In the pool of light, Talia was a damned goddess of fashion, pristine white angular panels of her dress drawing the eye along her slender frame to the (unloaded) nickel-plated handgun in her right hand. A playful wink, a pull of the trigger at the audience, and as quickly as she arrived in her couture, she strutted away on long legs tantalizingly displayed by the shimmering gold sea-silk trail of her outfit, her bare feet a challenge to the recent craze for Riverbreeze heels. But off stage, seething, was her doppelganger. Fingers gripping painfully tight at the top of her chair, teeth gritted, and the unmistakeable white residue of cocaine around her nostrils, Saniya's raw fury was so palpable that even the densest fashion writer and dresser knew to keep at least six feet between themselves and this less-favoured mad diva.
Together, Talia and Saniya were the darlings of the Republican and Tirtassian fashion worlds, setting trends with outfits that echoed into the noble courts of Tehra and the cartel balls of the Prasineonessian islands. Beauty alone - or even with talent - couldn't possibly have catapulted them to so lofty a height. It was precisely their reputation that brought them to their prestige and success. The rage, the cocaine, the perfectly maintained balance between unpredictability in conduct and reliability in booking. The darling bad girls, mobbed up and just dangerous enough to get gossip flowing without scaring away the names that really mattered. Magnetic performances full of nerve and the invincible surety of youth, fuelled by frightening quantities of champagne and cocaine (but never heroin - all a part of that careful balancing act) and the kind of rivalry that outsiders were convinced might turn violent at any second.
Sometimes it did. Saniya's palpable rage at being passed over for the final walk had already left one of the other, lesser models in tears after a slap for getting too close to try and rescue her eye liner. It was the kind of outrage that might end another model's career, but only fuelled the reputation, the 'edge' of the Starshadow twins. The tension in the dressing room rose and rose as Talia finished her walk, her ermine coat left behind to better display the lean angularity of her shoulders, by pulling the trigger one more time. The gesture was synchronized to the release from the ceiling of great fountains of falling sparks of arcane, shimmering blue diamonds that danced in and out of existence for wonderful brief seconds and made every Elven observer in the room a little high, that sent tingles up the spine and made hair stand on end. By the time Varaness, the line's designer, stepped out for his speech Saniya was incandescent with rage, staring in the mirror, and when Talia entered with her ermine coat neatly cocked over a shoulder the buzz of the room quieted to a frightful, awed hush.
Breathless, models and stylists and gossip rag muckrackers peered through split fingers and cracks in the dressing booths, too enthralled to look away from the bloodshed. But the gasps that followed were not those of shock and terror - or at least, not the shock and terror they'd anticipated. Far from violence, from a murder, the other source of gossip surrounding the half-elven twins rose to the surface for those brave souls who dared to peek. Saniya, still naked from her last change of the show, had pulled Talia in close, wrapped her hands around her throat, but she wasn't choking her sister. The two identical blondes were instead locked in a fierce, intense kiss, indistinguishable save for the clothing so artfully draping Talia's frame and the slighter pallor of Saniya's skin. No one in their audience could have taken the kiss between them for chaste appreciation between siblings, or even a mockery of the act - not with the parting of pouting lips to each other, the way the two pressed at each other's bodies, the little push back towards the dressing table.
Together, the two were a queer work of art on the dressing table, Talia backed up onto it, her dress pulled heedlessly apart despite the strangled cry of a stylist and pushed down her body to pool around her waist. Inviolate taboo so casually broken, unmistakeably desired by both twins. Even the flash of a camera seemed not to interrupt the erotic reverie of the two, Saniya leaning close to whisper in her sister's ear, half snarled words spat cocaine-fast.
"You think just because you got to go on last you're better, huh? That you're not still my little fucking slut? You wish!"