Silly boy, Bellum was no place for sleeping! Everyone knew that dreams always got the best of you here. They set loose flocks of razor winged butterflies in the pit of your stomach, and made dry men beg for a bottle or a knife. Even the best sleeps teetered precariously on the cliff of nightmares, although it was nightmares that brought you the greatest sense of relief upon waking.. so maybe they were to be held the closest to your chest. One should hope for a nightmare before they laid their head down.
That was Vaughn's manifesto, but she had not been sleeping much lately. She was not herself these days. She was trying to be Jane, and it was making things complicated. She did not know who Jane was, or what Jane did, or what Jane would say.. so Vaughn took it upon herself to make a new Jane. A better Jane, one she could really wrap her head around.
New Jane was about late nights and city streets. Screaming in an empty alley just to hear it echo all the way up to where the bricked rooftops rubbed elbows with the moon. New Jane liked the park, and she liked to be barefoot, but she missed the winter. She could remember a cold that was so deep it went through one's bones, it was a cold that pervaded everything, it took one over, and it was the only thing one could think about. Only how cold it was.. and not the fact that.. she was losing a grip on everything. She was Vaughn, not Jane. She was Vaughn, she was just pretending.. she was supposed to be doing something important.
Vaughn hadn't tried to contact Daniel, she'd barely made him suffer yet. Because that was what she was here for, that's why Jane was back.. to make him suffer. She'd fallen away from that intention sometime between tonight and two weeks ago.. it just became easier to wander the city, to come home while the last of the darkness was leaking away. And then she made some tea, and she smoked at her window, and she thought of the Witch.
What would the Witch do? The Witch would go up to R1, right now, she'd scale the stairs and she'd make that man sorry. After putting out her cigarette, and adopting a methodical, mechanical pace.. she exited her fourth floor apartment, and took to the stairs. Up, and up, and up. Her feet were bare, and she wore a trio of silk slips that barely functioned as casual dress. Layers of silk and lace in odd, alternating colors; magenta and seagreen with an overlay of threadbare black.
Vaughn could remember a time when she'd spend her nights in the stairwell, exhaling smokestacks and watching the strangers. But that had been quite a long time ago, when she'd still been able to be herself here. Before certain misunderstandings.. like the knife, or pushing Boyd down the stairs, or when Sleeping Beauty turned up with all those peony bruises. But really, who was counting?
It was while she was crossing the landing of the eighth floor that the elevator sounded, and perturbed by the invasion of her solitude, Vaughn came to an abrupt halt. The man was no one she had seen before, although she had to admit that she'd hardly been keeping tabs on the new residents these days. It was a touch difficult when one could not even keep track of themselves.
Stepping forward onto the rustic bristle of carpeting, and leaning somewhat against the stairwell's ominous mouth, she surveyed him before speaking. "You look lost.."