(no subject)

[rhoddlet]

*

All the players who can buy the bar
And the balling-ass niggers with the candy-ass cars
If you're a player and you know don't love them hoes. . .

*

Tom has been scrimping and saving and economizing all semester, but in the end, all he's got is just enough to buy him a two-way Port into Paris in the rainy offseason. This isn't to say that this city isn't still something with those grey streets under a wash of North Atlantic rain. The cathedrals, the streets, he's got a little rental room in the student quarter with no heating and dishwater colored walls, and since it's just as warm outside on the streets as in there, he goes wandering up and down the streets all day, returns to his room only to whisper a heating charm on the bedsheets and pile coats on top of himself before sleeping. He doesn't have enough money for a camera either, so he just stands in front of the Eiffel for half hour trying to capture the lines in his head with the rain pouring down on his face. He does the same for the Arc de Triomphe, stands on a curbside and sticks his head out an angle into the street to look at it because the Champs is already buzzing with cars even though there're potholes the size of a truck from the tank shelling that hasn't been fixed earlier. What he really spends most of his time doing in Paris, though, is going church-hopping. Churches are reasonably warm, actually, and free and you can spend hours in them without someone kicking you out.

Not that many people do. Riddle has such a strange face, not quite English, not quite French or European, for that matter with the deep, dark eyes over broad cheekbones. A sharp nose, those proud lips -- it takes some effort to make that face into a pretty one, really, but there certainly is something striking about it especially in the dark reaches of a church.

Tom doesn't go to Notre Dame or any of the ones in the fashionable quarters of Paris and especially not the Sorbonne one with its students in black and gold-ringed cigarettes. Some of his housemates have houses in Paris, and Tom refuses to be seen in this threadbare coat with his neck dirty and his fingertips blue. Old churches. Churches that are falling down, churches tucked next to patisseries, churches where the street is crowded up close against the nave. He sits through morning masses and takes the Eucharist twelve times at four churches during the first two days at Paris.

"You must need an awful lot of grace," says this dark-haired boy who comes almost as frequently himself, although a lot of times he doesn't take part, just sits in the back and looks hungrily up the aisle at the priest. He says this in French, which makes a little curl of pleasure unfold in Tom's stomach, and he doesn't object when the boy comes up and sits in the same pew, companionably close. After they take the Eucharist kneeling next to each other, they go for a walk through one of the little parks that're all around the city.

"I'm not really Catholic," Tom explains with a little smile and his charmingly accented French. It's half-dark already, and this raw little wind is blowing through the park -- boislettes, that's the local slang for them, though the trees in this one press quite close and are growing dark faster than the sky. They're walking along a little gravelled path, but then the other boy stops.

"Neither am I," the boy says, looking up at Riddle with eyes that are shaded into blackness by the covered sky. Tom has no idea what color his eyes are -- it was too dark to see them properly inside the church. "I gave it up along with my virginity.