Life is a Cabaret

Draft - Fragments (Part two)

Mon, 17 Jun 2019 02:07:18 GMT

[Four months ago.]

Acid roiled in the distended boiler of her stomach as she tried to calmly breathe through the burning bile slowly climbing up the tender tissue along her windpipe. Head down, fingers tightly interlaced between her knees, she looked like she was wilting in prayer. The words were wrong because she’s not the praying sort and can’t remember anything passed, Hail Mary, full of shiiii-grace, spoken with breath saturated in mint and whiskey.

And if she did remember the words of any other prayer, she wouldn’t utter it, praying to men on her knees never seemed to do her any good in the past. And any male deity that would allow this to happen to so many women earns him her deep disrespect as she tries to make sense of the shit show that had been these long criminal proceedings.

She didn’t tell anyone where she went off to for a few hours every day for the last three weeks. She even testified and although she couldn’t have that anonymized on the court record, there were enough murder cases in NYC that the news media didn’t blow this one up. But she hated the nickname one half-assed article from the Daily News gave her, the one that got away. As if it was that simple.

"Has the jury come to a verdict?"

She wrung her fingers together and looked at the floor. Her throat constricted and all she could do to stop it from squeezing shut entirely was to swallow. Images of broken women-dead women-flooded her memories. Her knee bounced up and down in a short frenzied pace. "Come on,” she whispered, “come on, do the right thing. Do the right thing.” If she could will it, she would. If there was some magic word, she’d utter it. “Please.”

“Yes, your honor. We have.”

The judge nodded.

The head juror nodded back. Something was wrong. Ezera felt it in the way that her mind blanked, like it couldn’t comprehend what just happened even though it didn’t happen yet. But it did, didn’t it? The decision was made and being transmitted not through words but the single curt glance, an understanding that they had come to without the need to deliberate on it.

“No,” she whispered, looking back and forth between the juror and the judge. “No, don’t you fucking do this to us.”

Us? The victims. Family members and her. The ones left behind to ask, why?

“The juror cleared his throat. “We, the jury, find the defendant, Danylo Wroclavich, not guilty of four counts of first degree murder and one count of attempted murder in the second degree.”

Everyone in the gallery gasped. Everyone except for Ezera. She froze in place. Her knee stopped moving. Her fingers stopped lacing themselves together in a painful weave. Shocked murmurs dissolved into sobs. Not her. She was too stunned to cry.

“Not guilty?” She said numbly to no one. The acknowledgement was purely internal, like a sacred word uttered to bring about the start of the apocalypse.

Something cracked inside. The fissures grew larger. Deeper. Longer. Seismic tremors shook her entire body. Ezera couldn’t hold it together anymore, not with a smile, not with alcohol, nothing would stop this. She didn’t feel enough to want to right now. And that was the problem. When you’re losing your shit you can hardly see that you’ve stepped in it. You couldn’t see that there would be something to clean up later while the stench followed you around for longer than it took your reason to return. She raked her fingers through her hair.

Not guilty?

The words were an ugly hollow sound that reverberated through her head, bouncing from the left to the right side of her brain as if neither knew how to process the information.

You’ve got to be shitting me.

The wave of nausea that hit her felt like a tsunami that mowed down the light of her soul like a string of eerie city lights that flickered and sputtered out under the cold rush of dark water. But the preceding earthquake that triggered it would have made this moment easy to predict for anyone that saw the signs. Hell, some of those people were probably jamming their fingers into the cracks, prying them open.

“How!?” She roared out. He murdered four women. And he nearly killed her. “How!” Never in her life has her voice roiled with an anger that sounded like it could melt someone’s skin off their body.

Detective Javier Santos inhaled sharply and shook himself out of his shock. He had worked this case for so long, saw so many casualties. He thought that they finally got the bastard. “Ezera,” he said in a low hiss, roused from his place by the anger in her voice, trying to push through the overflow of people corralled in the back gallery to get to where she was rising from her seat.

Lifting her eyes, she met Danylo’s glance. She couldn’t breathe. He was looking directly at her. And he smiled warmly. He smiled and there was pity in his glance. He smiled.

What was that feeling, it was like drowning, unable to hear the voices from the surface calling her name. She held his gaze while she drowned in something too cold and too deep.

His warm smile.

Her ass shot up outta the seat faster, lurching forward, but it wasn’t her, was it? It couldn’t be, it wasn’t like her. Someone is yelling threats. They sound angry, she thinks, not realizing it’s her. Everything feels like it’s being played in slow motion. Even her reaching into her purse. For what? Now someone is yelling at her, but it’s too distorted here beneath the dark water. The current of her anger pushes her forward and parts the crowd.

Danylo. Her father. Emcee. Tobias. And the nameless parade of men that only knew how to communicate through threats and violence against women.

It’s just too much.

Her arm begins to lift. There’s a sliver of silver just slightly peeking out of her purse, but before she can lift her arm higher, before anyone can register what was happening, it’s jerked violently behind her back, her grasp loosening, the thing dropping back into her purse. She gasps in pain, searching for her breath, the words garbled through the awful hurt shooting down her arm.

He slaps handcuffs on her wrists and jerks her out of the courtroom with such force that she trips.

“Ezera, calm down. Jesus. What the actual fuck? Calm down before I have to arrest you.” She knows that voice. Javier. He bolted them out of the doors of the courthouse. Opening the back of his police car, he very nearly tossed her into the back seat but didn’t close the door. “Just. Sit down. Sit! Breathe, alright? You gotta calm down, Iz.”

Really? Because she thought that she might vomit on his shoes instead. Her entire body shook with something so violent that she cut the insides of her mouth with her teeth as they chattered. Shock.

Unzipping her jumper wouldn’t have helped much even though the cool air that brushed the nape of her neck confused the sick sweat on the back of her neck and she didn’t know whether she was hot or cold.

Her mouth felt like cotton as the words tumbled out. “You said that this was a done deal. The DA said that with my testimony and the evidence...” Everything hurt. “You said.." She paused. "How did you not see this coming?”

The ground was littered with broken promises.

He shook his head emphatically. “Look, it was a done deal. I don’t know what happened in there!” At least he was pissed about it as well. “But what the fuck happened with you, huh? What did you think that you were going to do in there? What, huh?”

He knew. He knew what she was reaching for and it made her a little sick to think about her fingers curling around the handle.

“I don’t know, I don’t know," she half-lied. "Nothing. N-nothing.”

“Yeah? That sure as fuck didn’t look like nothing. You know what that looked like to me? Do you? That looked like about 20 years in prison.”

His voice was angry and concerned. She swallowed thickly and looked away. “I don’t know what you want me to say,” she managed quickly through a face hot with emotions that were too hard for her to untangle.

“I want you to deal with whatever is happening with you.”

She snorts.

“Look, I can’t imagine what it’s like to-“

“So don’t.” She snaps back. “So don’t. Because you know what the worst thing in the world is, J? Because it’s not constantly having to look over your shoulder. And it's not having to relive a traumatic event day-after-day. It’s the feeling of being utterly powerless in the face of injustice because some asshole with connections threatens a jury or pays off a judge.”

He paused and then nodded lamely. There was not much else that he could do. “I know. I know. Shit.” He ran his fingers over his face. “I don’t know what leverage he had but, Iz, let me figure it out. This is on me. Ok? I messed up. I didn't see that he was connected. I’m not going to stop going after that guy but it needs to be done by the book.”

“The book? Really. That's funny. This book of yours is the length of several encyclopedias," she says flatly.

He gives her a disappointed look for that cheap shot. “That’s not fair.”

“Neither is that murdering SOB getting off. Yet I’m the one sitting in your police car in cuffs.” She looked older and drawn, the tiredness of too many battles fought too fast, too soon, written on her face. “Uncuff me.”

“I’m just trying to protect you,” he mumbled leaning down to free her. “Something’s happening to you Iz, and I don’t know why, but I can’t reach you where you are. And it scares me, ok? It scares me.” She avoided answering him by massaging her wrists making the point to make him feel bad. But he was looking down at her with expectation. She appraised him with a quizzical brow.

“Give it to me, Ezera.”

“What?” She blinked innocently, all doe-eyed stupid. For her attempt, he gave her an impatient look.

She shrugged. “No.” Ezera ducked out of the police car. “No. Sucks my balls. I’ll give it you when he’s dead.”

He narrowed his eyes at her choice of words, something unsettled him about the tone of her voice.

“You mean, when he’s in prison.”

She held his gaze. “Sure. When he’s dead in prison. I'm not picky.”

Silence. Consideration. Both sides were already bleeding. It wouldn’t take much to hurt one another.

“You know who you sound like, right?”

Her shoulder’s tensed. There was no way that she’d let him proverbially slap her in the face when she was already down. She nodded, disappointed at him, and pressed her lips together as he made the first cut.

"Yeah? Well, if my father was still alive, you best bet that Wroclavich wouldn't be walking out of this courtroom today a free man."

More silence.

She sighed. She could ask him whether it would take seeing her dead body on the mortuary slab before he woke up. On the other hand, enough pain had already gone around today and she was just so emotionally drained and mentally exhausted.

“Welp. On that note, namaste...dick”, she says flipping him the bird with a tight smile. He snorted with a smirk and shook his head. That was the women he knew. Sorta.

She pulled out her cellphone as she walked away toward the City Hall subway station. Someone picked up but didn’t say anything on the other end of the line.

Trying to keep her voice light, trying to keep the devastating loss seem personally inconsequential, she begrudging admits, “you were right. We’re going to have to do this ourselves.”

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The Katakomb Kabaret in a Komedi of Errors

Thu, 03 Jan 2019 03:25:43 GMT

I'm waking up to ash and dust…
I'm waking up…

****************

"Sorry, wat da fuck did you just say?" Micah asked with the rough switch blade symphony of an accent from her adopted home, the Bronx.

"Garlic. Start smashing up the garlic. Then, then," Ezera said, lifting a finger in the air, her voice straining poignantly as she zipped around the industrial kitchen sorting out blenders, "we'll mix it in with fresh orange juice. Yes. Yes! That'll work."

Ezera was dashing around the kitchen so quickly that Micah considered that perhaps she had crushed up and inhaled the Road Runner in two neat little lines.

Ashayah Salifah, nicknamed Habibi, BB for short, narrowed her heavily kohl rimmed eyes with suspicion. "W-wwwhy?"

Ezera must have gone crazy, that's why. Micah shook her head in response to BB's question and slowly leaned back like the Tower of Pisa, her dark eyes muddied with concern but not devoid of humor as she subtly checked to see if Ezera was bleeding from the ears or had, you know, visible head trauma. Her brow vaulted to the sky cartoonishly when she found nothing. BB shooed her off the kitchen island when she was about to pop a squat on the food prep table. Instead, Micah leaned her hip into the metal counter and crossed her legs at the ankle. Her chunky unlaced Doc Martin's looked humongous on her feet just like the leather jacket that was two sizes too large. She rubbed a hand over her shaved head and exchanged a concerned look with BB who was biting her lip to prevent her from saying what her large appraising eyes were unapologetically conveying.

She's gone fucking nuts.

( Read more... )

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Bakerstreet

Fri, 26 Oct 2018 16:58:01 GMT

Just reading the paper over some tea.

TFLN

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Invoke the names

Thu, 27 Sep 2018 00:43:02 GMT

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"This song was intended as a thank you note to the spirit and legacy of protest; to the artists who imbued their work with the vigour of dissent, and a reflection on the importance of that tradition in the context of the rights, and lives, we enjoy today. My hope for this video is much the same.

Thank you to Mavis Staples, for giving to the world a timeless example of how worthwhile the raising of one’s voice is, in song and in protest."

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Elastic Heart - Sia

Mon, 24 Sep 2018 23:29:36 GMT

♪ And I will stay up through the night
Let's be clear, I won't close my eyes
And I know that I can survive
I walked through fire to save my life
And I want it, I want my life so bad
And I'm doing everything I can
Then another one bites the dust
It's hard to lose a chosen one

You did not break me
I'm still fighting for peace
Well I've got thick skin and an elastic heart
But your blade it might be too sharp
I'm like a rubber band until you pull too hard
But I may snap when I move close
But you won't see me fall apart
'Cause I've got an elastic heart ♪

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Road trip!

Tue, 31 Jul 2018 23:39:15 GMT

While we try to figure out Izzy's response and feelings to Cassie's situation in light of her position with her clubs, we will road trip trip.

1. Git in the car...

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Fri, 27 Jul 2018 00:31:03 GMT

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Ghost Hunting

Fri, 13 Jul 2018 00:32:34 GMT

Of course I threw half of my team at this...

Eleonora: bakerstreet | What's your surname, Francis?

Ezera: bakerstreet | What's your surname, Francis?

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13.8 Write about your father.

Tue, 03 Jul 2018 23:01:53 GMT

Prompt for Writer's Muses

Regurgitated here | July 2018
Write about your father

My father knew how to cut deep with comedy, to laugh through sadness and to sacrifice the deepest, most sacred, parts of himself. I should know.

He sacrificed me so that I could live.

( Read more... )

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Hola!

Mon, 02 Jul 2018 12:55:28 GMT

Hi guys! I'm back from my work trip. Dealing with some major jet lag but if I owe you a tag, I'll get back to you soon. Hope everyone has been well?

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Summary...

Sun, 29 Apr 2018 03:27:54 GMT

It story started with a few whispers in the dark recesses of the criminal underworld. The whispers were carefully orchestrated, spoken in places where the message would carry further. The street gangs with uneasy overlapping business with the different mafias starting talking first—the chatter started among the Bloods in Washington Heights and then traveled down over the Brooklyn bridge to the Latin Kings before spreading through the slavic gangs in Greenpoint until it reached the Crips in Queens and went as far as to MS-13 on Long Island where you could die in a machete attack as if you were in some Columbian jungle and not the 'burbs. Word was that some dumb upstart bitch was pushed across the line and went mad crazy when her crime boss father fell into the Punisher's crosshairs. Apparently, the dude didn't kill Josef Baader outright but he sure as shit armed the bitches that did. What he did do was shoot up the dead man's club. Everyone died, including a number of key industry players. That should have been the end of the Baader-Holt syndicate's era in the "entertainment industry". But something unlikely happened.

( Read more... )

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Timeline Assumptions

Mon, 16 Apr 2018 03:46:03 GMT

Hola,

I'm moving Izzy's timeline up about three months so that I can combine the mixed past/present/future threads. But I'm just going to hand-wave a few points/fillers that I don't think I need to write out fiction for or RP to bring things up to speed.

Ezera's father did leave her an "inheritance", making her fairly wealthy thanks to his money, legit businesses and (personal) property, namely his townhouse in Manhattan and a mansion out on Long Island. The mansion stands vacate but she's moved into the townhouse, leaving her apartment to Stefi (if she wants it). However, the lawyer that informed and carried out these matters didn't know anything about her father's (criminal) business holdings in the entertainment industry. She feels like shit moving into the townhouse but it helps her "cover".
If you're a friend that's not involved in all this organized crime drama, she likely will start/has started pushing you away. Especially if you've started to ask questions. Teeeeension.
She's stopped dancing at her club. She's stopped dancing/performing publicly, period. (Gasp, what?! Not good fo' sure.) Image, people. Mobsters don't gotta dance dey make money move...;) She's not managing her club either, she's left that to Cassandra (if that's alright, C! Cassie's already managing a lot of it but this would be an official handover.) However, she still owns the club.
She's been seemingly MIA for three months, having dropped off the face of the earth to prepare for her role. But when she surfaces it's like her name is everywhere in certain social circles and she's gaining some popularity like K. Kardashian--you know, no one knows what the hell she's famous for, really, or why she's so popular but she is. (Iz probably hired the same marketing and image consultants, ha.) She's seen at galas, clubs, charitable events, business functions, but there are also soft rumors of criminal family associations (which only feeds the hype). The criminal underworld hears other things too, less charitable, stemming from previous RP'ed events.

And that's where she's at--the tip of the iceberg ready to be the official figurehead/mascot for a larger team of peeps just beneath the surface, helping to bring down the fort. ~~(The road to hell is paved with good intentions.)~~

The short end of it...

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RL

Tue, 10 Apr 2018 03:29:20 GMT

Sorry my RP peeps, RL was/is a little too real these days. But, I'm coming around. Do a girl a favour and let me know if I owe you a reply? I think I got to/wrapped up most of them now, but I have a weird feeling that I might have let a few slip through my fingers.

Also, in the next few days, I'll post a State of the Muse update. I need to move Izzy to the present. I'm starting to get confused with having past/present/future threads playing out at the same time. My brain can't handle it. Can you smell the calamari-like burn? That's my brain. ;)

M'wah!

-M

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Bakerstreet

Wed, 28 Feb 2018 03:32:44 GMT

1. FRIENDS!! (Runs toward this post like a loyal bitch.)
2. Blind date...so don't want to be here...
3. Hungover...STOP YELLING!!!

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Feb-March

Sat, 24 Feb 2018 03:01:40 GMT

1. The Take Care Meme

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Some Top Levels

Sat, 10 Feb 2018 01:04:35 GMT

1. TFLN
2. Angst
3. Stray
4. Minor injury

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NSFW: Superbowl Sunday?

Wed, 31 Jan 2018 03:33:21 GMT

Could be a performance at the cabaret on Friday before the SB. Haha.

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Bakerstreet

Sun, 21 Jan 2018 19:57:12 GMT

Whose idea was it to meet up camping?

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Plotting and story movement 2018

Mon, 15 Jan 2018 04:15:35 GMT

I totally realize how OCD this looks...just go with it.

Storyline Summary

2016: Dancer. Creative Director. Co-owner of a modern day speakeasy styled cabaret. Daughter of a New York City crime boss that she thought was dead (and now really is dead). In the cross-hairs of the co-owner (Ludger Holt, aka Emcee) who wants her club for himself. Was fortunately unfortunate enough to cross paths with Frank Castle, which, unintentionally, set off a world of crazy.

2017: Shaken. Devastated. Traumatized. Resilient. Emcee is on the lam. She relies on good friends, strangers, frallies (friends+allies), determination, humor, booze and a lawyer to get her through the devastating family secrets that she's unearthed - four other clubs. Four other trafficking venues. And then a half-brother, Emcee's son, whose intentions are murky, at best. A myriad of other criminals may be moving in on her father's turf. The plan? Transform into a faux organized crime princess next in line to the family throne. Get info. Move in on the clubs and get the women out before more harm comes to them.

....

General Premise

2018: Emcee's back. Ezera clings to her new persona. Her past catches up to her. Will she abuse her new power and position to take care of her problems? How long does she have until a rival for her position decides to make a move? Will the quest to hold the fragments of family together make her blind to her half-brother's machinations/influence? Or will she let go? Is it even possible to lead a double life--helping trafficked people while pretending to be on the inside? Is there a voice of reason and sanity to be found anywhere? Or are there just partners in crime?

(Potential) Morbid Aristocracy 2018 Fiction

1. Fragments: Ezera relives a memory from her past via an abused woman that's fighting for her life in the hospital and she has to make a difficult decision. [Part One--done.]
2. Upon My Death, My Heart: Tobias gives Ezera a letter that her father wrote to her, one that was never meant to be delivered...(Tobias is a manipulative opportune bastard).
3. Shadow Dance: Izzy initiates the Stop Traffick campaign. And changes the trajectory of her career. (Sorta.) But that also means that it pisses off a whole lotta criminals. She knew how to get into this world but is it even possible to get out?

(Potential) Morbid Aristocracy Plot related 2018 RP ideas

I welcome everyone into my plots and scheming if there's an interest. Anything can be adapted/changed to help fit in with different characters and what you'd want to get out of it whether they're evil, neutral or good. Willing work-in cross overs. Always feel free to hop in to open threads or PM me. I don't always feel comfortable tapping people to join my threads but, know that everyone is welcome.

1. Emcee gets his comeuppins...
2. Saving the trafficked people from the clubs...
3. Drowning cargo - I'm thinking she gets info on a cargo shipment of people arriving at the docks and then everything starts to go sideways (and into the water)...
4. Trafficking - One of her peoples gets abducted & trafficked. Ezera looks at the unlikely tag team she's called--"So, are you just going to stand there and glare at one another?! Go, rescue her, please."

RP Wishlist

I'd wish for...

Someone to pick up playing her half-brother (bit of a psychopath) but that's a tall order.
More relationship development btwn characters.

Changes this year...

1. Ezera's background changed a bit. It won't affect RP relationships. I took out the bit where she has cancer. While that was a plot device that I was using to finish an over-arching story and be the driving force for her personality and motivation to egg her on, her "path" changed so much that it didn't make sense to keep that in since she'd never be able to do half of what she's done at this point. It became a unrealistic puzzle piece that no longer fit.

2. But because that did play a huge part in forming her positive/driven personality, I changed it so that, after her father was "killed", which impacted her so profusely, she had one/two formative/significant events of bodily assault in her early twenties by a boyfriend, which, while terrible, better defines one of her character flaws, her personality, and also better explains the almost zealous, risky and ridiculously dangerous motivation to figure out whether her father's other clubs are human trafficking hubs for sex labor and human rights abuse.

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Bakerstreet - Sick meme

Mon, 08 Jan 2018 02:10:24 GMT

https://bakerstreet.dreamwidth.org/4701074.html?thread=2095500946#cmt2095500946

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January 2018

Tue, 02 Jan 2018 23:47:18 GMT

First meme of the year! Wooo... Sticky-notes

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Bakerstreet

Tue, 12 Dec 2017 19:42:51 GMT

Comfort...or just awkward?

We're kinda stuck

Argument meme

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November posts

Fri, 03 Nov 2017 02:02:29 GMT

November

Truth meme: I swear to tell the truth, the half-truth and nothing but ~~omissions~~ the truth.

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October threads

Tue, 24 Oct 2017 22:13:57 GMT

October

Vamp'ed (Bakerstreet W/Frank - You look pretty good to me right now.)
Jailed (Bakerstreet w/ Matthew - alternate title...The reason CVS will be out of Excedrin today...snort.)

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Bakerstreet

Sat, 30 Sep 2017 01:02:55 GMT

TFLN

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