Lyra V (![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} ichorous) wrote in ![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} rooms,@ 2014-05-25 17:51:00 |
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What: Narrative
When: Recently
Where: Gatsby/Marvel/Gotham
When trees were dug up, replanted, sometimes they died.
She knew this; she had read the books of botany on her father’s shelves and she had (when he was in a fond, kindly mood, prone to barks of laughter and the mercurial compass of his temper spun drunkenly north-north-west) asked him why with her fingers curled into his shirt-front and her nails against the buttons. He had told her, the Greek and the sadness in his voice both momentary and visceral. “Sometimes, agapi mou, if a tree’s roots are too deep in the soil, if it is too much a creature of its habitat, it will die if you put it somewhere it does not know.”
She wondered for the first month or three if she was such a tree. If she would die here, without the neon lights to bathe her and her roots abruptly jerked up from the blood-soaked soil of her family. But she did not think anymore she was a tree. Trees took time, they took root, they swayed when the wind came. She was a vine, and she would crawl up here as she had in Vegas and she would make it her own.
She kept Graham’s boy close now, a kernel of before to keep curled into her palm, a promise of retribution for betrayal. She drank in the Vega’s bar and she watched from the shadows as girls who had the same dying stars in their eyes took the stage as the stars that had been lost to the girls who had danced in the Vega-of-before. She slept with one arm crooked beneath Anais’s, and she slept without dreaming.
She was not a tree. She was a vine, and she would grow, wherever she was planted.
The door was substance. It was money layered over morals and the accumulation of modest wealth and the American Dream untarnished. She wore silk and beads and she danced at the end of the evening when the music was turned up on a gramophone and the girls danced for pleasure instead of payment. And none of it, none of it was enough. She had no roots, and even a vine needed something to wind itself around, to rootle up alongside and lean upon.
She didn’t think of Anais.
She opened one door and then the next, and she slid into Marvel with old coins and dollar bills in her hands to buy the drink from modern stores to put behind a bar a century before. Marvel was clean and it was bright and it had the taint of those trying too hard to be good. Gotham felt easier. She didn’t pick sides. She didn’t clash against the Falcones, she just put money into the right hands at the right time, old coins worn by hands, and she bought just enough that she was a friend of the right people.
And then she did the same with the others. Whispered words. Never there when the lies might tie themselves in two. And it felt right, the way the Dream had turned itself around, grown up and found itself not quite the same. The taint wasn’t trying too hard. It was people giving up, instead. She bought an apartment in a building close to the docks where the smell rolled in off the water. There were no roots, in Gotham. If there were, they were entwined and locked in battle for what little soil there was. There were families, old as hers had been, who ran the city and she didn’t look for that, not yet.
She had her money. She had her place. She heard the rumblings of a war, not far off and she smiled. Trees sought the soil they needed and Gatsby, wild, carefree, extravagant Gatsby didn’t hold the bite of danger that was on the smoggy, Gotham air.