Re: Cat and Jack
The dark was an edifice. No matter how high you built the bloody walls, the minute the lights were up, you needed something stronger, something with permanence because the benediction of shadow was gone and nothing remained of it. The light was harsher, after darkness. You saw more, once eyes adjusted to gloom and wasn't that the bloody point?
Cat rose and Jack expected it. The story stood bare in bonfire light and even the man with a city to burn and a death that wasn't a death didn't stand up to sordidity. If it was a fairy-tale it belonged to history, the kind of dark heart and sorry ending that lacked glass slippers and curses that could be broken.
Christ alone knew he'd sat in enough damp rooms with the smell of stale coffee to know it was true, and Jack's smile was bitter. He didn't watch Cat go, but he took the bottle and he sloped in the direction of the woods, where the fucked excuse for a house still sat.