nomorekaraoke | October 31st, 2006

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October 31st, 2006

Ahh, the late October evening air is crisp and sizzling with the bustle and excitement permeating 6th Street. Just an hour or two ago, the streets lay quiet and calm, like before a storm. And what a storm it is. Tonight is the biggest night of the year for Lorne - the only night he can go out with a bang (so to speak), and glam it up without having to worry about mobs and pitch forks and torches and all kinds of peer pressure. He can be lean and green and having a fabulous time. For any other demon with a sense of dignity, Halloween is the be all and ban all of faux pas-es. It's a night where silly wannabes co-mingle. It is just not done.

But Lorne will do it and do it well for every year he can muster. He'll be in his hundreds, old and wrinkly and hunchbacked, and he'll still come here for the big event.

***

And when the darkness has fallen over the city, and the parade lights up the city streets with eerie lights and chilled merriment in equal doses, Lorne dances down the line like it's 1999, all feathered up, glammed up and having a ball.

You never know who you'll bump into, and the best part? You can pop into a coffee shop or a restaurant on the way, get to know someone better anytime you want to. If he should be so lucky tonight, it would be the icing on the cake and the cherry on top.

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"Oh." It's got layers and layers of meaning, that two-lettered response, and it sends his grin waning. "Oh, dear. Don't I know the feeling."

She's on the run. But from whom? From what?

She raises her head a little, looking right at him for the first time.

"I guess maybe you might."

"Lemme take a stab at it? Not literally of course." Of course.

"You meet some new friends, everything's champagne and roses and fun times. You spend more and more time with them, getting real close. Why, you'd do anything for them, just anything, because you know they're good people. In some sense, you're like a family, you and the guys. It's like that for a long time. It's like you don't even remember what you were like before you met them."

Bitter? Excuse him while he lights up a cigarette. Hell yes, and it's only ameliorated by the fact he's a bajillion miles away from the memories. "And then one day, push comes to shove, and all the good things you and your bosom buddies worked for...it makes nice pavement for a certain yellow brick road what smells of sulfur."

At the words you meet some new friends, she tenses but doesn't move away; if this is a trap, she thinks grimly, let's hear it.

And then slowly the tension goes out of her as she listens.

He's not talking about her. He's talking about him.

"Kinda like that," she says, even though past a certain point the stories don't match at all. Because the people she was working with --

"Only you don't know they're good people," she hears herself say, without intending to. "Not the ones you're working with, not the ones you're pretending to work with, you just picked the side you thought was gonna keep you safe and not make you do anything horrible. And you picked wrong."

Another deep sigh breaks his silence as he listens, watching the young woman, and it strikes her just how young she must be. How old she must feel.

His face, thinly veiled by smoke as it is, remains passive; guarded. Only his eyes can't keep up the facade. Maybe their stories are worlds apart, just like they are or seem to be, but he knows some of her pain.

"But that's just the thing, isn't it? You didn't know. You believed you were doing the right thing all along. It isn't what you did that hurts. It's the betrayal of trust."

She shakes her head.

"Shouldn't have trusted her in the first place," she manages before her throat closes entirely; the mesh behind the mask may hide the sight of threatening tears, but it can't hide the sound.

"Oh. Oh, no, sweetie. Don't cry." He takes half a step forward, hesitating only because he's scared her once already and he isn't at all keen on making the same mistake twice in such a short time span. Instead, his voice lowers to a soft murmur.

"Lemme tell you something about picking sides. There are no sides. There's no clear cut right and wrong, there's no black and white. It's all one big, whoppin' gray area, and the only thing you can do is follow your heart even if it leads you straight to Hell."

If you have one. "You did, didn't you? You had faith in someone, you thought you were doing the right thing. You believed you were. Didn't you?"

And, well ... did she?

"There are sides," she says finally, low. "Doesn't mean either of them's right. I thought ..."

Her arms are folded tight around her stomach again, against the ache and nausea, but she can say this; she can say this to him because he has no idea who she is.

"It doesn't matter what I thought. People got killed and it was my fault."

Strangers in the night. Frank Sinatra had no idea.

"It matters," he insists that it does, and probably would years from now. It's his way of justifying his own crimes, big and small. He believed he was doing the right thing. He really did.

"Just, maybe not the way you think it does."

"How do you think it matters, then?" It's sharp, sharper than she would ordinarily dare, but all the rules of ordinary seem to have been put on hold for the moment.

And that hint of a bite is all the drop Lorne needs to have his martini glass overflowing.

"Hey!" You show teeth, he shows his. He may not have much of a bite, but he doesn't take crap from anyone. Even if this eerily surreal thing of theirs doesn't count as crap, they are both getting a bit too close to the core of things to be entirely comfortable.

As if they were ever comfortable to begin with. "It matters. If it didn't, we might as well just end it right here and now and throw ourselves on the rails and wait to die a horrible death. Why prolong the misery of knowing it doesn't make one lick of difference what you think, all that matters are the consequences?"

He shakes his head. "Fuck that. It matters, because it's who you are."

"You don't know anything about who I am," she snaps. "And maybe we should."

Her hands are down at her sides, clenched into white-knuckled fists; she's pushed away from the wall to face him directly.

"Maybe we deserve to, and maybe if I had the guts I'd have done it months ago, and what fucking difference would it make to anybody?"

"I know enough."

He grits his teeth to keep his voice down - neither of them need an audience, and who knows how long they have until the next train comes by. Not much.

"If you think you deserve to die, you wouldn't have been up there enjoying yourself in the crowd. You're running. Hiding. You don't take risks."

Another long drag on the cigarette. "If you wanted to die, you wouldn't have run away from me. You were running scared of what might happen if I caught up with you."

Not much at all; there's a gust of warm air from somewhere in the distance, moving their way.

Very low: "So if I'm trying not to die because I don't want to, even if I deserve to, what does that make me?"

"Human."

He turns his head to face the rails, considering taking the easy way out. He gets on, she stays. It's the least he can do, get out of her hair.

"Human." She laughs hollowly. "What would you or me or anything like us even know about being human?"

(At the far end of the platform, where the track enters the tunnel, there's a steadily growing gleam of light against the tiled wall.)

He doesn't say that he knows a great deal more than she thinks. He doesn't tell her that some of the best friends he's ever had were humans (once, in one case).

"Killing yourself would be the easy way out, doll. No more misery, no more suffering, no more feeling sorry for yourself. No more chances for redemption, you just...cut everything off before it hurts too much. Is that what you think you deserve?"

She looks away from him, and stares down at the tracks. There's a flicker of motion as something small, a rat or a mouse, dives into a hole under one of the rails.

The rumble of the oncoming train is getting louder, and her voice underneath it is just barely audible.

"Maybe."

(Soft and clear in her memory: Took off the mask. See the lies in the truth. Now you know who killed you.)

"If it's that or be a killer for somebody."

(Same memory, different voice: Live through this.)

Her feet are aligned precisely on the yellow safety line warning commuters not to get too close to the edge of the platform. She sways, just slightly, with the wind of the train's approach.

"They would have had me kill you."

Chills run down his back, down, down in swirls and edged patterns that make no logical sense, like little teeth.

She's too close, and he didn't see it until now. She's too close to the tunnel and if she stumbles he'll be too far away to do anything about it.

"Because I'm a demon. Because they're not."

He takes one step closer, watching her feet and the glaring yellow line.

"Because you're a demon."

Her head turns back to him as the train comes thundering into the station, a rushing wall of gray metal and white light and roaring noise, and black hair blows about her masked face in the whack of wind that follows it.

"Because I'm a Slayer."

"But you're not a killer."

He looks her straight in the eyes, though he can't see them. His own may seem too bright in the harsh fluorescent lights.

"You don't want to be."

The train stops, the screeching noise of the breaks echoing down the spiralling tunnels and up the stairs into the night above. He's about to take a risk he isn't sure he's ready for.

"...you wanna continue this fascinating conversation someplace else?"

There's a pause, one that seems longer than it is.

The doors open with their habitual two-note bing-bong.

"Yeah," she says, and turns to step into the subway car.

He follows her, finding a seat not directly opposite, but where they're in clear view of each other. A Slayer. Of all the ladies in New York, he had to run into a Slayer. A rogue one, from the looks of it. Which means a certain pretentious pringle and his posse can't be too far away.

Wells. Which can mean either of two things. The Watchers' Council took a dive into an empty pool, or there was a showdown between them and another, nastier faction.

Word on the street says it's the latter of the two. And the girl?

He sighs, knowing he doesn't have all the details. He does have a hunch, however, that Dorothy ain't Kansas no more, and Toto is nowhere to be seen.

"Why don't you pick our destination, pumpkin. Surprise me." He smiles, all big and brightly. Better she picks a spot she's comfortable with, than suspect him of leading her into a trap.

The last thing she's going to do is lead him to anyplace she's comfortable.

She nods, silently, and turns to study the map on the wall of the subway car.

It feels like an eternity, but fifteen minutes later the train stops at the Hunter College station, and without so much as the slightest warning, the young woman stands up and gets off the train, leaving him with two choices. Stay, or go.

He follows.

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