cassidy moran has ended all the revels (![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} revelsended) wrote in ![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} musingslogs,@ 2011-06-20 16:38:00 |
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What: Cass is abandoned, so Cass brings down the fog. [Forum update to follow.]
Where: Various
When: Immediately following this.
Warnings: Sadness. Madness. Other rhyming bad words.
Notes: I would like to state for the record it was not my intention to end up with three supervillains. Okay.
He had told her it would be alright if she didn't come.
But she had agreed. She had said she would come with him, said she only wanted a moment to stay behind, to talk to that spoiled Brandon boy with his cutting words and his delusions of being able to protect her when he'd done nothing but hurt her, nothing but drag her into situations where she could be harmed and refuse to love her the way she loved him. He had no idea what Wren saw in him, but he did not believe himself to be cruel, did not order Wren around, did not leverage his ability to keep her close to him. He left her to her privacy, and he waited outside the diner, back against the wall, checking repeatedly over his shoulder for her, and for anyone who might try to sneak up from either side.
He looked in just in time to see a few things. He saw Wren reach shyly for Luke's hand. He saw her take it in her own. He saw her run.
She ran.
He stood outside the front door of the diner, watching as the door to the kitchen swung shut.
She had run from him.
She had purposefully deceived him. She had lied to him to get an opportunity to flee. She had felt the need to flee, told him that she would come, and then fled from him.
He couldn't even bring himself to give chase, for a moment, and then anger and fear and the refusal to believe what he had seen spurred his feet into the closest alley. Surely this wasn't what it looked like. Surely she could explain -
When he reached the back of the restaurant, no one was there.
How long had they planned this? How long had this contingency been in place? He was sure now that as they had stood outside the diner before coming inside, they had thought this through - that if Cass insisted on taking care of Wren, they would run together, Wren and the boy who didn't love her, didn't care about her, didn't keep her safe.
So she was frightened of him. She was truly scared. Why else the elaborate deception, the trickery, why else run from him? She saw him as so much a monster that she thought he might even hurt her as she fled. So terrible that he could neither be loved back nor tolerated only as someone who wanted to keep her safe. She so loathed the idea of being near him, so feared what he might do to her, that she had run.
Twelve years. He had waited twelve years before coming to this world, trying again, trying to open his heart to care about something. He had been spurned then, first by Bonnie, then by Valerie, and he had gone back into hiding. Then there had been Wren, and he had thought maybe, just maybe, that, now, it could be alright. Maybe now he could move toward moving on, maybe now it was finally safe to care as much about someone as he had about Clara.
Twelve years hadn't been nearly long enough.
What a fool he had been. What a fool to think that it was safe to come out of hiding, a fool to fall for her, a fool to accept she might never love him back and still hope for something, anything - regard, maybe, or just her presence in his life. Friendship, perhaps. How sad. What a fool he looked, the monster come down from his bell tower to extend a hand to the beautiful girl, how disgusting, how violent, how mad and untouchable.
He should have stayed in his set of rooms, where it was safe, where the world couldn't score him through any more than it already had. Impossible to love, inviting mockery and contempt and fear. What had ever made him think that the world was worth going back into without her? He should have stayed inside. Should have.
He was going to make them all wish he had.
The air around him thickened, darkened, moistened and cooled. The haze grew into the mist, and the mist into a fog that insinuated itself onto streets and alleyways, snaking through the city like a live thing. There was nothing natural about it, this fog - it unraveled from around him like a creeping gray vine, tendrils whipping out through the streets, filling every corner of the city with fog. Fog so thick you almost couldn't see your own feet, fog that obscured cameras and clouded the vision, fog that wrapped around you in an uncomfortably close, thick embrace. Breathe it in, and it tasted like lost and abandoned and broken things, the thickness of a tongue so heavy with rage it had no words to express it, the loneliness of the truly isolated. It wrapped every man, woman, and child ein the city in a tight cocoon and separated them from even the people they were standing next to. It made them all alone in the thick gray dim.
He heard the first screech of brakes within ten seconds, and the exclamation of someone on the other side of the street who had seen the bizarre, frightening blossom of mist unfolding from his body, but then she too was shrouded in the fog. There was a long horn, nearby, and a crash. Someone screamed.
Cass walked back to Aubade. He didn't have the least bit of trouble finding his way. Where he walked, the fog parted narrowly ahead of him and gave him sight, and where it hovered he felt the people troubling it and parting it with their bodies, and he avoided them. He opened the front door, and shortly the Aubade lobby was shrouded in fog as well, despite all its filtration systems, despite the fact that the doors were closed. When he reached his floor the hall became saturated as well, as did every other floor he passed on the elevator.
He stepped inside his apartment. He took only one thing. A key hung around his neck, had hung there for over a decade. A key on his key ring opened the door to the usually locked studio of his apartment, revealing a room full of dusty objects covered in drop cloths. He knelt in front of a chest at the back, and he pulled the key from around his neck to open the lock. The chest's clasp creaked with rust as he pulled it open. His hand dipped inside, retrieving a small, round object wrapped in a piece of cloth. This he tucked into his pocket. Then he wrote a note, intended for whomever came here next (because they would come, of course they would) and he left it sitting on the lid of the empty chest.
He took nothing else. His wallet was in his pocket, and his mind had in it enough memorized information to pay his way into eternity. He took only the item from the chest, and as he quietly shut the door to his apartment, locked it, and walked away for the last time, he kept his fingers settled on the curve of it in his pocket.
The fog filled every corner of the building, now, and people had come out of their rooms, scared and looking for human reassurance that Cass had ensured they would not be able to find, all as blind as each other, all as separate. He moved past them like a ghost, listening to voices and eddies in the mist and drifting by them without touching. They never even knew he was there.
Into the elevator, down to the lobby, and out the doors. And he walked, and he walked.
At the back of his mind, the urge to turn back and hide where it was safe was smothered by the knowledge that they would come for him, and by the spreading numbness that had settled into him when he began to let the fog loose. Everything was in it, all his fury, all the crushing disappointment, self-loathing, and the complete knowledge that he was alone. All of it fed the fog, so thick it made the lungs pause and reconsider the act of breathing. And for the first time in a long time, he walked outside without fear.