Who: Ella and Jack What: A brief encounter wherein Ella offers safe harbor. Where: Orpheum When: Recently Warnings: None
It was early in the night, and Orpheum was at the peak of activity. The club was packed, and the Burlesque Show had just started for the evening. The show, which took place regularly, was popular enough to draw a very large crowd, and by the time Ella left the stage, the club was standing room only. Someone followed her on, an older woman with a husky voice, whose show was much more revealing than Ella’s was, and it gave Ella fifteen minutes to change before she was due on stage again.
She hadn’t been in Seattle long, but she knew the word traveled that she was one of the many safehouses on the nationwide vigilante network, which was growing, a new thing that linked people who wanted to help across the continent. She knew the word was out, but she hadn’t seen anyone in Seattle yet. No one had come to her window, as the protocol dictated, and she was beginning to wonder if activity was not as prevalent here as she’d been lead to believe in California.
Her rooms were toward the back of the club, and she closed the door behind herself and began to change from white to red for her next song.
It wasn't nearly as easy to escape the wrath of interviews gone wrong when Jack wasn't in costume. While talking to a pair of men in a bar about a possible Mockingbird lead Jack had found himself in the midst of a fight that wasn't his battle. If he had been in costume, it would have been easily dealt with. But with witnesses around to see if someone saw him get shot and not collapse, Jack fled the bar through the back, along with the men he'd been interviewing and the rest of the patrons, most of which were connected with the same gang.
Jack was not interested in being picked up by the national guard because someone saw him survive a fatal wound, nor was he interested in being grabbed by the police along with either the attacking or defending gang. It was a position he was unused to, being unable to defend himself, being forced to run instead of fight. He rounded a corner and ran through his options.
He'd heard sometime the last week that a safehouse had popped up in town for vigilantes in need of a place to hide. Going there out of costume wasn't ideal, but neither was being arrested, so he changed course and fled the sirens on his heels. He knew the place was somewhere close, and after a little circling he found it, running along to the back, sliding neatly to a stop by a window, and pressing flush against the brick so that the men who had broken off in the same direction he had could continue down the alley. Then he knocked at the windowpane.
By the time the knock came at the pane, she’d changed into the costume for her next act, and she was working on twisting her long, dark hair atop her head. It was familiar, the knocking, and even though she’d yet to experience it in Seattle, she opened the window without hesitation for whoever was outside. It was dark outside, and though she couldn’t immediately see anyone, she knew someone was there, and she stepped back to see if they would enter.
Jack did enter. He slid down through the open window and shut it behind him, moving away from immediate sight of the window if anyone happened by. He took quick stock of the prettily appointed room in white, turned around, and found himself only a few inches from a woman in pink. He'd known that the person offering safe harbor was a woman, but somehow he hadn't expected someone quite like the woman he was seeing now, even knowing that the place was a burlesque house.
"Thank you," he said, the first thing that came to mind, really. "Sorry to disturb you, but I happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time."
The fact that he wasn’t wearing a mask - wasn’t wearing anything at all to obscure his identity - surprised Ella, and she made a quietly surprised sound as she returned to her make up table, the surface as white as everything else in the room and the mirror old and vintage. She watched him in the reflection as she returned to trying to tame the long, dark ringlets that refused to behave. “Do all of the masks in Seattle seek to be memorable without artifice?” she asked, brown eyes warm and teasing as she looked at him through the mirror, voice soft and feminine.
"Not often," Jack said, watching her stroke her hair with the brush, listening as sirens grew closer outside. He stayed where he was between the windows, the safest position in the room until the coast was clear. It wasn't as if he could pretend he wasn't a mask, after all - he had come here. "But lately things have been a little out of the ordinary." Even with the chaos he had run from still hot on his heels, he couldn't help but admire the long curve of her neck before drawing his eyes away again. "I expect you know a great deal about being memorable, with artifice or without."
Things had changed quite a bit for Ella between New York and Seattle, and she caught the admiring look, but she didn’t read anything into it; she knew better. Sex wasn’t love, and love wasn’t sex, and she was used to being looked at now. She turned a little on the stool, and she looked at him as she tucked pins into her hair without looking. “Being truly memorable is a very different thing than being nice to look at,” she said, giving him a smile that was honest. “And a woman in here is nice to look at, regardless of what she looks like. It’s part of the allure of the costumes and the mystery, the taboo,” she said, and she held out a hand in an elegant movement that was more act than realism.
"You strike me as the sort of woman who doesn't have to try hard to be memorable, even while being nice to look at with no effort at all," he said. The words were warm enough, but not particularly flirtatious. His mind was obviously elsewhere, and he turned his head as several sets of feet pounded past outside.
He turned back, and she was offering him her hand. He took it, grasping it briefly. "Corbinian," he said, with a small smile, and there was something in the fact that he didn't hesitate at all that had to say something about his sense of self-preservation. It hardly mattered, and this woman had proved herself trustworthy. "You are extremely at ease for a woman harboring a vigilante," he observed.
“If you’re here, you know I’ve done this before,” she said, pins in place now. She turned back to the mirror, and she began lining her lips as she watched him worry near the window. “You’re the hero of this story; I’m merely a stop along the way,” she added. “Why aren’t you dressed?” she asked, and it was clear she wasn’t referring to his street clothes. He was memorable, his thoughts on being memorable aside, with the scar on his face and his mismatched eyes. He couldn’t make a habit of dressing like this, or he would have been taken down long ago.
"You may have done this before, but you seem unworried. Is this place protected?" He wondered if her ability kept her safe, somehow, kept the people she harbored hidden.
"I have been prevented from going out dressed," he said, turning back to look at her on the last word, clearly drawing a connection between her own dressing and his slightly different use for disguise, "Under threat of someone I know being hurt. I was actually busying myself in trying to find the person responsible for that threat when I happened to get caught in a fight that wasn't mine." Admittedly, Jack's face was not one easily forgotten, and it did make going out without any sort of disguise risky. He had varied things to an extent, occasionally doing what he could to hide his scar and wearing a contact in the pale eye, but not today. Occasionally, an uneven stare got more information from someone otherwise difficult to intimidate than violence could.
Ella didn’t know much about the vigilante scene in this new city, and she listened as he spoke, not interrupting and not voicing an opinion on the mention of threats. She didn’t point out that the outfit didn’t make the Mask, and perhaps it was only semantics, his belief that he was protecting someone. “I’m unworried because no one is going to climb in my window and harm me, Corbinian. And if they do, then that is my exit in the novel. I’m not the main character, I am no one’s protagonist, not even my own, and side characters usually survive to go unnoticed in the end.” She looked around the room, which was far from luxurious, and she smiled back at him through the glass. “I suppose it depends on what you consider protection. You’re here, are you not protection?”
He couldn't help but smile a little at that assumption. "Good point," he said. "Why don't you get to be your own protagonist?" It was an honest question, as he found himself more and more curious what would make a dancer at a burlesque club stick her neck out for people she had never met. Did she idealize them all? Or did she just give them all the benefit of the doubt?
“I was once,” she admitted, gaze clear in the glass, “but it didn’t have a happy ending.”
He watched her in the mirror, holding her gaze. "I know that feeling," he said. Then, "Another story could start for you. Any day now, one could begin." Not a belief he held for himself, but one he firmly held for other people. "Second chances and new chapters are key for any good protagonist."
“And when it ends?” Ella asked, standing as she heard the applause outside the door to her room. “No one dies of love but on the stage,” she quoted, “but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt just as badly. No, I’m content to serve a supporting role to heroes like you,” she said, and she nodded toward the bed. “You can stay as long as you like,” she told him. “And you’ll spread the word, won’t you? First aid, a quiet place to hide, a messenger - I’ll help any way I can.” She walked to the door, and she put her hand on the frame. “I was frightened for a very long time,” she admitted to him, as if she was just remembering his comment about being unworried and answering it for the first time.
"You'd be surprised," he said, with a faint smile, and left it at that.
"I won't press your hospitality long. I expect I'll be gone by the time you're back." He nodded to her. "I'll tell anyone who hasn't heard that this is a safe place for them to come."
He dropped his head a little. "We all are," he said, and it wasn't clear exactly what he was referring to, which of the things they'd been talking about - frightened of the end of love, or frightened of just the physical danger of helping the Masks. "I expect you dance beautifully for being past it."
“Did the past tense imply I was beyond it?” she asked, looking at him for a moment longer before ducking out of the room and locking the door from the inside, so no one would intrude on him while he was there.