ּ֯ . ❥ ּ֯ ┆꒰ Pierrot .ᐟ ꒱

The circus had a different kind of quiet after the show.

During the performance it was all noise and light and the particular breathless energy of a crowd held in the palm of something they didn't fully understand. After — when the last of the audience had filed out blinking into the night air and the big tent had emptied down to nothing but sawdust and the ghost of applause — the silence that settled was something else entirely. Deeper. More deliberate. Like the circus itself was exhaling.

You should have left with everyone else.

You didn't.

The backstage area was a narrow corridor of canvas and shadow, lit by a string of low warm bulbs that swayed slightly whenever someone passed beneath them. Prop boxes lined the walls. Costumes hung from iron hooks like shed skins. The whole place smelled like greasepaint and something older underneath it, something that didn't have a name you knew. You had been telling yourself you were just curious. Just looking. Just wandering a little further than you were supposed to.

The door at the end of the corridor was slightly ajar.

You pushed it open.

The dressing room was small and still and lit by a single lamp in the corner that threw long shadows up the walls. There was a mirror. A low wooden table covered in things you didn't have time to look at properly. A costume hanging half off its hook.

And Pierrot.

He was standing with his back half turned to the door, in the middle of something — his red cloak was already off, folded over the back of a chair, and his gloves were on the table beside it. His hat was still on. It was always still on. You had never seen him without it and something told you, in the particular instinctive way that certain things make themselves known without being said, that you were not going to see him without it tonight either.

He heard you the instant you stepped inside.

He went still.

Not startled — nothing as sudden or ungraceful as that. Just still. The particular stillness of something very large and very aware that has just registered something it did not expect and is deciding, quietly, what to do about it. His shoulders didn't tense. His hands didn't move. He simply stopped, mid-motion, and the room stopped with him.

Then, slowly, he turned.

His golden eyes found you across the small space between you and stayed there. And then something happened to them — something small and involuntary that he had absolutely no control over and would have hidden if he could have. His pupils, gold and sharp a moment ago, softened at the edges and curved and became, unmistakably, the shape of hearts. Just for a moment. Just long enough to see. He looked away almost immediately, a sharp turn of his head to the side, and when he looked back they were gold again and his expression gave nothing away.

But his face told a different story.

The color came in slowly, creeping across the white of his mask like something he couldn't stop and couldn't hide — pink deepening toward red at his cheeks, spreading up toward the black markings over his eyes, visible and undeniable against the stark white of his face. He was blushing. Genuinely, helplessly blushing, his own skin betraying him in the most obvious way possible. From the slight tension in his jaw it was clear this bothered him considerably.

The teardrop marking beneath his left eye caught the lamplight.

He looked at you the way he always looked at you, which was to say with an attention so complete and so unbroken that it was almost difficult to hold. Like you were the only thing in the room worth looking at. Like you had always been the only thing in any room worth looking at and he had simply been waiting, with great patience, for you to end up somewhere like this.

He didn't reach for his gloves.

He didn't tell you to leave.

The door swung gently shut behind you on its own, nudged by the draft from the corridor, and the click of the latch was very loud in the silence. Neither of you looked at it. Neither of you moved toward it.

His head tilted slightly. A small thing. Barely anything. The bells on his hat chimed once, soft and small in the quiet. Just enough to say that he was waiting — that whatever happened next was yours to decide, and that he had already decided something of his own and would hold it quietly until you caught up.

The lamp flickered once.

His eyes didn't move from yours. The blush across his white face hadn't faded. If anything it had deepened, spreading further, reaching the tips of his ears where his silver hair fell loose around them.

The circus was empty. There was no one in the corridor. No one was coming backstage at this hour. It was just the two of you and the low warm light and the particular quality of a silence that had stopped being empty and started being something else entirely, something that pressed against the walls of the small room and asked a question neither of you had said out loud yet.

Slowly, without looking away, he took one step toward you.

Just one.

And waited.