InsaneJournal

Fic: Erzulie (No Spoilers)
Title: Erzulie
Author: nishizono
Pairing: Blaise/Pansy (mentions of Blaise/Draco, Blaise/Draco/Pansy)
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: None
Theme/kink: Serenading
Word Count: 4900

Summary: It was a real shame he didn’t swing that way, because if he had, she’d be the one he’d dance with

Notes: This story is accompanied by an open letter from my friend Haze, which can be found here.



~*~*~

For Erik, for Haze, for Lisa: in memory of T, and “a city as mad and cruel as it is beautiful.”

~*~*~

It was one of those sultry summer nights, where the moisture clung to windowpanes and bared flesh in a sheen of translucent gloss over filth, gleaming in the muted yellow light of gas streetlamps. The heavy purple blossoms of the bougainvillea drooped low from their vines, basking in the heat that radiated up from the pavement, anchored by smooth wrought iron and crumbling stone. The city itself breathed life in deep, full sighs of gulf air and laughter.

Blaise plucked one of the dark fuchsia flowers from its vine as he walked, slipping it into the rim of his hat with a murmured, “Sorry, love; you’re just too damned pretty for your own good.”

A group of young women passed him, a shimmering mirage of tanned legs and bronzed cheeks, and he spared a wink when they strayed too close. One of them glanced over her shoulder at him, and he shook his head with a grin. Not tonight, doll; not when this city’s so full of ghosts and magic.

The French Quarter heralded his approach with song, long before he rounded the corner onto Bourbon Street; the soulful notes of the sax and the low rhythm of the bass like the heartbeat of a barely tamed thing, slowly bending the iron bars of its cage. At the doors of the Café Beignet, cigar smoke and the scent of whiskey unfurled to greet him, wrapped around and pulled him inside with lingering caresses and heady promises.

She was there, of course, as Blaise had known she would be; lit from overhead and shadowed from behind, knotted up in pearls and draped in satin; feminine and lovely, and anything but delicate. Their eyes met the moment he stepped through the door, as he’d known they would, and he slipped into an abandoned seat in the front row, smirking at his own bravado.

A waitress approached, lithe and dark, but Blaise’s attention was focused on the stage as she leaned in to take his order, Pansy’s voice soft and low in the background, “Other dancers may be on the floor, but my eyes will see only you.”

A glass was placed beside his elbow only a few moments later, cut crystal and amber courage, spicy sweet against his tongue. Lips tingling, Blaise raised his drink in a toast to Pansy’s everything before taking another sip.

Red lacquered fingernails against the metallic sheen of a microphone, and a false declaration in a smooth, melodic alto, “Only you have that magic technique, when we sway I go weak.”

The corners of her lips curved upwards and Blaise offered a roguish grin in response. Years later, long after tearful farewells and vehement promises, and the girl could still bring out the wicked flirt in him. It was a real shame he didn’t swing that way, because if he had, she’d be the one he’d dance with; but then, a lot of things were a real shame these days.

“You have a way with me,” Blaise murmured into his drink, as the last of the music died a slow, mournful death to the sound of applause.

Pansy slinked off the stage in a whisper of dark blue satin and a satisfied toss of black hair over a bare shoulder. One of her admirers waylaid her as she made her way to the table, with a blushing kind of, “You were really good tonight, Miss Parkinson. Don’t know how you do it every night, keep getting better and better, I mean.”

“Want to know my secrets, do you, Davie?” she replied, red lips set in that mischievous smile Blaise loved to hate.

The young man nodded eagerly, and Blaise hid a smirk in his whiskey, more interested in witnessing the aftershock of Pansy’s charm than rescuing the poor sap.

Pansy leaned in close, ends of her hair brushing good old Davie’s sleeve, and whispered, “I’m a witch.”

Davie blinked at her until his face broke into a boyish grin, and he laughed. “Fine, keep your secrets,” he said.

“I will,” she promised, fingers tapping his arm before she turned away, leaving him staring long after her swaying hips settled into the chair across from Blaise.

“Minx,” Blaise admonished.

“I learned from the best,” Pansy shot back, with a mock glare that made Blaise grin and tip his hat to her. “What are you doing here?”

“Came to see what all the fuss is about,” Blaise replied as he fished a silver lighter and a pack of cigarettes out of his trouser pocket.

“Don’t play coy with me, Blaise Zabini,” Pansy reprimanded him with a jab of one red fingernail in his direction. “I taught you coy.”

“And I learned from the mistress herself,” Blaise replied with a wistful sort of smile, lighting a cigarette with a quiet click and a burst of flame.

“How’s Draco?” she asked, plucking the cigarette from his fingertips and taking a deep drag.

“Same as always: arrogant, gorgeous, and spoiled rotten,” he replied, twirling the lighter on the scarred wooden tabletop.

“It’s your own fault,” Pansy declared, squinting at him through the haze of smoke. “I told you from the start not to spoil him but, as usual, you didn’t listen, did you?”

“It’s part of my charm,” Blaise laughed, and then, more soberly, said, “He misses you, Pans. We both do.”

“Don’t start that again, Zabini,” Pansy said, but the glare was softened this time by the fingertips she twined through his. “I miss you too, but I don’t miss England.”

“The war’s over,” Blaise replied with a sigh. “Been over for three years now.”

“The war’s never going to be over,” Pansy asserted with gleaming blue eyes and too many memories. “Not for us.”

“Besides,” she continued with a final squeeze of his hand, “This city’s got a way of getting under your skin, and I’m not ready to let it go yet; think it might rip me open if I tried, really.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Blaise said, and did.

“I don’t know how you can drink that shit,” Pansy told him reproachfully.

“What?” he said with a feigned look of horror. “This is the best whiskey I’ve had in ages.”

“You’re so bloody English sometimes,” she told him. “But it’s good to hear someone else wandering around here without an accent; good to hear your voice.”

“Yours too, Pans,” Blaise said quietly, fingers settling dark over pale on hers. “Yours too.”

Pansy smiled at him, and for a heartbeat they were sixteen again, restless and immortal.

“Come on,” she said, tugging lightly at his hand as she slipped, satin smooth, out of her chair. “It’s late, I’m tired, and Davis is going to come over here any second and ask to walk me home.”

“Far be it for me to deny the opportunity to defend a beautiful woman’s honor,” Blaise replied, taking the last of his whiskey in a single swallow and slamming the glass down on the table. “Not that you’ve any honor left to be defending.”

“Twat,” she dubbed him with a quirk of red lips and a pinch.

Laughing, Blaise allowed himself to be led out into the summer-damp French Quarter, carried along Bourbon Street and through Jackson Square on salt-kissed river breezes and pale moonlight. The night lapsed into a soft hum of lazy traffic and the quiet debates of front porch parliaments as they moved deeper into the heart of Faubourg Treme.

“I don’t know what you were expecting, Zabini,” Pansy murmured as they came up the creaking wooden steps of a ramshackle little house. There was a hint of indignation in her voice, but before Blaise could offer an apology for the derisive comment he hadn’t made, she’d unlocked the door and disappeared inside.

“I bought it when I first moved here,” she explained, not looking at him as he closed the screen door behind him with a groan of ancient hinges. “It didn’t get damaged in the flood, though, and I thought I’d keep it; seemed kind of fitting.”

“It’s yours,” Blaise told her, settling two dark hands on her bare shoulders and forcing her to meet his gaze.

“Yeah,” Pansy blinked up at him. “Yeah, it’s mine.”

They held one another’s- memories, hearts, souls- gazes for a moment before Pansy turned away and slid with blue satin grace across the scarred wooden floor. A wand, slender and willow-pale, lit a row of candles that had dripped wax down the edge of a peeling paint windowsill.

“I still don’t like electric lights,” Pansy explained as the candle flames wavered in the jasmine scented breeze. “And I think the neighbors might get a little skittish if I started conjuring orbs.”

Blaise laughed and shrugged off his light suit jacket, draping it over the back of a nearby armchair as he surveyed the room. The hazy glow of the candlelight cast golden shadows over dark red curtains and flowering wine bottle vases. Thick cushions on a sofa too large for its space gleamed raven feather black against cracked white plaster and hand carved crown molding. Ebony-lipped Kalfu stood sentry for a moonstone rosary on a low sidetable, and Blaise glanced up at Pansy through dark lashes.

“Practicing voodoo, Parkinson?” he murmured, tapping a finger against honeyed maple, a pointed inch away from the statue’s base.

“Wouldn’t you love to know, Zabini?” Pansy shot back over her shoulder, moonlight flesh bared between the separated seam of her dress as she drew the zipper down, all unabashed nonchalance that had once seemed much less threatening than the lines of masculine muscle beneath school robes.

Blaise swallowed and looked away. “It’s dangerous stuff.”

“So am I,” Pansy replied with a careless shrug, feline elegance slipping out of a silken cage as she disappeared down the narrow hall.

Urged forward by an inexplicable rush of warmth through the open window, Blaise followed.

There were candles there too; four tiny, temporary lives of writhing flame, dark as the crimson silk that hung in disarray around the bed. Vanilla scented remains of incense long since smoldered to ash scattered across the chocolate smooth surface of the dressing table, above which hung a mirror with deep blue eyes that glanced up at him as he hovered in the doorway.

“I’ll be out in a minute,” Pansy said quietly, running slender fingers through her tousled black hair. “Just let me find my robe.”

Bass lines thrumming in his chest, Blaise watched through a haze of firelight humidity as the smooth curves of Pansy’s arms curled upwards through the shadows, and red fingernails plucked at the silver clasp at the back of her slender neck. “Don’t,” he said softly, taking a step forward into the room.

“What?” she hesitated, perfectly arched eyebrows drawn together with confusion as her hand stilled, tiny silver coils held between her fingertips.

Breathing summer air surprised by want, Blaise closed the distance between them, gazes locking in the mirror for a beat, a rest, a beat of silence. Tracing the line of pearls at her throat with a fingertip, he murmured with whiskey courage, “Leave them on.”

“Blaise.”

Nothing more than a breath and a heartbeat, black silk stockings and pale flesh, jasmine breezes and heady warmth.

“Blaise,” Pansy whispered again, “We can’t do this.”

“Why?” he pressed, his words, his chest against her back, and his heart, heavy as the blossoms that had lured him in a blaze of purple against sun-warmed wrought iron.

“We tried, the three of us, remember?” she reminded him quietly, shifting in his arms until there was no more mirror between them to justify the gleam in her eyes. “Back before the war, before we realized that Draco’s too arrogant, I’m too self-absorbed, and you’re too-“

Blaise silenced her with a kiss, laced with whiskey and full of unspoken declarations that pressed we miss you to her lips, stroked we need you along the slick heat of her tongue, and captured breath like smoke with we love you.

“Gay,” he finished for her, pulling away and tracing the contours of her red tinted lips with his own. “But if I weren’t, you’re the one I’d dance with.”

A heartbeat of silence hung in the heavens like stars, and she tilted her head to the side, black silk of her hair like shadows of memory over her shoulder. Reaching up, she plucked the dark purple blossom from the brim of his hat and slid it into her hair, just above her ear. Red lips curled upward, more kiss bruised than lipstick, and she nodded, once.

Satisfied, and more than a little bit afraid, Blaise slid both arms around Pansy’s slender waist to pull their bodies together. Mindful of the ever-present shoes strewn haphazardly across the floor, he pulled her backwards with him toward satin sheets and the warm glow of candlelight.

“You bleeding romantic,” Pansy admonished him, as if she could read his thoughts when he leaned in to kiss her.

Grinning, Blaise tightened his arms around her and lifted her off the floor with effortless grace. “Shouldn’t play with dangerous things, Pans,” he told her with a deceptively soft kiss to flush on her cheeks.

“That’s what they’re there for,” she replied with a wicked smile.

With a quiet sound, more sigh than laughter, he tossed her onto the bed. There was a soft huff of feigned protest as Pansy pushed up onto her elbows, stockinged toes curling into red satin as she fluttered her eyelashes at him.

“Now who’s playing coy, kitten?” Blaise said with a devilish grin as he worked the buttons of his shirt loose and shrugged it off.

“No more than you’re the tease,” she replied, curling a finger at him.

Heeding the beckoning gesture, Blaise dropped to his knees on the end of the bed, bracing both hands on either side of her legs. Leaning in, he brushed his lips across the arch of her foot before moving upward, taking the delicate flesh of her silk-clad ankle between his teeth.

“Zabini, you bastard!” Pansy squeaked, kicking slightly to dislodge her tormentor.

“Still ticklish, then,” Blaise smirked, running dark fingertips along the taut line of her stockinged calf, and brushing the backs of her knees with manicured fingernails.

“Blaise!” she gasped in protest, twisting away from the touch; but he grasped both slender thighs and dragged her down against the sheets, smooth flesh and blood red lips, until she was pressed against him. “Oh,” she breathed, her halfhearted laughter trailing off into a breathy sigh as she rocked her hips downward.

“What were you saying?” Blaise taunted, meeting the gentle movement of her body against his with slow thrusts.

“You’re still wearing too many clothes,” Pansy replied in a murmur, staring up at him in a blaze of sapphires and smoke.

No hesitation, just vanilla and whiskey, candlelight and black magic, as Blaise slid a hand down his torso to tug at his belt. Metal against metal, leather against leather, and the slow vibrato-strummed slide of a zipper.

“Don’t,” Pansy purred when he lifted a hand to remove his hat.

With a lazy grin, he let his hand fall to her thigh, counting off the beats of his heart in tiny circles against warm flesh. Pansy smiled beneath him, caught her breath when night sky fingers traced the muscles of her stomach, tilted her head back as he leaned over her for a kiss.

“Anyone ever tell you you’re beautiful, Parkinson?” Blaise murmured against the heat of her lips.

“Yeah,” she whispered. “I get that a lot.”

Blaise withdrew slightly to stare down at her smirking face, flushed and lovely, the slender length of her wrapped up in pearls and silk. Tracing the contours of a silver white scar from ribs to hip, outlining ghosts with his fingertips, he murmured, “I bet none of them are as charming as me.”

Catching his hand and bringing it to her lips, Pansy brushed a kiss across his knuckles and said, “No one’s as charming as you, Blaise.”

Blaise offered her a disbelieving huff before bowing his head and traveling the path of her scar with the tip of his tongue, making her shiver beneath him and lace her fingers through his. Muscles tense with desire he didn’t care to explain or justify, he slid the waistband of his trousers down past his hips, and gasped at warm air on heated flesh that yearned for touch.

Bare want pleading beneath him, the smooth slide of flesh on satin, and his lips brushed her inner thigh with a low murmur of praise. A soul deep moan, and his tongue swept through slick heat, bittersweet and beautiful. Clutching, grasping fingers on his shoulder, hot as the summer night, he slid his thumb into her with the slow twist of a slender wrist.

“Tease,” Pansy told him in a gasp, arching and weightless with need.

“Learned from the best,” he breathed against her trembling thigh, drunk on river breezes and purple flowers in black hair.

“Blaise,” she whined, soft and needy.

Blaise relented, thumbing molten desire across the head of his cock as he looked up at her.

Pansy stared down at him, flawed and lovely, feminine and fearless, scarred and anything, everything but delicate.

Smoothing his palms over black silk and soft skin, he lifted her knees until they pressed against his ribs, heels resting in the small of his back. Gazes locked, they slid together in one deep thrust that caught in their throats and seeped out in twin groans.

She was hot and tight around him, so terrifyingly amazing that Blaise paused to still the vodoun drumbeat of his heart. Below him, Pansy shifted, all silky girlishness and eyes open wide, almost innocent as he withdrew and slid home again with a baritone growl.

“Merde,” she whimpered, head tilted back to bare her throat, which he leaned in to caress with wandering lips and fingertips. “Je me suis ennuyé de toi tellement.”

“Je me suis ennuyé de toi aussi,” Blaise murmured against the side of her neck, muscles trembling with black iron weight to anchor her clinging body.

Hands across sweat-slicked flesh, twining and clutching, drawn up and pressed down against blood red satin. Lips caught on whiskey laced sighs, brushing together with more and this and us and please, and black magic promises whispered to surrender.

Caught by war calloused hands, she writhed and gasped, breathing ache in her kisses and bleeding hope with every twist of slender hips. Blaise closed his eyes, needing the warmth of her around his cock, in his mouth, on his skin. Pansy was everywhere, everything, creeping through his veins, into his heart, reclaiming a place that had could never belong to anyone else.

“Blaise,” she sobbed, arching into him and pulling him deeper.

“I’m here,” he assured her, and didn’t know why until her legs tightened around his waist, and the fingers intertwined with his clutched at him with crimson nails that bit a line of crescent scars into the back of his hand. “I’m here, Pansy.”

With a heartbeat of silence shattered by a quiet gasp, she surrendered. Spellfire eyes open and clear, burning into his as she quaked in his arms, clenching around him and pushing him deeper with stockinged feet against his spine. Blaise held her, pressed needy fingertips into her hips and rocked her against the satin sheets, catching the last of her desperate cries in a kiss.

“Alright there, Parkinson?” Blaise asked her with a bokor grin as she trembled and swallowed, throat moving beneath his lips.

“You’re not bad at this for a gay man,” Pansy conceded, stroking his ribs with lazy fingertips. “You stopped, though.”

“Just giving you time to recover, kitten,” he replied, smirking at the concern in her voice. The truth was, he would have been content to lie there, despite the ache in his cock as it throbbed and pleaded inside her, as long as he could feel the staccato rhythm of her pulse beneath his fingertips, and the low melody of late night traffic on Rampart Street.

“Recovered enough for what I plan to do to you,” Pansy murmured with a much too strong hand against his shoulder.

Blaise obediently rolled onto his back, holding his hat in place with one hand and pulling her down atop him with the other. Black hair brushed his chest, kiss swollen lips soft on his stomach, and he traced the serpentine path of her spine with his thumb.

“You’ve got your work cut out for you, Parkinson,” he teased. “I’ve been seeing Draco for five years.”

“Oh please, Zabini,” she huffed against his hip, retracing her breath’s path with a hot tongue. “You don’t think you’re the only one I took under my wing, do you? The two of you’d be even more hopeless if it weren’t for me.”

Tilting his head back until the brim of his hat covered his eyes, Blaise didn’t tell her how absolutely right she was. Instead, he threaded his fingers through raven silk hair and pulled his lower lip between his teeth when he felt the first glide of her tongue across the head of his prick. Just right, the curl of her lips over the foreskin; perfect, her breath ghosting over his torso; flawless, the yambu chorus of crickets and the city’s sleepy heartbeat, just beyond windowpanes open to the night sky.

Blaise thought he’d be thinking of Draco, of pale hair and sharp features; and he did, as the missing houngan in a rum-drenched bayou ritual. The rest was soft curves and feminine sighs that conjured their absent lover’s smirking lips with every breath, until Blaise could swear he heard Draco’s smooth, aristocratic drawl saying, “This city’s mad and cruel as it is beautiful.”

Pansy shifted, slender legs splayed across crimson sheets, pale flesh peeking through a run in black silk stockings. Blaise lifted his head and followed the sliver of white with his fingertips, mending hearts and fabric with his touch. She made a quiet sound of thanks, of apology, of pleasure, as the molasses-thick heat poured out over her calf.

“Thank you,” she murmured, pulling away long enough to glance up at him.

Blaise nodded and closed his eyes as her lips tightened around him, because he knew what it felt like to be so deeply scarred you thought you’d never find your way home again.

Outside, a car rumbled past, war-drum bass lines and heaven-high saxophone crackling with crumbling parchment sweetness through the sultry summer night. A slow brushstroke of gulf air made the candlelight dance on the dark canvas of his eyelids, and Blaise tightened his fingers on Pansy’s thigh.

“Pans- I-“ he gasped, fingernails biting into soft flesh.

Pansy brushed his hand away with a quiet sound that met somewhere in the distance between moan and sigh; brushed his inner thigh with smooth fingertips; brushed his reckless heart with hers as he tilted his head back into darkness with a shuddering exhalation.

Candlelight heat rushed through him, pulsed through his veins, slick and needy as the mouth on his cock. Muscles trembling with black magic melody, and the chanting of ancient god-song with voodoo heartbeats, Blaise curled his toes into blood-sheen satin and helplessly drove his hips upward. A molten flood of tongue-strummed ecstasy shattered the crumbling walls of nameless defense; and he came with a silent cry, a whimpered prayer, a screaming incantation of loss, and love, and need more fragile than time-

-and when he opened his eyes again, she was singing; a heartbreak melody unaccompanied but for jasmine breezes and twinkling stars.

“They say you’re a runaround lover, but you say it isn’t so.”

Blaise closed his eyes again, feigning sleep, pretending not to hear the carefully misplaced doubt in her voice.

“The night has a thousand eyes, and a thousand eyes can’t help but see.”

“Pansy,” he said softly, rolling onto his back and looking up at her.

She was perched in the windowsill, candles long extinguished, outlined in silvery moonlight. A plume of smoke rose around her, curling off white against the dark purple blossom in her hair. The green shirt was Draco’s, the silver lighter she toyed with against her knee was his own, and Blaise smiled.

“Do you always faint after you come, or was the horror of having a woman bring you off just too much?” Pansy asked, squinting at him. The smoke and whiskey voice teased; the blue eyes didn’t.

“You’re not just any woman, dollface,” Blaise told her, erring on the side of honesty. “You’ve always had a way with me, and you bloody well know it.”

Mollified, at least for the moment, she looked away and took another deep drag from her cigarette. “Took me ages to get used to how quiet it is here,” she murmured. “Couple of hours before dawn, and there’s nothing but crickets and frogs.”

Blaise shifted, rolled onto his side and propped his head on a bent elbow. “Nothing like home,” he agreed softly.

“This is home,” Pansy replied, tilting her head back against the windowsill and exhaling a stream of smoke and memory. “We understand each other, this city and I.”

“Yeah,” Blaise said thoughtfully. “Yeah, I guess you do.”

She smiled at him then, the first real smile he’d seen on her face in years, and in a bass line heartbeat, everything changed.

“I should go soon,” he said with a grin. “Draco’ll have a fit if I’m not back when he gets home.”

“Can’t have that,” Pansy laughed. “He might break a nail, sinking those claws of his into your pretty eyes.”

“I promised him I’d bring you back, you know,” Blaise said, serious now that he was pulling the waistband of his trousers over his hips and drawing the zipper up with a fingertip slide of this is how it should be.

“And are you going to?” she replied, tossing the remains of her cigarette out the window to smolder beneath the oleander. Catlike, she slid off the windowsill and plucked his shirt off the floor.

“You’re already back, aren’t you?” he asked her, brushing the question against her knuckles with his thumb.

Pansy watched him with a considering gaze as he did up the buttons of his shirt, black hair on green silk and red lips curled upward in a silent challenge. “I’m too self-absorbed,” she said.

“You are,” he conceded with a grin.

“Draco’s much too arrogant for his own good,” she continued, following him through the summer heat shadows of the hallway.

“Always has been,” he agreed with a laugh, pausing to collect his discarded jacket.

“You’re the gayest man I’ve ever met,” she told him, pulling the screen door open with a creak of hinges. “And so bloody flamboyant sometimes, I can hardly stand it.”

“Blaise Zabini, at your service,” he replied with a mocking tip of his hat.

They stared at one another for a moment, there in the doorway of a ramshackle little house in the heart of Faubourg Treme: veterans and friends, allies and lovers, two careless magicians, weaving time with breath and hope with heartbeats.

“You should probably take this,” Pansy said, holding up the silver lighter between them, dangling from her fingertips. “Never know when one of you might have to light some beautiful woman’s cigarette.”

Blaise slid his hand over hers, felt magic and vouex incassables curl around his fingertips like smoke. Grinning, he tucked the lighter into the breast pocket of his jacket, just over his heart, and tipped his hat to her before tilting her face upward with a thumb hooked beneath her chin. “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid,” he whispered.

The screen door closed behind him with a soul deep shudder of hinges, and he knew she wouldn’t be standing there if he turned to look. Laughing a drumbeat melody, Blaise strode down the breeze damp streets of Faubourg Treme to the corner of Rue Rampart, plucking a drooping bougainvillea blossom from its vine and tucking it into the brim of his hat.

This city was as mad and cruel as it was lovely, and it didn’t matter if she was a thousand, two thousand, even three thousand miles away from where she’d once been, because the war was over and none of them were where they used to be; and Blaise knew what it was like to rest your head at night and have the warm arms of home wrap around you, hold you tight and tender beneath the careless summer sky. He knew what it was like to fall in love, with cities and men, dreams and faith, magic and hope.

Draco’s pocketwatch was heavy in his palm, gleaming silver in the moonlight as he pressed two night sky fingertips to the clasp. Breathing summer air like candlelight, memories like stardust, he disappeared with a bass line thrum.

Somewhere along the Rue Royale, the lonesome melody of a tenor saxophone caught the salt kissed breeze, singing a black magic song for a thousand midnight souls in a city that was flawed but beautiful, beaten but not broken, deeply scarred and anything, everything but delicate.