multiversallogs | It's like paradise, spread out with a butter knife

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It's like paradise, spread out with a butter knife :: [OPEN]

Who: EVERYONE
What: Réjean has decided that more people ought to celebrate and help raise a bit of dosh for one of his favourite bars. See: flyer.
Where: The Apache.
When: Misdi night and into the wee hours of the morning.
Warnings: Discussion of Pickman's manky feet.

The Apache is much the same as it always is: dimly lit, with the jukebox playing in the background, and the bartender serving whatever's on tap. Tonight, the bar is packed with people from all across the city, different cantons and cohorts, all out to celebrate surviving the fungal plague. Patrons are encouraged to buy tickets for a door prize with the proceeds going to repair the damage tunnelling ants made to the cellar.

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"All right." The cooler air outside - almost anything is cooler than the heat of an over-crowded room full of alcohol and cigarette smoke - might serve to clear her head just a little bit, just enough, so that's something, too. She rests her hand on the bar as she steps away from it, making sure she's steady before she follows Cindy properly, shimmying the hemline of her skirt back to a slightly more acceptable length as she goes.

It doesn't really occur to her to disagree or, really, to ask why; they're going to talk, sure, and she's comfortable enough with Cindy that she doesn't really mind being steered now and again. Her nature is more deferential than she plays at.

One of Cindy's hands lands itself on Ilde's shoulder, an outside force to steady the fae just a little more. And maybe it's to steer her through the throngs of people celebrating survival also. Funny how this world that's so different from Fabletown reminds Cindy of how they party for the Ides of March. It's not actually a party to have fun and let loose, but a party to honor those who didn't make it out of the Homelands on the last boat and those they've lost along the way, and most of all, to honor the fact that the ones celebrating today made it through by the skin of their teeth.

Two different worlds, same need to glorify the luck of survival.

Now that they're outside, the night air breezes across Cindy's face and she gently turns Ilde away from the bar's entrance and down the block into a less populated area.

Ilde still has her cigarette in hand, but by the time they get outside it's not lit any more and she lets herself be led as she fumbles for a match to relight it as they walk. This is oddly familiar - half-stumbling out a party with a girlfriend, the 2AM drunken heart to heart, but normally it would've been a house and not a bar and she'd have been planning how to best disguise her antics the following day.

There's nobody to hide it from, now; she supposes she grew up, somewhere in there, out of sight. Then again- maybe not.

"It's quiet out here," she says, apropos of nothing. She may not be able to hear very well - the sound level was meaningless to her in there, watching people's mouths to understand what they were saying to her - but the music had thudded through her like a heartbeat and the amassed populace had been a dull roar rattling against her ribcage and her jaw. It feels different, without it.

"That's the point," Cindy replies with a distinct lack of her usual snark in her tone. She stays on a lit path, but chooses one with nobody else walking down it at this time of the night. One thing Baedal has going for it is empty places to talk.

She turns them around the corner and onto a street bench, pushing lightly on Ilde's shoulder to sit her down.

"Who's they?"

Swinging one foot behind the other and tucking both under the bench by reflex, Ilde looks up as Cindy asks - her expression flattens out in a way that by now she can probably recognize as 'self-protective'. When it's too raw, a part of Ilde just disconnects, and it's that that causes the false serenity she plays at so often. She learned how to be nothing.

"Prometheus," she says, looking up at the streetlamp above them. "They're a government organization in the United States. The study and suppression of supernaturals, I guess. That'll teach me to want a break from my father." It's a little wry, a little bitter, but her expression doesn't change again. "I wasn't a person."

The simple description of the group sets Cindy's teeth on edge. Her world has their own bullshit organizations that have the idea that they're doing something good for people when it's really not. She's fought against a few of them and probably will fight against more if she ever goes back.

She would gladly kick this Prometheus' collective asses if she could. What that says about her friendship with Ilde is something strange even to Cindy.

"But you are now," Cindy adds as she sits down next to Ilde, leaning an arm against the back of the bench. "You were then too because you wanted your own life to live. Whatever they told you is absolute shit."

"Sonja came with a group and destroyed the facility," she says, after a slight pause, "earlier this year. I was there for five years." The timeline of sixteen to twenty-one, perhaps, is beginning to make more sense in its own quietly hideous way; her sparse account is a creeping kind of horror, letting the mind of her audience fill in the blanks where she pauses, where her eyes are distant, where something tightens inside her and twists.

Her head tilts, remembering. "She gave me a knife and told me to kill the one I hated most. And then we were friends." ...yes. Sonja had been the first person in a long time to talk to her and not around her, the first person to treat her like something other than a problem to be solved, and Ilde's attachment to her is unmistakable and unabashed.

Well that explains the attachment between the two women. Cindy's not going to ask whether or not Ilde did as Sonja told her to; that part's not her business and for what it's worth, she assumes Ilde did it anyway. Five years of horror is enough for one person to live through. She's not about to make Ilde live through it more just to satisfy her curiosity.

As for leveling the playing field, Cindy glances away from Ilde and begins rubbing her right ear idly. "Cindy."

When her body first changed, she'd lain in wait for one of the guards and tested her new teeth on his shoulder in a fairly savage attack born out of desperation; it had failed, then, but she'd known the smell and taste of him and she remembers how it felt to drive the borrowed knife into him, in the rain. She doesn't bring it up, but the vicious satisfaction of it curls her fingers under her palms in memory before she slides into the next thought, away from that.

That Cindy has been lying doesn't really surprise her; what surprises (and pleases) her is being trusted with the truth, now, as she realizes is happening. Her willingness to talk about Prometheus is as much about delivering a quiet fuck you to their campaign of erasure and she doesn't expect reciprocity but treasures the implication of trust when it comes. It matters to her to matter to people - specific people. Like Cindy.

After a moment, she says, "I'll still call you Cynthia in public, right?" Because sharing with her doesn't mean sharing with the rest of the goddamn city, and she's pretty good at secrets and the keeping of.

Cindy doesn't exactly call it lying in this care. It's more like covering her ass in a strange place where she doesn't know a damn person. There are no Fabletown laws here against telling a non-Fable the truth, but that doesn't mean that those rules that were drilled into Cindy from day one can be easily forgotten. That said, Ilde isn't even a Mundy and that much makes telling her that much easier.

"You better," Cindy says with a huff of a laugh. "You're not going to ask why?" Not that she's pressuring Ilde to if she doesn't want to--it makes things easier on the both of them--but sometimes, Cindy is just honestly curious on what makes people tick. Most people would have been offended enough to launch into a million and five questions.

"Yes," she says, contemplatively, watching smoke rise off the end of her cigarette, "just not all in a big rush." She's curious - very curious, always curious, people fascinate her and what she seeks is always understanding, some way of making sense of that which tends to bewilder her - but she's also patient, and a little wary. In her experience, people don't like to be asked a thousand questions all at once, they don't like for other people to demand information like they have a right to it; knowledge unfolds for her if she takes her time and lets it come to her.

After all. They're sitting here, now, having this conversation. Ilde watches more than she asks, most of the time, and she learns a great deal that way. It suits her.

"Are you hiding or just misdirecting?"

"Neither." There's technically nothing to hide from nor is there anything to misdirect. Okay, that's a complete lie, but it's not one Ilde needs to worry about. Cindy will never admit to being a spy. That is just something she wouldn't give up even if her life depended on it. Everything else, however, is free game. Nobody but her gets hurt if it got out.

"It's short for Cinderella." She just leaves that hanging in the air for Ilde put two and two together as she stretches out her legs, eyeing the leather and steel studded boots on her feet. It all makes sense now, or it should.

It both does and does not, even slightly - the memory it evokes is oddly vivid, Prisca warm and smelling not unpleasantly of the wine she'd been drinking, putting a tiara on Ilde's head and tucking her into bed with her, leafing through the variety of storybooks that had been previously deemed acceptable. It's not the story that she remembers as well as the moment it was told, and she's momentarily distracted by it, trying to remember the name of Prisca's perfume or the shape of its bottle.

Shaking that off, she smiles, suddenly, almost out of no where.

"A fairy and a fairytale." It's a little funny.

"We're one fucked up pair," Cindy mutters just under the breath of a laugh. Technically, they're a fairy and a Fable, but details schmetails. She doesn't need to tell Ilde to keep her mouth shut; that much was clear when she asked about the cover name in public. This all oddly feels somewhat cathartic now that something personal and real about her is out there. Keeping up with the rules sometimes gets tiring after the first three or four centuries.

Pulling another cigarette from her rapidly emptying pack, Cindy takes a moment to light it and puff on it slowly a couple times. "Want to go back in?"

(She can still hear Prisca laughing into her hair, if she concentrates-)

"Yes," she says, after a moment, glancing away from Cindy to the dimness at the edges of the street-lamp's reach - she isn't much worried about what she'll find in the darkness, it's just sort of interesting. It's bright fluorescent lights one need concern oneself with...

"Yes- going in, I mean, as well as being fucked up." How conscientiously correct of you, Ilde.

Cindy should do the polite thing and finish her smoke before going back in but who actually does polite in this place? Ah well. She gives Ilde's leg another slap before getting up. "Come on then, bitch."

And she means that in the most loving and endearing way ever. Seriously. No jokes this time.

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It's like paradise, spread out with a butter knife :: [OPEN]

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