Cassandra (speakingtruth) wrote in nevermore_logs, @ 2012-08-08 17:45:00 |
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Entry tags: | cassandra, lewis carroll |
WHO: Cassandra & Lewis Carroll
WHEN: Early Tuesday morning
WHERE: His place
WHAT: It's a Greek princess-o-gram!
Cassandra didn't know his name. Or perhaps it was simply that she didn't remember it, as there were so many things she didn't - and couldn't - remember. But one of them, one of those old man writers who had recorded down their lives, who had built Cassandra's tongue from ashes and made it a wily thing to never be believed, one of them had called her second in beauty only to Helen.
Was that the girl she was?
A face comparable to Aphrodite, they said. No one would have known it to glance at her, a teenage girl standing on a street corner as the rain flooded down and painted her jeans and sweater onto her body like a second skin.
The thought that she should go home crossed her mind, but Cassandra didn't know if she had one of those anymore. There were lines that mankind stood behind and to put even a toe over that line... well, no one wanted that.
She blinked rain out of her eyes.
It's raining, said the man who approached her under his umbrella.
I knew it would, Cassandra replied.
If he said more she didn't hear it. (And if she said more he wouldn't believe it.)
She took shelter beneath the curving belly of a horse statue - an irony not lost on Cassandra - and lay curled there as the rain drizzled down and eventually dried, the sun rising with it. Somewhere her sister-in-law was nursing a knife wound, not deep but not any less terrifying for that. It was just that Cassandra sometimes couldn't help herself, couldn't quite remember who was a friend and who was an enemy. Her confused mind could make her as angry and frustrated as it made her sad and how could Cassandra have known that the other woman wasn't trying to hurt her.
Cassandra didn't need to be a prophet to know that she couldn't stay, not in that house of father and mother and tiny baby. She would save her brother the heartache of asking her to leave and she would disappear as though she was never even there. Everyone would have so much more peace without crazy Cassandra around. Her brother would be sad to start with, but quietly there would be relief, and eventually she'd be only a memory.
When Cassandra arrived on the writer's doorstep, her clothes and hair were still wet. She felt drowned, in more ways that one. She considered, for a moment, knocking, but Charles was soon to leave his home, she felt sure. So instead of knocking, Cassandra stood in front of the door and waited for as long as it would take.