(no subject)

[fascinationex]

More untitled CS fic. First bit here.

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Although the money Jannings left her proved to be a great deal more than Cassandra initially supposed, it was clear that it wouldn't last the week. Four days, perhaps, if she was lucky and careful—more, if she was lucky and less careful, and fancied her chances of wandering the streets at night instead of finding somewhere safe to set down.

She did not fancy them, but but not knowing how or when she might get more made her risk it anyway.

It did not take Cassandra very long to feel subtly unwelcome on the streets of the unfamiliar city after dark: the tiniest sliver of a moon was all that shone down, and the air seemed frightfully cold. The cobbled streets of the city were narrow and shadowed, and as she moved through and the sun really disappeared, strange people—people like Cassandra, probably, who did not quite fit—seemed to come spilling up out of the woodwork and the gutters.

She was exhausted, but she kept walking, feeling that it was safer to at least appear as though she had somewhere to be, even as the streets emptied out. There were lights in windows above the shops, but none on the lower floors. Cassandra was exquisitely aware of the soft glow from the scar on her calf, which could only really be mistaken for a stray slice of moonlight in motion.

At length—at what seemed like great length, really, while she walked and walked and her thoughts circled endlessly, frantic and anxious inside her head—the lights of the upper windows, too, began to go out. For city blocks, everything seemed icy and quiet, with only the occasional cry of a tramp or a drunkard to brighten the night.

Come morning, Cassandra decided, balling her hands into the oversized sleeves of Jannings’ old donated coat, she would see about finding somewhere to rest, no matter the expense. She had already begun to shiver and couldn’t seem to stop.

She supposed she’d have to find some kind of employment, just to keep herself, at least until she could find any information about how she’d come to be here. She wasn’t sure what, though; her job was in an office, and involved spreadsheets and computers.

She knew the year now, and wasn’t certain that her Microsoft Office skills would translate, exactly…

She’d have to find something. Even with no identification, no references—

Cassandra felt the wild flutter of panic in her belly once more. It wasn’t helping anything, of course, but she felt it all the same.

Ahead, a rectangle of light spilled out across the ground and black silhouettes streamed into it, grotesquely elongated by the angle of the light. It reminded her of a different light, much more powerful and significant, soaking horribly into her brain, for just a moment.

This wasn’t a crack in reality, or a doorway fit to lead her home—of course not. It was just a cabaret, and from inside the last patrons were wrapping themselves in their coats and leaving. The warm air that rushed out smelled of cigarette smoke and cloves.

Cassandra raised her eyes automatically and breathed out a cloud of hot, misty air through her teeth.

The sign above the door, dimly lit by the light spilling forth from within, showed a woman’s leg, stark on the white background. It seemed bare, but her skin was a stocking peeled back to the knee, and above, her thigh was a delicately painted thing of muscle and tendon, rich and swollen with blood.

‘Ecdysis,’ read the sign. The Ecdysis Club.

“Excuse me, Miss, you look a bit lost. Surely it’s late to be meeting a friend?” The man was tall, elegant, with a sharply cut suit and a neatly trimmed moustache. Despite the gentle slur in his tone, his eyes were lucid and bright.

Cassandra took a step back. A knot of other patrons reeled past, bulky men in heavy coats, arguing with one another amid laughter.

“Victor.” His companion wrapped her hands around the bend of his arm. Her short hair was a perfect rounded cap, thick and glossy on her skull. The ends curled around her cheekbones. “Don’t be harassing strangers on the street now—you must excuse my brother, he’s had too much to drink.”

She, too, looked like she’d had rather a lot to drink, from the way she supported herself by leaning into her brother’s tall body. She slid her hand inside his coat at the belly—for warmth, Cassandra hoped.

“Shh, shh,” crooned Victor, enveloping his sister in the circle of one arm. “Perhaps she’s lost. Are you lost, Miss?”

Those lucid eyes seemed brighter still. Something stirred in Cassandra’s hind-brain: a scarred face, eyes put out. The hair on the back of her neck stood on end, and then abruptly flattened, slicked down like the fur of a cowed animal. She felt she might be in terrible danger if she said ‘yes’.

She shook her head. She looked at his shoes, shiny and patent leather. “No. No, I’m sorry to interrupt you,” she said, although she hadn’t. “I’m just on my way now.”

“Are you sure? You might get in terrible trouble, wandering like that.” The woman nodded to the ground, and Cassandra followed her gaze where—oh, no, she was nodding to Cassandra’s feet, instead, where the dull yellow glow from her scar shone ever so subtly. It was clear in the darkness of the street outside the cabaret.

Cassandra shoved her left leg behind her right, hoping to obscure it. It didn’t help very much. “Erm, might I?” She wasn’t sure what anyone would care, except that it was strange, but perhaps they knew something she didn’t. She reeled between the certainty that she wanted nothing to do with any drunk stranger on the street, and the acknowledgement that she rather needed help. “I am, actually, er, looking for somewhere I can stay for the night. I’m—newly arrived in the city?”

This only prompted a sharp, inelegant snort from the man.

“The night? It’s not four hours til dawn,” Victor said, looking up as though he could even see the path of the sun in the night sky. When he tilted his head he swayed, gently, on his heels, and his sister smiled and steadied him—though she, too, was not that steady. They weaved gently together for a second, apparently perfectly attuned.

“Well,” hedged Cassandra, and then didn’t finish the sentence at all. Instead she hunched harder against the cold and said, “Anyway, if there’s a—er, a hostel, or something, nearby—”

“A hostel,” repeated Victor. “What, a doss-house?”

Cassandra paused. “I beg your pardon?”

There was a short silence, and then a sharp noise that may or may not have been the sister kicking the brother in his leg. If she had, no discomfort crossed his face. “—glowing, Vic,” she heard her say, and Cassandra bit the inside of her mouth.

“I—you know what, never mind, I really must be going,” she started, only to be collected in one incredibly steely arm and reeled in by the drunken Victor as she tried to pass.

“Rose’s quite right,” he informed her, relinquishing her arm just in time for his sister to catch it instead. If anything she was, inconceivably, stronger. Cassandra’s tugging on her arm seemed only to encourage her. “We’re four blocks away; you can have the couch until morning. I’m sure you have—an interesting story to tell.”

“I, no, I don’t think—”

But even as Victor stepped away, long legs covering the ground as he twirled, head tipped back to view the stars above, Rose’s chilly fingers clamped down on Cassandra’s arm.

“The Suppression Bureau watches he club sometimes, you know,” she breathed, leaning into Cassandra now. The words meant nothing to Cassandra, but her tone was urgent. “Come on.”

It was enough that Cassandra took the first step on her own, and then momentum carried her. Rose’s weight on her side seemed compelling, and she was still terribly tired.

Maybe they were going to turn out to be demented serial killers or something, Cassandra reflected, but at least she’d probably die warm. After the day—the week—she’d had, probably that was the best she could ask for.

She glanced over her shoulder one last time. In the doorway of the cabaret club, a dark-eyed woman with a bindi prominent upon her forehead watched, unblinking. A second after catching Cassandra’s gaze, she exhaled a long plume of smoke from her cigarette and closed the door. The light into the street went out.

Victor and Rose together, and by turns, coaxed and persuaded—and sometimes just tugged—Cassandra through a few more streets in the dark. It did not escape her notice that Rose was watching the ground intently, staring at the shadows cast against the soft glow of her scar.

They arrived at a terraced townhouse with a tiny, sweet front garden, set back from the road. In the dark it seemed indistinguishable from its neighbours. Rose, her arm firmly locked around Cassandra’s, kept them at the foot of the short, broad steps that led up to the door while Victor preceded them.

She rocked back and forth upon her heels and peered down at their shoes.

“Will you show me,” she said, as Victor unlocked the door with the gentle clatter of keys, which seemed terribly loud in the predawn darkness.

“Um,” said Cassandra. She didn’t have to answer, though, because a dim light came from within the house and Rose began to hustle her up the stairs with her implacable grip.

Victor held the door for them both. He shut it behind them, too, with a definite sort of finality that made Cassandra’s heart race.

God, what if they were crazed serial killers or something? Cassandra was a product of the ‘stranger danger’ campaigns of the late twentieth century. Did she really not know better than to follow suspicious and unfamiliar people home?

Victor seemed to think it perfectly normal to help Rose divest herself of her coat before even taking off his own. Her dress underneath was a long, shapeless sheath, skimming her hips and sort of vaguely hinting that she had the general build of a prepubescent child. A long scoop of her back was visible, showing the vertebrae between her shoulder-blades pressing sharp and knifelike beneath the skin.

The dim glow illuminating parts of the corridor must have been from a lamp deeper in the house. Cassandra could see the foot of a staircase up to a second level. The steps were covered in a lightly worn carpet, and whatever was above on the landing was shrouded in shadows.

Cassandra felt quite naked to be handing over her own coat—that giant thing that had been given to her by Jannings—but she also didn’t feel as though she had much choice when Victor held out his hands expectantly. Upon the coat hook by the door it went.

At least, she thought, he had not tried to touch her.

Rose had no such compunction. Her hand was small when she laid it upon Cassandra’s bare arm. “What an odd style,” she said, peering closer.

“Oh,” said Cassandra. She couldn’t remember what she’d been wearing. Jannings had given her the skirt, true, but he’d offered no clarification on what might have happened to her trousers. Tucked into her skirt she was wearing a tee-shirt printed with ‘SORRY I’M LATE MY CAT WAS SITTING ON MY LAP’ in text of varying sizes and styles. “I guess it is,” she said, and then offered absolutely no further clarification.

There was a short, uncomfortable pause.

“Shy, are you?” Rose asked, looking up at her from beneath her eyelashes and her short fringe. It was a look that suited her sharp, pretty face. Cassandra swallowed hard, feeling a flutter low in her belly. “Come, sit down, I’ll put on something for tea.”

“It’s three in the morning,” Victor reminded her.

“Do you like sugar?” Rose asked, ignoring him utterly.

Since it seemed she was to be made tea whether or not she wanted any, Cassandra didn’t want to put her to any more effort than she had to. “No, thank you.”

Victor led her to the front room, where he waited for her to choose a seat before sitting himself, and then she sat in frozen and awkward silence while Rose could be heard clattering away deeper in the house.

“Where did you say you’d come from? You aren’t local.” There was a tiny slur in some of his vowels. Cassandra wondered how much he had had to drink.

“No, I’m not local,” she agreed. Victor’s eyes seemed to linger on her legs, and she wasn’t sure if that was some weird sexual thing or if it was the quiet glow of her scar. It was almost impossible to hide when her skirt rode up with sitting. She crossed her legs, pressing it to the seat. The pressure made it throb. “I’m a bit lost, actually,” she admitted.

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped before him. “But that doesn’t say where you’re from, miss.”

“Cassandra,” she said.

He hummed. “Delighted to meet you, Cassandra. I am Victor, and my sister is Rose.”

“Nice to meet you,” said Cassandra automatically. Now that she was inside where it was warm, and sitting in the ruddy glow of the single lamp—an art nouveau thing with a curved neck and a shade like a tie-dyed flower—she felt supremely exhausted.

Rose re-emerged with an entire tea service on a silvery tray, which she set upon a low table. The set itself was cream coloured with bright green leaves painted on it.

“If it’s not too forward,” Rose began, even as she was pouring tea out for Cassandra. Cassandra watched her do it, and then move on to a cup for her brother, and then serve herself last of all. The tea smelled soft and faintly bitter and achingly familiar. Steam curled up towards the ceiling. “I’d very much like to see that mark on your leg.”

“It’s not too forward,” said Cassandra slowly. She couldn’t help but hesitate. Something about the pair of them made her feel like all her senses had to be sharp and on point, and she didn’t have the energy. She was still hot and sick-feeling, and now she had been walking for hours and her body was tired, too.

But it wasn’t a big request, was it.

She unfolded her legs and twisted a little in her seat, flashing the telling, honey-gold shape of the scar at Rose.

“Here’s your tea,” said Rose, holding it out to her by its saucer, and when Cassandra at last took it, she dropped to her knee on the carpet and peered in so close that Cassandra could pick out the individual, gleaming strands of her dark hair in the light.

“What a thing!” she exclaimed. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Victor!”

Then he came, too, and Cassandra felt Rose’s sharp, small fingers on her leg, holding it steady for inspection.

She took a too-big gulp of her tea.

“You could ask Madame Amavasya about it,” Victor said, “she is particularly knowledgeable about—these sorts of matters.”

What sorts of matters are those, Cassandra wanted to ask. She didn’t, though, because she didn’t want to seem even less knowledgeable to either of them. Rose looked up at her with her sharp, pale eyes, though, and Cassandra felt like she could see straight through her anyway.

“That’s the owner of the club,” she explained, for Cassandra’s benefit.

“The Ecdysis Club?” Cassandra repeated. That was it, wasn’t it?

Rose nodded, sharp edges of her hair swinging around her equally sharp cheekbones. She was pretty, Cassandra couldn’t help but notice again. Although it was more in spite of, than because of, the fashions of the age.

They peered at her stupid leg and its odd, soft-glowing scar for what seemed like a very long time, and Cassandra finished her tea and tried to be patient with their whispered conversations and poking and prodding.

They did not, she got the impression, know as much about—well, anything to do with whatever they thought her scar meant—as they wanted to. What an odd pair they were! But it was oddest of all, she thought, that neither of them actually asked her where she’d got such an injury.

She grew tireder and tireder as the day caught up with her. At length, they let her be and sat back in their own seats, sipping their own tea as the night outside marched slowly but inexorably towards the cold dawn.

“’S a funny name for a cabaret,” Cassandra said, slowly, even as Rose watched her begin to doze on the couch.

“Hmm?” Victor prompted.

“Ecdysis. Like a cicada. Shedding its skin…”

“Is that what it means? Shedding skin?”

“Mmm. Not like a snake, though. Just arthropods.”

“How …specific,” said Victor, slowly. “Despite your accent, you do speak as though you’re educated, Cassandra.”

“Oh, sure.” She sagged, mumbling her words. Her eyes just did not want to stay open. “I’m just a font of useless information.”

“Ah. Hmm. About what, I wonder?”

She didn't answer. Her tongue felt like iron.

Someone removed the cup from her hand.

“She’s out,” said Rose. Something creaked.

The last thing she heard was Victor’s quiet hum of agreement. And then, nothing.