Cohost writing prompt: @spy-thief-assassin-who — Mob Boss who looks a lot different than they used to
Martingale glances into a ceremonial obsidian mirror, and minutely adjusts her wingtip collar.
It's one thing for the people around her to know that she clawed her way up from feral gutter vermin over a pile of corpses; it's the kind of personal mythology that provides a strong foundation for reputations like hers. It's another thing for anyone to see her with eyes equipped to compare her, from personal memory, to the starved and brutal child she came from.
The best part of having come a long way is no longer being there, and as much as Martingale appreciates the uses of that past, she doesn't appreciate being anchored to it in any way.
She catches her own gaze for a moment. The replacement eyes — matte spheres of sorceled basalt, that see more than any fleshly vision — were an early change, and the uncanny mien they lend has helped put the fear of her into hundreds of hearts. She is groomed and luxuried, respected and feared, sharp and powerful. Caring how she's received by anyone from her past makes her weak, and worse, being seen to makes her look weak. She schools her face into casual, professional disinterest, seats herself, and taps a finger on the quartz sphere that will set its partner, at her secretary's desk outside, chiming softly in resonance.
One of her lieutenants, thick-necked and sharklike, opens the door and ushers in an awkward figure. Spiderweb-fine hair the colour of ash floats around a thin face, atop a body too long and and bony for grace. Back in the gutter, the name Dandelion had stuck, and for a while, they'd been a pair; feet turning in different directions, ultimately. Martingale's to step into foot soldier's shoes and up the bloody ladder; Dandy's to the strange and narrow paths of a different power, fire in the blood and hexes beneath the tongue, masters no less mercenary and brutal, but with fewer intermediaries and fealty sworn perpetually in bone and soul.
And now Martingale is the kind of person whom someone needs the goodwill of, if they come to her town and seek to set up shop; no matter what demanding arcane master they serve, the proximate placations go to her, in cash.
"Padrone," Dandy says, ducking a gawky curtsey. "It's a rare day that my business doings directly concern someone of your eminence. I hope I haven't overstepped myself in any way." She looks meek enough, but not outwardly concerned. But then, it's been a long time since they were kids, blood smudging Dandy's lips when a fog troubled her to cough too hard, flint-eyed in a filthy warehouse, practising hurling newly-granted curses until she could explode a rat across the room with her eyes closed. Who knows what kind of occult promotions of her own she's clawed her way through?
"Not to my knowledge," Martingale says, tipping her head for her lieutenant to take himself outside, and Dandy blinks, recognition slowly dawning.
"Marty?" she says, and stares, drinking Martingale in, attentive and detail-hungry in a way few openly dare look at her, now.
Her lieutenant pauses silently at the door, waiting for any sign the warlock should be reintroduced to her place via a joint-crushing ham hand. Martingale lifts a faceted crystal tumblr of dark liquor and sips, waiting for any such sign herself.
"Underlord's dangling cockhead," Dandelion says, in a distracted, fascinated way. "You got stacked," and the years and anxieties evaporate in a single laughingly sputtered mouthful of spirits.