk and analyze the facts, to share details and stories, to unburden and discover the truths behind the sacrosanct mysteries of the Ithavoll Group. Those became more infrequent, though, the further they strayed from the desperateness of those days around the awakening of Jubileus, as the demands of both their lives – hers for justice, his for truth – made the days stretch to weeks, then months, then a full year of waiting, wondering, and wishing. Her excuse – when she finally deigned to give him one – was one of time and duty...and an unarticulated but inarguable commitment to her white-haired Umbran sister. But as a compromise, she made an agreement to return to the City of Deja Vu once each year, in the late spring, when the crowds are few and the wine exquisite, to revisit for at least a few days their conditional and all-too-conventional relationship of queen and knight. He's gone every year, to the same hotel overlooking the piazza, as promised...though she hasn't shown her face in five.

He wonders absently if this year will make it six.

Not that he hasn't felt the influence of her presence in other ways, across that span of years. Sometimes, he'll be walking along the street, and glance into the reflective surface of a shop window, and he'll catch a glimpse of a trail of ornamented ebony hair, shimmering just out of reach. Other times, he'll be sitting in the cafe near the flat, reading through his journal of scribbled details and theories over cooling coffee, and his nostrils will flare in subconscious recognition of a perfumed scent of rose petals, only just hinted on the breeze. And on very few – extremely rare – occasions, he'll even hear a subtle, tickling whisper in his ear, prodding him to pursue a new contact, or concentrate his efforts on a far-fetched lead, or just to trust to his own inimitable luck...which Cheshire cats are supposed to have in spades.

At the thought of the Witch's old pet name for him, he chuckles, to spite himself: he thought the name degrading, but hearing it again from her lips now would be a blessing to his ears.

Beside him, Eve stirs at the motion in his chest, and with a maudlin smile, he turns his head to look at her, this stand-in for the other woman he will never – can never – have.

Nevertheless, he rolls onto his side and puts his arm around her, cupping a handful of firm but soft breast that's become very familiar to him somewhere over the course of these last years. Because even though she isn't her, he still feels a keen tenderness for this woman: this young woman who brings him his coffee stiff and black in the mornings, who rubs his shoulders after a long day hunched over cabalistic arcana, and who kisses him and strokes his stubbled cheek every time she says farewell, all for support of him. This sweet young woman who winds his long scarf around his neck to protect him on chilling mornings, who cleans the blood and dirt from his face when he pushes his sharp, inquisitive nose too far into clandestine affairs where it doesn't belong, and who helps him up the stairs to his flat when he uses the warm taste of whisky as a substitute for the warmth he knows she is willing to give him but that sometimes he can't bring himself to take, all for fondness of him. This beautiful, sweet young woman who sucks his cock when he asks her to, who bends herself over the side of his bed to let him dominate her, and who muffles her screams into the soft, silken sheets they share when he fucks her with the hammering lunge of his hips, all for wanton desire of him.

“Luka...?” she murmurs, craning her head halfway around, her brown hair falling across his face like the fluttering wisp of a butterfly's wings. She smells of plumeria; in the language of blossoms, it means the convergence of all things good.

The meaning makes him smile again, before he even realizes it. “I'm here,” he whispers. “Go back to sleep.”

She hums, something akin to a sigh. Her voice is high, gentle, solicitous; nothing like the rolling, vibrant, mocking purr about which he still dreams with startling regularity. “You're leaving for Vigrid tomorrow, aren't you?”

“Today,” he corrects simply, but he keeps his tone low, for what precise reason he can't easily name. “But not until later,” he assures her. And his lips curl almost ruefully upon each other, as she turns around beneath his arm, shifting from one hip to the opposite with a suppleness that is very pretty, very alluring, very arousing...but that is yet nothing like that of a Witch.

She lifts her chin toward his, seeking his lips in the dim, pre-dawn light. “Stay with me until then?” she murmurs, the warmth of her breath somehow comforting to him, despite who she is. Or, rather, who she isn't.

“Of course,” he replies, because the need in her is so very sweet. And because if he can't lie with the wily Witch who haunts his dreams, he can at least take pleasure in the clutching press of this beautiful, sweet young woman whom he knows wants him to see only her when he looks into her brown doe eyes, and feel only her when he kisses her pouty pink lips, and think of only her when he fills her with the deep and longing desire that he's only felt – unilaterally, unconditionally, hopelessly – for a woman who isn't her, but who all the same can't be his.

But he takes her face in his hands, and he kisses her, and he pushes himself between her naked legs anyway, shushing her fretful breaths with his mouth, squeezing her lithe little body with his teasing fingers, and filling her loneliness with the rhythmic thrust of his need...even while somewhere on the edge of his lusty awareness he thinks he can hear the Witch, chuckling softly, a mostly-silent spectator to this show of zealous congress, all for lack of her.

2: The Witch's Side

“Must you?”

Jeanne's voice is icy, almost visibly dripping with disdain, and her sudden nasal haughtiness makes Cereza both smirk and frown.

She knows that there has never been much love in Jeanne's heart for mortals, especially mortal men; they are reminders of the great scourges raged against their kindred over a now-hazy conflux of memories of the centuries past. Of course, there has never been much love in Jeanne's heart for anything, save for her sister-soulmate Witch, who turns now to look at her over her shoulder, a loosely-wound trail of ebony hair bouncing beside her cheek.

Cereza lets go a low, pealing chuckle. “What's the matter, love?” she purrs, narrowing her eyes at her ivory-pale mate from behind her glasses. “Are you jealous?”

“Don't be ridiculous,” Jeanne snorts, turning up her nose just so she can look down it at the other Witch. “I simply don't understand why you waste your time consorting with inconsequential mortal idiots like him and that...that despicable little toad that Rodin lets sully up his bar.”

“I thought witches were supposed to like toads,” Cereza quips, a smile tugging at her glossy lips. But before Jeanne can make a reply, she waves her long fingers in dismissal.

“Enzo has his uses,” Cereza tells the other Witch. Then she glances back at the scrolling scrying glyph behind her, where the tall man with the curling dark hair has lifted his fey fille into his lap, as she rakes at his back and starts to wheeze his name like a quickening mantra (“Luka oh Luka oh God yes Luka please”) with every bounce upon the stiff pole of his sex.

“So does Cheshire,” Cereza murmurs beneath her breath with voyeuristic glee; like all men, Cheshire's idea of sex is so banal, but watching him have such fun with his tasty little sylph is nevertheless thoroughly amusing.

Jeanne steps in front of her, wiping her arm through the glyph. The rolling chromatic letters scatter back to the aether, as the magical connection to the sleepy, half-aware plane of mortals is severed into nothing so much as drifting fog.

“He's a vulgar primitive,” the white-haired Witch spits. “They all are, the whole rotten lot of them. They don't deserve you,” she mutters, and her eyes flare, briefly, with a fierce sensitivity that Cereza doesn't usually get to see so plainly outside the clutching embraces they share when they wrap arms and legs and hair around each other.

“They have connections,” Cereza tells her softly now in an appeasing voice; it's a not-quite-argument they have had many times before, during their long and loving sojourn through Purgatorio together. “They can move in circles we can't; get answers to sensitive questions; gather information we need to know.” She lifts her hand, stroking her fingers across Jeanne's pallid cheek, which barely twitches beneath her subtle caress.

Jeanne steps up, mimicking Cereza's action like an inverse mirror image, her touch soft against the curve of Cereza's face. “You are all I need to know,” she whispers, and then she presses her ruby-red lips to Cereza's with a fiery passion that is quite at odds with her normally cool composure. She reaches up with her other hand and cups the winding mass of thick, pitch black hair behind her sister's head, holding her close in their kiss.

Another step brings their bodies together, too, and for a moment Cereza almost forgets why she sought to find Cheshire in the first place this time; Jeanne has that effect on her – always has, always will. Still, she takes a long minute to linger in that kiss, darting her tongue into the other woman's mouth and slipping her hands along Jeanne's less rounded body, seizing the firm round of her breast in one and the firmer round of her buttock in the other. And she chuckles of a sudden behind Jeanne's harshly-pleasant, humming mouth; she can well understand what aching delight Cheshire takes in a smaller lover's body.

But then she pulls away, her lips clutching to Jeanne's for a split-second longer, as like to the sticky, gossamer threads of a web. “Naughty girl,” she trills, wagging her finger in a scolding gesture that is only half-mocking. “You're trying to distract me from my commitment to Cheshire again, aren't you?”

Jeanne steps back, too, cocking one shoulder up as she crosses her arms in front of her chest. Her mouth pinches into a frown; the immaculately white countenance is once more cold, impregnable granite. “So you're going.” It isn't a question.

“I've stood the poor sod up too many times already,” Cereza replies, trying to sound flippant. “He's liable to think I got dropped into the bottom of a lake again!” She lays two fingers upon her cheek in diverted thought, humming with appropriate melodrama. “Now, what do you think's in fashion in Vigrid these days...?” she asks with a lilting chuckle. But a brief glance into Jeanne's glowering face makes her catch her breath, though only just. She feels her own stance shift, her shoulders straightening to command attention and assert authority. “You know no one comes close to you-” she begins, but her sister turns, her gun-heel making an abrasive scraping sound upon the ground.

“Just go,” Jeanne snaps from between her cherry lips. Then she snaps her fingers, too, and Sibilia suddenly appears, its engine already revving to its mistress' summons. She throws one long, crimson-clad leg over the seat, her fist wrenching at the handle in silent, aroused ire. Then Sibilia's tires squeal for a sharp moment, and she's gone, in a burst of light and sound.

Cereza sighs in her wake, cocking one leg out to the side. She knows that Jeanne won't – can't – stay angry at her (the sway of her hips is too inviting, the quirk of her lips too enticing; Jeanne has even told her so), but even that knowledge doesn't make the white-haired Witch's leaving any more palatable.

So Cereza draws her finger in the air again, carving a new scrying glyph, to find a partner for her misery. She watches Cheshire shove a rolled-up shirt into an already-full satchel, while the adorably naked moppet in his bed sits up on all fours, arguing with him about something. Cereza decides not to eavesdrop this time, no matter how much fun it usually is to hear Cheshire get his berries handed to him by anyone, especially a girl half his size; she's had her fill of arguments today already.

Past the rolling letters of the wavering circle, Cheshire barks something at the girl, and she freezes. Then her admittedly pretty mouth utters something that Cereza can recognize – even without the benefit of audio – as a verbal blow to his fidelity and favor, and the Witch closes one eye and cringes in some only half-amused sympathy. Then the girl gets up, wraps the sheet around her, and stalks to the door, while Cheshire raises his hands in surrender, following on her heels, only to have the heavy wood slammed into his face.

Cereza sighs again, this time on behalf of the lonely man in her glyph.

Temperamental lovers seem to be the one thing that they share in common, these days.

3: Chasing Memories

The first thing that Luka does when he arrives at the old hotel in Vigrid – before even trudging up the stairs to the last door on the right, as the attendant tells him – is to order a dram of single-malt whisky to his room. After a half-second of thought, he reconsiders, and tells the porter to bring him the whole bottle, preferably something from the Macallan or RedBreast quarters, but really anything will do. The cheeky twerp gives him a hard time for about thirty seconds, until Luka rolls his eyes and pulls a wad of money from inside of his vest (part of his valuable quick-grab, go-to bribery money, but it can't be helped in this situation), which the suddenly-sparkly-eyed and helpful attendant takes with a smile and a grating, “I'll make sure you enjoy your stay, sir!”

Luka doesn't waste the energy to argue with him; he's still got Eve's teary words bouncing around in his skull like the spiked ball of a mace, making it hard to concentrate on anything without the softening effect of a nice layer of alcohol to deaden his senses.

“You're in love with a fantasy,” she told him through the bathroom door back in his flat, while he tried to apologize for his post-coital change of demeanor. “I can't compete with that. And I can't pretend to be something I'm not. I won't. Not even for you.”

“Eve, please,” he muttered, his palm laid against the flat of the door. “We can talk about this when I get back. Just-”

“You can talk,” she said, and he remembers flinching from the sudden, decisive sharpness in her usually soft voice. “But I won't be here to listen. Go chase your memories, Luka. You will anyway, no matter what I say.”

“Eve-!” he blurted, but then his lucky, charming Cheshire Cat tongue faltered.

“Just go,” she told him flatly in the abrupt silence.

And that was that.

An hour later, he was on the train to Vigrid, his leather-bound journal spread open on his lap, his pen hovering over the page, but nothing would come: no theories, no threads of facts, no words to take the place of Eve's quiet direction for him to leave.

Her voice is still with him now. It's the main reason why he makes himself swallow the first dram of whisky in a single gulp and then immediately pours himself and downs another, even while the first is still making his eyes water. He slams the glass on the table, feels it slip away a little between his fingers, then clenches his fist around it again. He pours himself a third, more slowly this time, because his senses are already starting to go pleasantly dull, and he doesn't want to drown himself falling asleep in a warm bath.

That's where he is twenty minutes later, his head lolling on the sloping back of the tub as the steam drifts up around him, his arms and one leg dangling over the porcelain rim like lazy, sweaty puppet's limbs.

Is that what he is, he wonders torpidly as he stares up at the embellished ceiling through a red-rimmed, alcohol-induced haze; a puppet controlled by the tempestuous whims of fortune and women? A fool chasing a dreamy vision of the perfect female under the pretense of the truth? An idiot led through the twisting turns of his life by his cock, just as every other man throughout history is fated to do?

And then he hears it, deep in the recesses of his addled brain, the question he's asked a hundred times before without ever really thinking about the answer:

Do you believe in Fate?

He wipes the cleansing sweat from his forehead with a sigh, denouncing the however brief pause he awards the words.

It's a line – a coy line meant to charm and distract, like a magician's sleight of hand. It doesn't mean anything, it has no significance to him except as an effort to spread a woman's legs. Eve was the last woman he used it on, in fact, that day in the cafe; he remembers how she wasted barely a heartbeat to tell him that, yes, she did believe in Fate. And he chuckles to himself of a sudden to recall her blithe confidence. But then he also remembers the reward of her plum-sweet flesh, sucked up countless times with the syrup of their sweat, and he rubs his hand over his face, in some foolish attempt to force her from his mind.

He's a journalist, for Christ's sake! He's supposed to be concerned with unbiased facts, and logic, not swayed by the succulence of a pretty woman's warm, pale flesh as she squirms and whimpers beneath his mouth. Yet here he lays, cursing the sad, pathetic twist of Fate that's brought him to this place, this point of thoughtless desire, torn between the illusive Witch he wants and the genuine woman who wants him.

He closes his eyes and drops his hand into the warm water, cupping some to his face and feeling his fingertips catch on the stubble on his cheeks and neck as he follows the water's path back to the tub. He'll have to grab a new shaving kit in the city this afternoon; his regular one is still sitting in the bathroom back at the flat, locked out of his reach when Eve slammed the door in his face.

He exhales a long breath, scratching at his jaw with another sigh, as more memories come flooding back.

She gave him the kit for his birthday four (or is it five?) years ago, telling him that – while she did like him a bit scruffy – he would be better respected among the higher class of his peers if he cleaned himself up every once in a while. He agreed (if reluctantly; he always thought a rougher look made him look roguish and a little less resistible to the opposite sex...though likely that was part of Eve's impetus all along)...and then made the wicked suggestion that if he had to shave down to the skin, then she had to, as well, initiating a semi-regular tradition of depilation that would invariably lead his mouth and hands to her sweet forbidden fruit.

And now, it's the memories of Eve's tantalizing mound that make him drop his hand between his own legs, taking his bath-heated, bobbing meat in the O formed by his fingers to stroke himself hard. It doesn't take much effort on his part; he's already at half-mast just from the thought of her citrusy fragrance and taste, and in a few moments he feels the welcome rush of arousal reaching its pinnacle.

He bites his lip between his teeth, though in all honesty the moaning might do him good, make him feel a little more in control. Or at least a little more gratified.

He's just about to spill when he hears it: the peculiar click of gunmetal on marble, a familiar and haunting sound. And then, summoned seemingly from the very air around him with the scent of rose petals, the devilish, snickering purr of the beautiful beholder from his dreams:

“What a nasty, nasty boy you are, Cheshire. Didn't your teachers ever tell you that you can go blind that way?”

4: The Same

"Jesus!" Cheshire shouts, nearly slipping beneath the water with a startled flailing of limbs at her entrance. Like a drowning rat, he scrabbles his hands against the inner rim of his tub, in some comical effort to sit up and cover himself from her view.

"Try again," Cereza prompts, smirking at his discomfiture.

Snorting water, his skin flushes bright pink, and not from the heat of his bath. "Bayonetta-!" he says, his nostrils flaring of a sudden.

She feels a sneer come to her lips, as she saunters around the edge of the tub, trailing her fingers along the porcelain. Against the marble tile of the floor, her gun-heels make a measured click-clack sound, like the ticking of a clock. It is a sound not dissimilar to the one made by Jeanne before her exit tantrum just that day.

Thoughts of her Umbran sister threaten to make Cereza's carefree facade falter, and that won't do her any good in front of Cheshire. So she pushes them down and in its place gives him a coquettish little shake of her head. "In the flesh," she says, crossing her ankles and extending her arms out to either side in a flamboyant curtsy.

To her surprise, he doesn't seem swayed by her charm. “Could you spare me the decency of knocking, first?!” he growls. He finally manages to sit up, while warm oily water splashes down to the floor, collecting in little puddles around her feet. “Or at least hand me a towel?” he grumbles, gesturing toward the rack near the door.

But she ignores him – it's the way they communicate, with him alternately asking for favors or making demands, and her choosing either to humor him or snub him, whichever suits her fancy at any particular moment – and instead perches herself on the rim of the tub, down near his feet. With a sniff and an undulating sway, she crosses one long leg over the other.

“You should know by now that even your masculine form holds no mystery for me,” she says with a fresh smirk. And then she rests two gloved fingers upon her cheek, to regard him with interest from over the top of her glasses.

He's aged some – understandably so – over the last ten years, but he wears the time well. The youthful, rounding baby fat is gone from his face, but it hasn't yet been replaced by the gauntness that tends to haunt most mortal men with his tall, narrow build, and which reminds her, strangely, of his father, who had the (ultimately unlucky) distinction of being the first man she laid eyes on after a centuries-long sleep. And while Cheshire will never be the impressive, beefy hulk of a man (well, Fallen one) that Rodin is, he's developed an impressive girth of both shoulder and chest that many fairer members of his lower class of being would likely find appealing and attractive. Comforting, a lesser woman might say, or even assuasive. (Jeanne would call his form apish, but Cereza prefers not to go there.) The bright, inquisitive light is still in those grey eyes, though, and even if age has made Cheshire not nearly so whimsical as he used to be, it's that fundamental quality of his intelligence – however much it sometimes gets sublimated behind his all-too-male lecherousness – that makes her pass her favorable judgment at last:

“You're looking well,” she says, less superficial than simply honest.

Cheshire's flustering suddenly turns to almost contemplative esteem, as he seems to study her from between two wet, curling locks of chestnut-colored hair drifting over his eyes. “You look the same,” he replies, and then he gives a low and almost wry snicker. “Not a day over – what? – twenty-two? Twenty-three?”

Cereza shrugs. “I stopped counting a long time ago,” she answers, truthfully enough. Then she drops her hand beside her, leaning against it as she cranes her head to garner a closer look at him. “Are those crow's feet?” she asks with a chuckle.

Cheshire stiffens (from the shoulders up, at least; everything of note below the water line he's covered with his hands for lack of anything more substantial), and a faint blush colors his face anew. “Not everybody's immortal,” he mumbles to her.

“I should hope not,” she says flippantly, hoping that the playful tone of her voice doesn't set him against her, too, today. She doesn't want to argue with him; quite the contrary. From what she's seen, from what she knows, he may just be the only person within her limited circle of trusted comrades-in-arms – she hesitates to call them friends, though she can't for the life of her put her finger on the reason as to why – willing to lend her a sympathetic ear when it comes to the more personal matters closer to her heart.

But it's never been easy for her to be serious, what mortals call being “in touch” with their feelings. Raw emotions and the dark arts, when put together, are a potentially explosive and deadly combination for all parties involved.

So she covers her minute anxiety with more frivolity. “Can you imagine how boring that would get?” she says, waving her arm and scoffing into the air. “Everyone having the same arguments over and over again, throughout eternity? Bad enough those libertine Lumen twats can never just admit when they're wrong-!”

“Bayonetta,” he interrupts, and then he sighs. The sound makes him seem much more weary, much more matured, much more exhausted than any thirty-whatever-year-old man should be. “Why are you here?”

Cereza stops, turns, and blinks her dark eyes at him. She can feel her long eyelashes brushing against the lenses of her ornate glasses, and the sensation reminds her of Jeanne's mascaraed lashes sweeping across hers, when they lay together side-by-side, faces touching. The sense memory makes her smile, for herself and for him.

“Because you want me to be here,” she tells him. “Because you need me to be here.” And then she speaks the words that even she has known to be true for quite some time, but has never been able to articulate until now:

“Because we're the same.”

His lips fall open at her in dumbfounded and mute surprise, and it makes him look very much like the young, idealistic man she once knew, ten years ago. The renewed resemblance is welcome.

So she sweeps herself to her feet with a breath and a light click of her tongue, turning to look at him over her shoulder. "So, Signore Redgrave," she says with a chuckle. "I suggest that you get your pretty self dressed, so that you can take me someplace where I can get a nice, stiff drink...and we can talk about it."

5: Dangerous, In a Man

Luka takes a final glance into the mirror above the sink, just to see if he can at least pass for sober and coherent to any onlookers on the street. Not that it's the type of thing he cares about, but it simply won't do to look like a drunken ne'er-do-well if he's going to be sitting beside Bayonetta in all her unabashedly, unambiguously predatory beauty.

Distinctly bloodshot eyes stare back at him from beneath his humidity-curled cowl of hair, and there's an uneven growth of beard shadowing his cheeks and chin, but other than that, he doesn't look so bad. So he finishes buttoning up his shirt and steps out to the main room of his hotel suite (fame has its privileges, even for a dedicated journalist like him), where the Witch has already taken the liberty of making herself comfortable – very comfortable – on the chaise, her long legs thrown over one burnished wooden armrest.

“You take almost as long as a woman to get ready,” she tells him with a half-puckered smile.

Luka snorts. “Well, now you know what it's like to be kept waiting,” he replies sardonically.

Bayonetta sweeps herself to her feet in one languid, fluid motion, her dark hair trailing after her like a cape. “Touche,” she offers, and then her lips perk into a pleased-looking smile. “That tongue is still as sharp as ever, I see.”

He bows low at the waist, with a flourish of one arm, and then abruptly stops himself. It's a move he's done for Eve many times, before stepping out with her for a meal or a stroll, or sometimes just to make her smile. And it reminds him of her, of her genteel, high-pitched laughter...and the final, painful words from her soft lips (“Just go,”), murmured to him only that morning.

He rises swiftly, turning serious.

The Witch seems to take his cue. There is still a subtle peak of the edges of her mouth, but the bulk of her typical smirking levity is replaced now by an odd gravity. “Shall we, then?” she suggests, nodding toward the main door.

“After you,” he says, and she sniffs in minor amusement, inclining her tall, winding coif ever so slightly to him. He follows her out, closing the door behind them and feeling like an adulterer, even though he isn't married and she isn't some secret lover.

Is this feeling part of what Eve meant, he wonders, when she told him that he was in love with a memory, a fragmented figment of his past that he's built over the years to be the perfect assemblage of feminine quality? A womanly ideal made so flawless in his mind that simply walking beside her again makes him feel like he's committing a sin against the darling maiden he left behind in his Florentine flat?

“You're too quiet,” Bayonetta says as they reach the bottom of the stairs.

“Just thinking,” he mutters as they step around the tall, Doric support column and into the atrium.

She chuckles, telling him: “That's dangerous, in a man.”

He can't help chuckling back; Eve is fond of saying the same, especially when the gears in his head start to turn to his, her, or their mutual pleasure, as they invariably do.

Bayonetta peers sidelong at him, her dark irises almost lost behind the intricate butterfly-wing rims of her glasses; it's almost as though she can read his mind with that gaze.

“What's her name?” she asks of a sudden, and Luka stiffens, mid-step; is telepathy part of an Umbran Witch's skills set?

He shifts, abruptly uncomfortable beneath her unwavering scrutiny. “What makes you assume I'm thinking about a woman?”

“You're a man,” she ripostes with a click of her tongue, as though disappointed. “A man who likes women. What else could possibly cause you so much distraction?”

Mind-reader or no, she's at the least got him mentally cornered now, so there isn't much point in trying to circumvent the question. So he snorts, telling her in a low voice: “Eve.”

Bayonetta's narrow nose wrinkles up. “Eve?” she echoes, and then she shoots a derisive breath through her nostrils. “How dreadfully biblical.”

“It's short for Evangeline,” he informs her with a crooked smile.

“Oh, bugger,” she says drily. “That's even worse. Where did you find her, a bloody Vigridian cloister?”

Now he laughs, as the memories of some of the charmingly impious things Eve has done to him come to mind; the brown-haired girl is gentle and lovely but she neither is nor ever has been (since he's known her, anyway) any measure of sinless, in mind or body. And then he stops, just in case Bayonetta really can see into his head; righteous feminist that she is, she's liable to punish him severely for some of the delicious transgressions he's committed upon Eve's body, under the guise of mutual stimulation.

“Hardly,” Luka mutters. They make their way to a table on the outskirts of the promenade, and as he sits down in the seat across from her, he drifts his hand across the table top with absent fondness, as he recalls the particulars of his first meeting with the girl who for some reason he can't shake from his mind.

“It was a cafe,” he tells her. “We ended up at the same table because there weren't any other seats left.” And he smiles, as he's reminded with surprising clarity of the shy but almost familiar way that Eve smiled up at him at his approach; the effortless exchange of pleasantries over coffee and cakes; and the impromptu stroll through the arcade afterward, discussing books and history and the culture of their Vigridian milieu.

“She was still just in Circulation back then,” he murmurs, mostly to himself, recalling, too, the playful but enticing way that she bounced up the steps of the Biblioteca Civica in Circle Square, and then that little half-turn on her hips, to wave back at him and smile.

It was her smile that brought him back to the cafe again the next day, and the day after, and the day after that, in an attempt to talk a little bit more, listen a little bit more, learn a little bit more...as well as to see if he could charm his way into her pants. He did, eventually – after two tantalizing weeks of cautious advances of his stroking fingers and questing lips – with a terribly cliched and dramatic pronouncement of his leaving in the morning to parts uncharted, for a span unknown. After that, the little darling practically kidnaped him to her bed, coaxing from him with her surprisingly talented kisses a promise to return, which he had absolutely no intention of keeping...yet two months later, he was back in that cafe, searching for the petite and pretty girl with the chocolate-brown eyes and pouty smile, the one whose skin smelled of pale, delicate Frangipani flowers, and whose high-pitched voice called him by name when she came.

Bayonetta's hushed snickering snaps him back to the present. “Circulation?” she says. “That sounds delightfully whorish.”

Luka chuckles; whorish, indeed. “She's a librarian,” he explains.

Bayonetta crosses her legs, snickering again. “A librarian!” she pronounces, sounding both surprised and inexplicably impressed at the same time. “Well, she sounds perfect for you, Cheshire,” she says, and he feels a swell of pride at this estimation; the Witch is not the only one who can seduce and enrapture.

But then she leans over the table and chuckles, wickedly. “What was the reason?” she asks in her throaty purr. “All-access to those precious rare scribe collections? Or just a bit of sweet honey in the pot?”

A flash of memory – Eve's wet, whimpering lips pressed against his palm, her sweat-slick thigh flexed over his elbow, and the dull, rocking thud of heavy hardbacks next to his ear as he growled salubrious threats to her virtue and dominated her among ancient texts of Lumen Sage prophecies – makes him stiffen in his chair, as a flush starts to burn in his face. And, suddenly, a pang of something very cold, something very much like...shame...cuts through his ribs. He has only ever wanted to be noticed by the Witch, after all, to be drawn into her fold as an equal, a confidant, a lover. So he's spent the last several years of his life bending another woman to his whim, as a substitute for his deep-rooted desires to rule and rein in the Witch he can never tame, the woman who sits across from him even now, blinking at him from over the top rim of her ornate glasses.

Bayonetta's perfect, glossy lips pucker as he stares at her. “Oh,” she says. “Have I twisted a nerve?”

Luka tightens his mouth into a thin line. Eve told him to go, go and never come back to her. She made her bed, she can lie in it: alone, without him. This is the woman he wants, the wily ruler of his dreams and fantasies.

He smiles. “No,” he says at last, and then he leans forward in his seat, almost reaching across the table with his hand, the way he did in another cafe, in another time, with another woman, to bridge the gap of acquaintance into something more substantial, more heady and luscious, the culmination of his desires.

But just as he is about to reach her, he stops short, of a sudden noticing the small, delicate flowers that form the decorative centerpiece between them. He picks one from the rest, twirling it between his fingers with abrupt distraction, carelessly, until his mental encyclopedia of detail recognizes the fragile petals in his hand:

Frangipani. Also known as plumeria.

Of course.

Luka closes his fist, crushing the flower in his palm, and shakes his head. “Let's get those drinks,” he mutters.