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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"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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