cassidy moran has ended all the revels (revelsended) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2011-04-27 21:37:00 |
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Entry tags: | prospero, roxanne |
Who: Cass and Wren
What: Wren climbs up the side of Aubade to thank Cassidy for the kevlar, and finds out who's been making it rain.
Where: Aubade
When: The last night of the freak rainstorm.
Warnings: None
The last few days had been...different ones for Cass.
When he heard on the news about Thomas Brandon being shot for suspicion of being the Bat, all he could think about was Wren and her kevlar, out there on the street, fighting her all-consuming fight and getting killed by people committed to anger without any real consideration of logic or facts, mob mentality pitted against her. He didn’t agree with everything the masks did, with the way they went about things, but, Wren aside, it was simply wrong what these madmen were doing. Innocent people were being shot and killed, and for what? To kill one man, maybe two?
Someone had to put a stop to the fervor, to, at the very least, send the mobs scattering and give their anger enough time to cool off. Gathered every day as they were they would continue feeding each other. But send them running home, and many of them would stay there, too much effort for them to go out again. They would convince themselves that they had done their part, and not bother going a second time.
He had only experimented a very little with his ability since he had crossed over from Musings a few years before. Mostly it came into play only in turning him into a walking pathetic fallacy, the natural world bending to his emotions where ever he went without his conscious input. He had once created a storm to see if he could, while riding the through Europe, and felt a sort of euphoria that he hadn’t known before that moment. He had put it aside after that, not touching it since. It seemed dangerous, too powerful to be toyed with, but the rioting and mobs had made him reconsider. Maybe he could do some good with it. He could only try and see what happened.
Late in the afternoon, he opened the curtains in his bedroom to a wide view of the city below, windows that looked out onto a balcony that gave a spectacular view of the city and the sound. He shut his eyes, and he reached out, and he found what he was looking for - moisture. He could almost taste it on his tongue, high above the city, floating in the air, and he began to slowly churn it together, to pull winds down by threads, plying every piece of the elements to his will. It felt natural in an almost eerie way, and after a few minutes work the clouds moving toward the city had become ominously dark. He kept building them higher, pouring into them his fear and his anger, anger he had enough of for a thousand storms over, and was coursed through with that sense of elation again, of power over something.
He had never opened the door out onto the bedroom balcony before, but he unlocked it and stepped outside just before the storm broke, watching the clouds roll in, the tongues of lightning, the immense potential in them thrumming down to his fingertips. When the clouds broke open and began drenching the streets in sheets of rain, he actually laughed. He was soaked to the skin in moments. It was biblical, a revelation, and even from where he was standing on the balcony he could see people running for cover, and he kept laughing.
He came back inside to dry and see on the news that the mobs were dispersing. That was good. But this couldn’t be a short, quick burst. To make his point clear, to make clear that someone was watching Seattle who was prepared to do whatever it took to keep innocent people from harm and mobs off the streets, the rain would need to last.
So he made it last. He stayed up through the night, pacing through the apartment, reaching out into the storm and touching and adjusting, holding it in place with force of will backed by inexhaustible amounts of rage for the foolishness of people and unnecessary death, and love, besides. By the next morning he was tired, but the connection to the storm kept him awake, something in its sheer kinetic energy keeping him walking.
He fell asleep without noticing, while sitting on his bed sometime on Friday. He slept all through the night, but the storm never slackened. He dreamed about rain, about rain pouring through the apartment and filling it to the ceiling, about drowning with someone else. He woke up late in the evening on Friday, sitting bolt upright and gasping for air. But when he woke, he found the apartment dry...aside from the carpet in front of the balcony door, which was soaked through, as was he. He wiped a hand across his face. He’d never sleepwalked before, but there were wet footprints from the door to the bed, and wetness soaking the sheets. He touched upon a fleeting memory of a dream about flying, and then it was gone again.
He ran a hand through his hair. That peculiar sensation of exhaustion mingled with power in every cell continued unabated. Soon. It would have to end soon. Even if he didn’t necessarily want it to.
Wren wasn’t in Aubade because of the rain. She wasn’t even there for a visit, not really. She was practicing. Practicing with kevlar and the suit she’d spent nearly a month sewing and getting perfect. It was brown, a deep chocolate that made it hard to see at night, pants and a hooded shirt, and a perfect line of kevlar strips strategically sewn into the torso and pants. The belt she wore rested low on her hips, and it boasted a perfect circle of tiny knives, all tucked into their respective slots. Her hood was pulled over her hair, and her eyemask was a matching, dark brown. She wore no wig, and her hair was back in a braid, not visible with the heavy fabric of the hood in place.
She went to Aubade to thank him. Despite the rain, and the cold, and the fact that she’d never actually scaled something that high. But she was determined, and under cover of night she climbed the escapes and the wall, looking for footholds and almost falling three times. By the time she reached his floor and his balcony, she realized she needed gloves, even if they might make her aim with the knives less true. She was soaked through, but the water slid off the slick surface of her suit like rain on duck feathers, and it was only her fingers and face that were wet when she rapped on the door out to the balcony. It was dark inside, and so she knocked hard, wanting to be heard over the water.
She had no idea Cassidy was causing the rain. She didn’t know his ability, and she would never have thought it possible for him to do something in defense of the Masks. She didn’t see him as the type to care so much, even if she might be involved with the vigilantes and, therefore, in danger. She knocked again, harder, glancing up at the sky and the never-ending deluge. She was thankful for it, nonetheless. It had dispersed the mobs, which meant Luke could come home, come back to his life and his family. That was important to her.
“It’s me, Cassidy,” she called out, barely audible over the downpour, in case he was listening.
The door was still ajar slightly, and Cass heard her voice as he was sitting in bed. For a moment, he thought he was dreaming still, but no, not unless it was particularly vivid. He turned to look, but it was dark out on the balcony. Lightning struck , and the momentary brilliance showed a silhouette on the balcony. He got up quickly from his bed - but he’d recognized that voice. “...Wren?” he ventured, staying a safe distance from the door. He peered out at her. He looked like a mess, in just a pair of loose-fitting pants and a faded blue t-shirt, both wet enough that they clung to his skin. He ran a hand through his hair, sweeping it back and away from his eyes, water dripping down the back of his neck.
She tapped on the glass, rather than pushing it open. “You’re soaked,” she said, seeing that even through the glass and dark and night. She pushed her own hood back, even though it wet her hair and face, allowing water to slip along the back of her neck and under the brown fabric. “Did you come outside in this?” she asked, which was silly. She was dressed to keep her skin dry; he was not.
Cass closed the distance between them and opened the door for her. “So are you. Come in.” He shut the door behind her when she did. It was dark in the room aside from what light filtered in from the city outside through the windows. The curtains over them were open, which was uncharacteristic, the first time he’d pulled them back since he’d taken up residence there. “You look...prepared,” he said, looking over the suit. She’d done an excellent job with it, there was no doubt about that. That didn’t change the fact that he wished she wasn’t wearing it, however. “How did you get up here?”
He glanced behind her to the window. The floor and sheets were almost as wet as he was. “I did,” he said, after a moment’s thought - because he must have, even if he didn’t remember it. “I...wanted to see how bad the rain was. I haven’t been out in the past few days.”
“I climbed,” she said, looking over her shoulder once she stepped inside, as if it was the obvious answer. “I’ve been practicing that lately, climbing. I’m not very good at it yet,” she confessed. She looked back at him, and then she reached for his hand. “You need to get dry,” she said, leading him toward the bedrooms, toward where she knew the bathroom was, “or you’ll get sick.” She sounded like the grown up in the room, quiet and steady. He was soaking, and she was worried.
“You climbed?” he said, incredulous. “In this? Wren, you could have fallen.” He was being pulled toward the bathroom as he spoke, and he let her do it, because frankly she was right. He hadn’t noticed, but the shiver in his bones wasn’t entirely from maintaining the storm outside. “Practice when the weather is better, at least.” His tone was pained. He was trying to get over his old habit of admonishing her for everything, but really, why in God’s name would she scale the side of a building in the middle of a torrential rainstorm? He didn’t like in the least that his storm could have hurt her, even indirectly.
She nudged him into the bathroom. “Dry off, and I’ll find something for you to wear,” she offered, adding to the moisture already in the carpet as her suit dripped, dripped, dripped. “It rains at night,” she added. “Especially here. I need to know how to climb when it’s wet, too,” she explained, as if there was nothing more sensible in all the world.
"On a ten story building?" he asked, backing into the bathroom. He shut the door most of the way, which seemed a little strange even as he did it. Hadn't Wren had seen more of him exposed than just about anyone since he'd crossed over? Still, that felt far away, part of something that had been fine for what it was, if fake, if false. Besides, he didn't even go without a shirt while he was by himself.
He pulled his clothes off and covered up with a towel, rubbing it briefly over his hair and then pulling it high enough to mostly cover the scars on his torso. He was thin and pale on top of still shivering a little from the cold, and they added up to make him look even younger than usual.
She reached into the slightly open door with a fresh shirt and pajama pants, which she’d found in his dresser, and she didn’t try to look inside the bathroom. “The Masks spend a lot of time-” she cut herself off, realizing she’d been about to tell him where to look for Seattle’s vigilante population. She’d thought it was romantic, at first, that you could look up and know someone was watching out for you. Now she looked at it very differently. “Getting up high is important sometimes,” she finally said, glancing toward the soaked bed. “Why is the bed so wet?”
It wasn't exactly difficult to put together what she meant. "On rooftops. How cliche," he muttered, pulling on the dry clothes. "Thank you. Important it might be, but it seems unnecessarily risky."
He stepped back out into the bedroom, towel hanging around his neck. "The bed?" he asked, following her gaze. "Oh - I...sat down there after I came inside," he said. Not a particularly good lie, but he wasn't entirely sure himself why it was wet, or what he'd been doing in his sleep. He pulled the towel from around his neck and laid it across the wet patch on the bed. "At least wait to go out again until the rain slows," he said. "It can't last much longer." He wouldn't be able to hold it up much longer, anyway.
“It might,” she said, giving the bed a look that was entirely disbelieving. She walked to the window, then, toes squishing in the damp carpet as she looked out. “It’s to help the Masks, they said on the forums.” She sounded thoughtful as she said it, a smile around the corners of her mouth. “It’s nice, knowing other people care.”
Outside the rain lightened a little. "See?" he said, looking out the window with a peculiar sort of intensity, finger twitching a little where his hand hung at his side.
"I think I saw that," he said, as casually as he could manage, sitting down heavily. Maybe it was his body recovering from the cold, but the strain of the last few days seemed to be finally settling in at last. He looked up at her, in that skin tight suit, and wondered if maybe he shouldn't just tell her. "What...so you appreciate it, then?" He hadn't seen her on the post, though he'd wondered what her reaction to it might be. He'd thought she might find fault with it, or not believe the motives behind it had been pure. This was a much better reaction than he'd expected.
“The Masks can use all the help they can get, especially recently.” She didn’t consider herself one of them, and it was obvious in her use of third person when she talked about them, regardless of the fact that she was wearing a suit. “The people were doing more than trying to hurt them physically,” she said thoughtfully, looking back at him. She moved, then. “Where’s the linen closet? We should change the sheets.”
"You make it sound like you aren't in their number," he said, picking on her exclusion of herself from the group, a little amused at her saying such a thing while wearing a suit with kevlar sewn into it and, of course, a mask. "Despite the fact that you're wearing the uniform."
"I know they were," he said, small smile dropping like it had never been. "They were making websites to track them and try to do everything they could to hurt them. It wasn't right. Someone had to put a stop to it, and no one was going to - not the masks, not the police. I doubt the police would complain much if something happened to the masks, at this point." He watched the rain strike the glass. "Someone had to do something," he repeated, a little more quietly, sure and low.
Wren's very practical question about changing the sheets shook him from his reverie. He was more tired than he'd thought, clearly. "You don't have to do that," he said. "I have a maid, and she's paid well to do that sort of work." He paused. "Why did you come visit me, Wren?"
She tugged the Mask off, and she dropped it into her fingers as she walked around the room opening drawers and doors, looking for linens despite his words. “I’m not one of them. I’m just a little girl playing dress-up,” she said, giving him a sad-sweet smile, and then making a sound of success as she found white bedsheets neatly folded in the closet. “Sit in the chair,” she said, walking back to him, carrying the blankets and nudging him with a hand. “I didn’t think you thought the Masks should be helped,” she said thoughtfully, unfolding the sheets as she made the statement. “I wanted to thank you,” she repeated.
Trying to stop her would, of course, get Cass nowhere, as trying to prevent Wren from thinking or doing something had always proved fruitless. He got up from the bed and sat in the chair as ordered, watching her. He kept his thoughts about how she looked in that skintight suit to himself, and felt ashamed for having them as soon as they occurred. "That's not true, and you know it," he said. "You climb buildings, you help your girls, you have knives on your belt. What more do you need to qualify?"
"I don't necessarily agree with the way all of them - all of you go about things, but at least you're trying to do something." He propped up his head with a hand, curved forward in the chair, damp hair falling across his eyes. "Innocent people were being killed," he said, hearing the thanks and, for a crucial, exhausted moment, misconstruing its meaning, losing the thread of the conversation and connecting it elsewhere. "And you and all the other Masks were being chased down and tracked. It was foolishness, simple mob mentality, the masses rising up because it was what was appealing this week to do potentially permanent damage. I couldn't let that happen."
She stopped with only one corner of the sheet in place on the bed. “You couldn’t let that happen?”
He looked up from the window, where his gaze had drifted again, and froze. He'd stopped paying attention to what he was saying about halfway through, and he met her gaze. "I meant - they," he said, as quickly as he could muster his thoughts together again. "I can't imagine that they could have let that happen, under the circumstances."
She dropped the sheet, and she walked over to him, her boots making sounds as they sunk into the too-wet carpet. It drew her attention, and she looked down at just how much moisture there was in the apartment. “What is your ability, Cassidy?” she asked, looking up at his face.
He hesitated. He tried to avoid her gaze, but then there she was, staring directly at him. He could lie. He could say telekinesis, or, better yet, precognition that rarely worked and would therefor not require a demonstration. Then he could avoid the conversation that would necessarily ensue when she realized what he'd done.
But lying to Wren - lying to her face - would hardly earn her affections when she found out he hadn't told the truth, as she necessarily would. Nor did he think it particularly likely she would believe him if he tried.
"I can control the weather," he said, haltingly, biting down hard along his back teeth hard enough to ripple the muscle in his jaw, bracing, unsure what sort of reaction to expect.
She just looked at him for a moment, still and quiet in the damp dark, the rain outside pattering against the glass as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “You did this?” she asked, though it was barely a question, barely a question at all.
“I did, yes,” he said, slowly, looking back at her, waiting for some sign of her feelings. “I - it will stop soon. I’ll stop it soon, by morning. I doubt I could hold it up much longer than that anyway, Wren, it...” he trailed off, looking down at his hands. “I’m not good for much,” he said. “I’ve done enough terrible things, been useless enough. Innocent people were being caught in the crossfire - you might have been caught in the crossfire. Or your friends. It seemed like the right thing to do. I wasn’t even sure that I could, but...” He looked outside, at the rain and the wetness on the carpet. “Here we are.”
It seemed like something so big. It wasn’t like saving one person, or marking one rapist, or stopping one assault. It wasn’t like anything the vigilantes did, and it wasn’t anything like the abilities she knew about. It was godlike, somehow, and she was reminded of her mother and her candles and bags of sweet smelling herbs. He could kill people with it, she knew, that ability. Kill an entire city of people, and it made her shudder to think of the force and strength behind it. It scared her, and she was awed, and part of her felt like she should kneel at his feet. “That’s so big,” she finally said, quiet and awestruck. “You should use it to help innocent people. Not us, but to help somehow. There are so many bad things out there, Cassidy.”
Awe had not been the reaction he’d expected at all, and it gave him pause. “I’m not sure how,” he said, even though he was already thinking about a way to do it. “It seems too big, as you said, to help anyone by themselves. Maybe the city, maybe to do things like this, disperse people and make them go home, but...I don’t know. I don’t think I’m the type to run around on the tops of buildings, hitting bad people with lighting.” He watched her for a moment. “You’re not upset,” he said, just to be sure.
“I’m not upset,” she said, shaking her head. It still felt huge, and she couldn’t imagine ever having that kind of power over anything at all. “I think it’s amazing,” she said honestly, the awe still thick in her voice. She smiled a little, a tiny smile. “And I was just coming to thank you for a few strips of kevlar,” she said, adding a tiny shrug to the comment, even as she tugged her hood back over her now-damp braid. She finished making the bed, and she turned to look at him. “Thank you,” she said quietly - maybe referring to the rain, maybe referring to the kevlar, maybe referring to both.
Cass couldn't help but feel a small stirring in his chest. Wren thought something he'd done was amazing. "You're welcome," he said, the reply coming a little delayed while he dwelled on that rare spark of good feeling. "I'll keep doing what I can," he added. Now that he'd done this once, now that he knew what he could do, there was little doubt he would do it again whenever he felt it was necessary, whenever it might help, somehow. "Promise me you'll be careful climbing back down?" His fingers traced along the seam of his pants, dragging forward, and outside the side of Aubade that the balcony faced, the rain stopped altogether.
She looked over when the rain stopped, and then she looked back at him. She moved forward, and her fingers dragged over his along the seam, the touch slow and reverent, and then she moved back to the window and stepped out into the cold, where the rain no longer fell. She gave him once last look, this one haloed by the moon and the stars and the darkness of Seattle, and then she was gone, shimmying down the escapes and wall with only two near-slips and gone into the night.