Who: Thea and Matilda What: Thea comes home at last. Where: Matilda and Thea's place. When: Directly after Lin dropped Thea off. Warnings/Rating: None.
Her hair was dripping.
It was the chilly damp of drip-drip-drip down the slope of her neck and the clammy press of her shirt (Lin’s shirt; there was something lurid written across the front in hot-pink, Thea liked hot pink as much as anyone was a fan of neon when not a member of the original cast of Flashdance but it said something cutting and witty if you knew the pop cultural reference point and Thea did not) stuck to her skin as she sat back in the seat of Lin’s terminally-terrible car.
If she concentrated on how uncomfortable that was, the skein of soaking-wet hair across her shoulders then perhaps her stomach would stop roiling, the ill-advised egg churning and rolling, questionable tide in the pit of her belly. And then the engine cut out completely and Lin was a rattle of keys and a warm body at her side and a look on his face that said maybe he’d come with and she couldn’t - not really, not that because if her aunt was going to kick her out it was totally easier if it happened alone, if it was humiliation, party of one and she could start looking up flights back to Russia or something straight after.
She slid, jeans across creaking seat and she shut the door and she didn’t look behind her as she disappeared toward the building. There was little ambient light in the neighborhood, the odd blue-lit window flickering from a television screen but there was noise. It was late: Thea could hear an argument rising in tone and volume as she walked the path toward the building, she could hear the shrill squeal and dull thuds of someone having extremely satisfactory sex, the low hum of people talking, those television sets in stereo. The door swung behind her, a slam and the cool, artificial-lit hallway of the building and the stairs before she stopped outside her doorway - Matilda’s doorway - with her heart yammering against her ribs, the eggs making sick, slow, loop-de-loops in her stomach.
She fumbled for keys, dug in the bottom of the bag, her pockets; oh. She’d been sneaking in for days before, open window left propped up. The fire-escape. Her keys were somewhere in a bar (or with the bar’s asshole) along with her wallet. And ID. And her favorite copy of Franny and Zooey. Thea knocked, instead, a timid tattoo of knuckles. Maybe Matilda would be out? That would work. She could sneak in again, sleep at Lin’s. Come back in the morning when it wasn’t dark and she hadn’t eaten eggs.
Matilda was in. She'd been in for hours, tackling a particularly frustrating bit of code, fighting a long, hard fight with a computer in an undisclosed location. No, really. On this one, even the original country of origin was still a mystery to her. It was coded in French, apparently for the sake of obscurity, which was an interesting novelty. None of this, however, really served to distract her from the waiting game of listening for the door.
The worst thing about the past ten days or so had been the guilt. She had brought Thea in, clearly on something, and tried to make sure she was safe. She had let her rest, waiting for her to wake up, hopefully fully dried out, so they could have a talk. And then she'd been gone, snuck out the window, and Matilda had felt everything like a stupid parent who didn't watch their kid closely enough. She should have made her sleep on the couch, or checked on her more often - something.
In the ensuing days, she'd filed a missing persons report, posted anonymous bulletins online with her niece's picture, and even plumbed the journals. Nothing. She did find an old post that Thea had put up - something about jumping off a roof - and while it didn't tell her where the girl was, it did tell her that she might have run into trouble doorside, somewhere. No proof of that, of course. Someone just as easily could have dosed her with something and then convinced her to run into their arms, and she'd turn up in a year or two buried in the desert somewhere.
Matilda wasn't hysterical. She was a realist, and she knew that, once a week had gone by, the odds of Thea returning alive, much less uninjured, had shrunk to almost nothing. Even if her niece had run away, the statistical probability that someone had already grabbed her, a nameless runaway, and done something to her were high. She didn't sleep. She printed fliers and actually put them up in public places, analog style, when the online bulletins brought nothing. She even grew desperate enough to call Madeleine. Her disinterest in coming to help find her daughter made even Matilda go cold with anger. She didn't have to be mum of the year, or anything, but her daughter had been missing for days. Her book tour was apparently more important. She was troubled, yes, but sure Thea would turn up sooner or later.
Then Thea did.
When the knock came at the door, Matilda got up quickly enough that she nearly knocked her chair over. She made it to the door in about four seconds flat. She checked, once, to see who was in the hall, then pulled the door open. She was dressed in a black t-shirt that was about four sizes too big, no makeup. Her hair was in the same state of disarray it usually was when she had nowhere to go, but worse, and there were dark circles like saucers under her eyes.
Matilda stared for a moment, visibly looking her up and down for injuries, then moved wordlessly out of the doorway to allow her in.
Thea was injury-less; pale that was three weeks without desert sun, scrawny-thinner than she ought be but nothing that said foul play in visible letters - nothing that said anything of anywhere. She was twisted hands and sparrow wrists in evidence beneath long, loose sleeves and the loose splay of hair around her shoulders hid dipped head, Thea making a study of the thin line that was hallway carpet and scuffed linoleum entryway. A moment, looking up and her aunt looked like something out of a Living Dead movie and while Matilda didn’t usually do put together in the chignon, sheath dress and nude pumps her mom did, the slow lurch southwards of Lin’s eggs was vague understanding that tired and mussed probably meant Matilda wanted to know her even less than she had before.
She crept past her, peppermint soap and clean-scrubbed smell and damp hair and she came to a halt just inside the door, hunched-miserable shoulders and her bag - still textbook heavy, still a pendulum weight on one shoulder - slipped down her arm and sank into a puddle on the floor.
“Hi?” Small-voiced. Maybe she’d keep it short before she’d throw her out - she could text Lin, ask him to turn around, pick her back up again. The apartment smelled familiar, like coffee and laundry and the plastic-warm smell of the air-conditioning. It smelled familiar enough to be ‘home’, if ‘home’ was a smell - as close as Lin’s own had been - and Thea sagged, bowed against it and sank onto the couch, wrists on knees.
Matilda watched Thea come in, shut the door behind her, and stood there. She watched as Thea shuffled in, as she dropped her bag, as she slipped down onto the couch like someone had disconnected all her joints. She walked over to her, towered over her as a wraith-like slip, and then sat down on the floor in front of her, fluid as you like, folding bony elbows over bony knees.
Matilda didn't touch her, but she looked at her hands, hanging over the edges of her knees. "Tell me what happened," she said. It was difficult to tell what she was thinking, or feeling, whether she was angry or cold. But there was a faint tightening around her eyes, and an intensity in her gaze, that said she would wait to pass judgement until she'd heard the story, because it was a favor no one had ever done her, and she knew better.
Perhaps she’d expected shouting. Thea had never much had shouting, beyond the dorm-mistress at that New England school; she’d been surprised at it at the time, they’d never gone in for words-above-a-whisper right up until she was sat, hands twisted in her lap, demure in schoolgirl plaid and the boy down the corridor being yelled at by someone different and someone male. She’d had disregard, too but Lin’s face as she’d walked out, rubbing her hair with a towel, said maybe Matilda wasn’t quite at ‘disregard’, casual carelessness that could be expected from Madeline, from dad when he bothered to call from Hong Kong or India. She hadn’t expected the mercury-flow of angular body to pool in front of her expectantly, she hadn’t expected Matilda hunched in on herself in front of her like maybe she wasn’t just the adult.
Thea dipped her head, her hair fell forward like water, over elbows, forearms. “Which part?” Voice crisp-clear but uncertain, minor note struck. There wasn’t an explanation for three weeks gone, three weeks lost behind a door. In the brevity of light, the posture - a comfort in angles, in stark lines - was a vague echo of Matilda’s own, elbows over knees, feet tucked beneath thighs. Drawn together, drawn up. pallid to shadow, negative versus print. Thea lifted her head, wary-watercolor blue gaze and pale lashes; “Because I don’t think I can. You can send me back. If you like.” A rigid shrug of shoulders beneath the too-big, washed-thin shirt. It was the edgy snappishness of something backed up into a corner, showing teeth given the wall pressed uncomfortably close.
"I'm not sending you back," Matilda said, throaty and dismissive. She hadn't even considered that as a possibility. "From the beginning," she added, to answer her question. One hand flickered lightly out, fingers uncurling a little while she watched that drawing in. "Where you were before you come here acting drugged. Where you went when you left. Why you stayed. Why you went to your friend's."
Matilda was silent a moment, then asked, "Was it a door thing?" She watched Thea tightly for her initial reaction to those words. If she denied it, she would at least be able to see the tiny flinch of knowledge if the words connected at all. Although if she was hiding something, exposing the fact that Matilda already knew about the hotel might be enough to draw it out. She suddenly craved a cigarette, and her fingers curled in again. "I saw you on the journal."
Thea’s head darted up, a bright flash of shock. The journals were a cess-pool of people, to wade in or paddle out of when needed: Thea looked for a couple of names but talked without editorial, spoke widely and thought little about it. If she’d thought about it, she would have disregarded the possibility of Madeline possessing such a thing - too much self-possession to be someone else, even temporarily - but she had not thought even in passing of Matilda. She was transparent, rain behind glass, shoulders tightening like elastic drawn tight. There was no tiny flinch, it was reaction as abject as fish launched into gasping air, twitching on a line.
“You--” Pale stare, blinkless. Door things were dust and hotels and young people who smiled knife-sharp and rattled off words that skipped, danced together. She didn’t hear I’m not sending you back, not beneath the knowing that was as pointed, as quick as Matilda was slow-coiled, as the recitation of all the facts stacked against her were piled up and knocked over: ’I saw you on the journal’.
Matilda was surprised by that reaction, and it showed. Her expression was usually relatively steady with only minute changes to indicate a shift in mood, and this was the same, brow raising just a tic. "Yes." She hadn't seen anything that would make her want to ship her niece off to Russia or back to her mother, so she had no idea what had warranted the reaction. She waited, instead, to see if she answered any of the questions she'd posed once she recovered from the shock.
Thea folded herself back up, misery-lines and limbs both in the cramped curl. “So you know. About all of it.” She didn’t think of asking precisely what it was Matilda knew and she didn’t think of questioning journals and entries. Thea was thinned lips gone colorless, the damp t-shirt clung to her shoulders, her fingers curled around her own wrist, thumb rubbed along the bony line of it. “You know the DC door?” Thea looked at the disheveled shape of Matilda’s hair, at the sharp line of her nose, but decidedly not meeting eyes. “There was something. They put something in the air.”
"I know you weren't acting normally, even on there," she said. Matilda leaned back, thinking she might understand a little. "I didn't go digging," she said. "I just read what I thought would point me at you." Something in the air was vague as could be, but it was half of an explanation. She nodded. "And it made you unwell," she said, each word as continually crisp as the last. "And that's why you ran off, after you came back here."
It sounded like puzzle pieces being put down on a table, methodical and factual. There was no anger in it, nothing combustible - spark to simmering-unsettlement, to the liquid unbalance of a relationship set to burn. Matilda was, Thea thought, listening to the calm, even way the words were laid out like a logic pattern, nothing like Madeline.
“Well, mostly because things were fucked,” Thea chanced a look up, all slanted wariness, “Through her door. So she wanted to go back.” Did not digging mean Matilda didn’t mind, or Matilda didn’t care? Her aunt was crumpled paper, something less than pristine but nothing written visibly where Thea could read it out loud. “So I kind of went. And when I came back my friend knows about doors, he has one.” She said it plainly, without a thought as to how it sounded, that safety had been a friend rather than family, had been Lin’s warm, comfortable, geeky living room and kitchen rather than the ghosting-past-one-another that Thea and Matilda managed, most times. “Don’t blame Lin,” she said quickly.
"I don't," Matilda said, lifting her chin slightly. In fact, she thought she might have misjudged him, but she wasn't the best at apologies. That could wait in the wings a while. "Your friend through the door," she said, accent treading hard over the rs, "Is she going to grab you on a regular basis?" That seemed to be a problem for some people on the journals. It wasn't for Matilda, not so far, but that was mostly because she refused to let herself be run by a crazed, confused beast. "She could have seen fit to send word," she said, pointing two fingers in gesture. It would have been the right thing to do, even if things were crazy. It didn't matter. There were some things that only took a second that one ought to do, particularly in as chaotic a situation as theirs, and she could think of almost no good excuses for why someone might not bother.
Matilda didn't let the fact that Thea had run for Lin's get under her skin. He was her friend, a trusted ally. Matilda represented her mother by proxy, whatever their differences. It made sense.
Thea’s smile was thin-shadow, it was almost, the same twist of her wrists as her hands carded together, knees hugged tight and her chin tipped up to observe Matilda as solemnly as police testamony. Cass didn’t think about families, perhaps because she didn’t have one - Oracle followed her electronically when Oracle was present - nor, Thea thought, did what they had much resemble family. (They; used as lightly, as carefully as hands cupped about blown glass, they, us-together) “It’s one of the doors that makes demands,” she said thoughtfully, blue eyes and bitten nails and she began to chew at the edge of her thumb, “They’re always life or death. I don’t think she thought about sending word.”
And if she had, Thea hadn’t thought about it either. “She might,” and then head tipped and the kind of naked-curiosity that was bare of jaded-attempt at nonchalance or even self-aware misery -- “Who do you have?” It was an odd thing, to find familiarity over and in, but it was something.
It was something, a connection that only people in this city could understand. The strangeness of the experience was still something Matilda was trying to wrap her mind around, but for now, she compartmentalized it as much as possible. Her life was already strange to the standards of most people, so she tried to put it in context with that. Everything so far had been atypical - why would her experience with the supernatural be as false and imaginary as everyone expected? Why wouldn't it be terribly real?
"He's a wolf," she said. "Or he was. He’s human now. He doesn't have a name." She paused a moment, then shrugged. That was all she had, really. "Tell your friend to send word, next time. Or to try." But there was understanding in her face that it might not be possible, and that, next time, she wouldn't be so quick to file a missing persons report. "Tell me her name, so I can check with her. If I can't find you."
“She’s Cassandra,” Thea said and maybe she thought a little about oracles and Greek mythology, that one, dusty book at the very back of her favorite used book-store downtown, mythology wrapped around in long, dull words that didn’t suit Cass at all - Cass was light, featherdown sailing over roof-tops but sat at the computer she was all weighted information and whispers over comm lines a little like Delphic oracles. “Cassandra Cain.” She was tired, all slumped shoulders and exhalation and maybe she was sitting like she’d given up but the adrenaline was slowing to nothing, was heartbeat returning from timpani-pound to slow, ticking over of normal restored, even if normal was now her aunt sat on the carpet in front of her, loose hands and anger distilled away to nothing and talking of doors and wolves and people that existed only in books.
“She doesn’t really...” Thea hesitated, a world of words that was thickly comforting, warm the way of blankets and pyjamas and rainy nights outside, that was entirely alien to the girl in her head, like learning a language backwards instead of forwards. “She doesn’t talk. Exactly. Much. It’s complicated,” she said a little helplessly, and the palms in her lap went loose, slack, a tangle of fingers like knotted ribbons and finally, finally she looked at Matilda and mistrust didn’t glint at the back of grey-blue eyes. Her mouth quirked, all butterfly-quick look of a smile before it went, “How can you be a wolf and not a wolf? Doesn’t that flout the laws of physics?” And maybe it was picking up a piece of the conversation discarded in the wake of things more important like fixing the future, boarding over glass that wasn’t broken yet, but Thea pulled it apart with her fingers, held onto nonsense and books and worlds beyond the doors that didn’t seem quite so irreparably broken as the one she had to call hers.
The name didn't ring a bell with Matilda, but she'd never been much for comic books. Games, sure, sometimes. She liked video games. She liked hacking them better. She liked old, thick books. Comics had sailed right by, with a few exceptions. She nodded to the name, and it said she wouldn't forget it, not next time. Because of course there would be one.
"She doesn't have to," Matilda said. She had always been that girl, the one with the economy of words. At least it made sense to her. "Just a few." The next time Thea disappeared, all it would take would be a hello and a 'through the door' and she'd let it alone, at least until it went on for too long.
That little smile felt like a flicker of encouragement. "It should," she said. The Wolf wasn't a wolf. Or he was, but he didn't appear to be, and Matilda was starting to get the feeling that there might be more to things than just a wolf who was cursed by a man. What sort of wolf could read and write, anyway? Something was wrong, there. She considered it for a moment, eyes flickering across the floor ahead of her. She and the wolf didn't talk, like some people seemed to talk to the people through the door in her heads. It made her too uncomfortable - she didn't much like talking to regular people on this side of things, so someone in her head at all times was worse, not better. Thankfully, the Wolf wasn't too chatty either. "I don't think he knows what he is either," she said. But that was a conversation for another day.
As quickly as she'd bent down, she stood up again. "You need rest," she dictated. She didn't know if Thea had slept at her friends, but she needed a good long lie in. Maybe some tea or something. A hangover cure with sugar and milk. It wouldn't do anything to fix any lingering effects of the drugs, but it might be a comfort. She wavered on the edge of uncertainty, because that felt strange, offering succor to another human, but she could go with it. "Do you want...another blanket?" she asked, mouth set into the same thin line as usual, with just the tiniest hint of a waver. That did sound like comfort, didn't it? More blankets?
Thea looked up, up at angular face and stark lack of comfort in it, the flattened mouth and the shadowed sweep between her aunt’s eyes - and for a moment, something beyond young and miserable and tired in a way that was the door’s toll, Thea saw the line of Matilda’s own exhaustion, the tremor of it behind so much unforgiving sparsity. If she’d been worried (and maybe, maybe she had, maybe as Thea tried out the strange taste of it on her tongue experimentally, all uncertainty of that solid belief in familial connection) then she’d have been tired. Matilda always looked like she’d been wrung out, ink-smeared from sleep but she was pared down to the cheekbones beneath skin, the seriousness of her eyes. And maybe she’d terrified Lin who’d been uncharacteristically quiet on the ride over, but maybe that didn’t matter either.
“I’m fine,” Thea stated with the shy hesitancy of olive branches, of peace newly made, “It’s kind of ...warm, for blankets.” And she grinned, a too-big stretch of mouth, eyes slanting down as quickly as she’d given it away, that moment of something sincere. “I just kind of want to crash.” And if there would be dreams of wolves-not-a-wolf, if Matilda in the next room was something familiar to feel like comfort, then she didn’t care. She was stringy blond hair and scrawny shoulders in Lin’s shirt and she yawned, wide stretch of teeth.
It was warm for blankets, and Matilda blinked. Why hadn't she thought of that? That hadn't been a logical connection at all. "Right," she said. She let her hands hang uselessly at her sides rather than tucking them into her pockets. She nodded, and then jerked her head in the direction of the hall. "Your room's the way you left it," she said, taking a step back to allow Thea past, a wordless affirmation of her right to a little privacy. "...I should go talk with the police down at the station." She picked up her keys from where they lay splayed on the counter. "There's food in the fridge," she said, and shut the door behind her in a flurry of swift, decisive motion to distance herself from her growing confusion.