Chapter Text
Home, for Aria, used to be so simple. It was anywhere she could see the stars and be with Elisa. A telescope and a shared bed were enough to make any house their home.
Then came the blackmail, the ransom demands, and that horrible night when Aria came home to find Elisa on the floor with her throat slit and an envelope of dried flower petals sat beside her body.
For a year, Aria traveled the world, tracking down the person who had murdered her lover. Finally, she met a man who told her, a knife to his throat, that the assassin, Scathewick, had come from the Neath.
She wasn’t doing well when she came to London. The past year had taken its toll, mentally and physically. Which was probably why the first thing she did was get drunk out of her mind on something called Black Wings Absinthe and stab someone whose perfume smelled like the flower petals from the murder scene. The stabbing wasn’t even temporarily fatal, but she threatened a constable who came to talk to her, which was enough to get her thrown in New Newgate.
Aria served almost her full sentence before she escaped. She couldn’t muster up the will to keep going. But then she heard the gaolers mention a murder case that sounded almost exactly like Elisa’s.
London could never be Aria’s home. The false-stars did not compare to the skies she had left behind, and no woman she met could ever compare to Elisa.
Veilgarden was too loud, too bright, too crowded. And a pianist at the Singing Mandrake had a taste for Tchaikovsky, which reminded her too much of Elisa.
Watchmaker’s Hill was, in Aria’s mind, little more than a filthy marsh infested with spiders and fungus. It did, however, have an observatory. She hiked up the hill once to see it, but it was inhabited entirely by eyeless monks and the spiders who had taken those eyes.
In Spite, she could disappear among the masses. But those masses had a talent for attracting the attention of the constables, and Aria had secrets to keep.
Ladybones Road was the kind of place where people minded their own damn business. Everyone except the devils, milling around Moloch Street Station, gathering under Hangman’s Arch, trying to talk passers-by into giving up their souls.
The University should have felt like home, and for a time, it did. But then Aria grew so desperate to preserve her place there that she exiled an innocent woman for the favor of Summerset’s Provost. After that, she was left in a kind of in-between space. Summerset disapproved of her work with the Correspondence, and Benthic saw her as a liar and a traitor. So she shut herself up in her lab for weeks on end and did her best to forget about them all.
Home, these days, was the forgotten and abandoned places, more full of death than life. Wandering the Forgotten Quarter was one of very few things that brought Aria a feeling of peace. The tomb-colonists there greeted her as a friend; as well they might, for every day she was becoming more like them.
It was the tomb-colonists that pointed her to the old dripstone temple. Outside the city, it was hidden away among stalactites and cliffs. It was an empty, silent place, heavy with old memories. Perfect.
So Aria secluded herself away in that temple, surrounded herself with her books and equipment for reading the language of the stars, and she told herself she was content. Not happy, but satisfied. Elisa wouldn’t have liked the place. But Elisa wasn’t here.