Re: Cass & Alex: the (bad) diner
The kind of death courted with French cigarettes - which was Cass's preference, even if the packet in her tunic pocket was resolutely dust-on-boots American - crept up on quiet feet and ransacked the house while you slept. It wasn't a death that sliced you out of the world whole. She'd seen enough of those and she didn't need to court them. She thought dreamily of one day surrendering, of taking fate and changing it to choice. Perhaps before she went entirely mad, and she watched the boy slouch into brickwork, the dust of crumbling red adhere to his sweater, with the lingering shade twisting and re-twisting at his back.
Cass's smile was liminal amusement, tucked into her cheek. "I do. Or perhaps I have something else." He didn't look tired, grooved by running on the same track. He had youth, and she looked him over with clear eyes that were candid about taking in everything and making no apology at all. She observed his hair, and his height and the vague light suggested only that his eyes were light. She could see all of him, and she could see the twining smoke of something trying to suggest, to pull itself out of the ether.
She looked into his face, and her own was neither honest nor dishonest. You couldn't tell, truly with a face. Hands perhaps. Hands did things faces could not, and her own was tucked into the pocket of the tunic, closed around the cigarettes. "I am new. Perhaps less new than yesterday but I began here a month ago." She looked into his face and she hoped, a little. The drugs, you see. She hoped and hoped they were curdled in urine and flushed quite clear until she could think of herself as herself, and not as an empty gourd.
She looked into the boy's face and she saw it briefly, a flicker. A street lamp, and an arrow and blood in rivulets into the gutter exactly as if the world had paused and unreeled like a roll of celluloid. Cass blinked, an expression settled like ash over her features for not more than one second, before her smile asserted itself underneath.