Christine DeChagny (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lethermindwander) wrote2017-11-03 12:12 am
lethermindwander) wrote2017-11-03 12:12 am
Entry tags:
[LH!Verse fic] Forever for Now.
The sky is rather beautiful tonight, she thinks.
The dark, sulphurous clouds are swirling in such a colorful, enchanting way against the coppery red moon. The stars momentarily peek through the haze, twinkling in such a magical sort of way. Christine holds her phone towards the sky and snaps a photograph. She’d like to remember this sky once they’ve all left this town. She’d like to look at this picture and think that wherever he is, Erik might witness such beauty, too. Hope that for a moment, he might have been staring at the same moon as her camera lens. It’s something to hold onto while she’s gone. They’ll come back, of course, though that doesn’t change how guilty Christine feels for agreeing to leave Little Hades with Hancock and Elizabeth. She’s not giving up on her search for Erik, she will never give that up, it’s simply being put on pause momentarily. Christine has accepted that he is not the only important person in her (after) life. This isn’t about Hancock, Lord knows that Christine has been trying to avoid dissecting all of her thoughts concerning that man, especially since the zombie debacle Halloween spectacular. No, this is about Elizabeth. Her singular focus has been finding Booker for so long and now Christine wants to be there to witness this reunion.
Tomorrow morning, the three of them are to board the train and ride it straight to this city. Tonight, Christine finds herself in a position she’s been in so many times before. Standing on a high perch, white wings folded behind her, reminiscing and reflecting on all the things this city will now mean to her. She takes a step forward, only her heels left balanced against the sturdy concrete of this skyscraper. There’s only one building in Little Hades that’s taller than this one--Brimstone HQ. Most nights, she dares not fly so close to a place so ominous but this night, she decides the risk is worth it. A way to commemorate her departure from this town.
With a grin, the angel takes flight and soars through the layers of clouds, one by one, until she lands on the very top of Brimstone’s tower. She hangs off of the tallest radio transmitter, taking in the view. The heavy clouds are now far beneath her, the shadowed red sky and all the stars are no longer impeded and the moon glows an even deeper red. This is worth a photograph, too. She snaps one and tucks her phone away. Up here, the air feels different, it smells different. It’s still humid and sticky but the change in ambiance forces it to feel refreshing.
Christine is leaving Little Hades in the morning and she is loathe to admit that it makes her feel free. She’s been cooped up in this town for months. She’s been holding herself on some sort of twisted leash for months because she still hasn’t figured out what to do with herself since finding Erik. She’s been drowning in his presence since the first time she looked up at Angel’s Requiem, before her eyes had even lain upon him again.
She hatefully smothers the idea that she has been relieved this whole time he’s gone missing. If only because with his absence, the continuation of the search has given her something to focus on. A reason to jump head first into dangerous situations. A valid reason why she can’t ever seem to sit still and stay in one place.
With such little thought, Christine leans forward and her fingers slip away from the metal and gravity does the rest. Her body careens towards the ground at a violent speed. The hot air feels like searing knives against her skin. The wind rips through her hair and all Christine can do is stretch out her arms and fall. Through the sky, through the clouds, her stomach is doing flip flops, her dead, beating heart is pounding from adrenaline and this is the very definition of freedom. She’d laugh if the air wasn’t being sucked from her lungs in her descent.
She watches the ground swiftly approach and waits until the very last possible moment before adjusting the position of her wings to avoid impact. Her body abruptly swings back up into the air with so much momentum that Christine has to do very little in the way of steering before she’s back up to being level with rooftops. She soars through the air, easily dodging buildings at breakneck speeds.
Perhaps she is simply not meant to grow roots. That revelation sits at odds with what she wants. Who she wants.
Mid air, Christine feels a slight vibration in the pocket of her jeans. A text, probably from Hancock or Liz reminding her of the time they are to leave or something. Christine ignores it and moves on with her flight. As long as she keeps moving, she can keep thinking and her thoughts are not so bothersome when she can sort them through the air.
She flies over the Hive, meanders through the Drag and zooms along beside a speeding train. When her wings finally tire, she lands on an errant roof. It’s an interesting building. A rare architecturally beautiful place among the more dangerous streets of Little Hades. The bricks are crumbling in places, the roof is buckling in one of the corners. There’s a charge in the air here that she can’t explain. An instantaneous sense of anxiousness. She can’t escape this sudden sense of dread.
With an easy jump, she descends to the ground and tries to shake it off. Her feet carry her past a colorful display of fresh graffiti. She snickers at the sight, recognizing the bald man being defiled by that unicorn. A particularly irksome angel that works with the police, corrupt and cruel and entirely undeserving of that status. The exact sort of person that has convinced her that all these rules of angels and demons are complete and utter bullshit.
It’s the sort of thing that she and Hancock would have had a good drunken laugh over. That ass had gotten Hancock in hot water over absolutely nothing way back when. Her Hancock. The old Hancock. The one that’s still missing.
Still, Christine takes out her phone to snap a picture. Perhaps new Hancock will get a kick out of it, too.
The moment she slides her thumb across the screen, her stomach drops when she sees the name attached to the text message she had so blithely ignored.
Erik.
Panicked, she reads it over and over. Over and over and over again. It’s been weeks since she has heard from him, even longer since she has actually, physically seen him and she can hardly believe that this message is on her phone at all. Her eyes dart up towards the sky, as if the stars will give her answers, will somehow tell her this is real.
Forgetting about the photograph entirely, Christine’s new immediate goal is to get back to the Requiem as quickly as possible. There’s only one way to know if this is real or not or if she’s only imagining it. (It wouldn’t be the first time she has imagined something so vividly). She breaks out into a sprint, her legs carrying her as fast as they can possibly manage. When they are pushed too far, she takes flight once more, despite her wings’ aching protests. She can push harder, she can push farther, for Erik anything is possible. It doesn’t even matter that he wishes to speak of so called difficult things. All she wishes to do is hold his ugly face between her palms and kiss him absolutely senseless. She convinces herself in her hopeful naivety that conversations of difficult things are better than having no conversations at all.
Her muscles burn and twitch, threatening to give way and send her crashing against the ground but still, she perseveres. She’s gone through worse for far less. Tears prick her eyes both from the pain and the very idea of laying her head against Erik’s bony chest and feeling his arms tightly wrapped around her. She can almost hear the warm tones of his voice shushing her, rocking her gently and she is suddenly certain that there is no such thing as freedom unless he is by her side.
Christine damn near crashes through the front doors as she lands on the Requiem’s door step. When she had finally noticed that message, at least twenty minutes had passed and another fifteen had been added in her frantic travel. She runs through the halls, not caring about the noise she makes. The disturbance she’s causing. She rounds the corners and tells herself that he’ll be there waiting for her, in her room by now and everything will be fine. They’ll be fine. She doesn’t even notice in her quest that she nearly topples over the Rose of the Requiem. Luckily, a crash is averted, both women easily dodging another bullet.
It’s poetic, really. The two of them always just managing to miss the impending collision.
With shaky fingers, Christine slides the key into the lock on her door, a large grin preemptively spread across her lips. But her room is as empty as she left it last. She swallows harshly as she closes the door behind her.
“Erik?” She calls his name tentatively, “Erik, are you there?” A pause, “Please don’t play games, it’d be too cruel to refuse to show yourself now.”
Nothing.
She looks at her phone again, thinking that even after so much scrutiny, perhaps she was imagining things.
No, the message is still there.
“Erik, this isn’t funny, please stop hiding.”
Nothing.
It would seem as if that looming sense of dread followed her home. She sits on the edge of the bed and leans forward, looking rather defeated. She’s tired and all she can do now is wait. He’ll find her here, if he’s coming.
(There’s a voice in the back of her mind telling her that he won’t.)
When too much nervous energy has built up in her feet, she springs back to them and paces back and forth like a caged animal. He’s coming. He’ll send another message if he isn’t. When Erik says he is going to do something, typically he does not go back on that word. He’ll be here.
He’s still not here.
Obsessively, Christine checks the clock until at least an hour has passed. She stares at the bookshelf from where he typically emerges. She stares at the mirror, wondering if he’ll choose to use a more classic entrance. Every possibility is dancing across her mind except for the most likely one; that something has happened to detain him in the worst possible way.
Sometimes she forgets that this is Hell.
The process repeats for another hour. Sitting on the bed, pacing around the room, staring at bookcase, staring at mirror, checking phone. When the agonizing pattern has fatigued itself, Christine finds herself sitting at her desk, feet propped up on it. Idly, she strums her white-bodied ukulele. An instrument she had never intended on picking up and had instead found she liked it. The rhythmic motion is soothing, the harp-like sound of the instrument is hypnotizing and the improvised minor chord progressions leave a melody taking form in her head. She whistles along with the delicate sound of her strings to test it out. A moment later, a haunting song is pouring from her lips.
“Hush, hush, don’t say a word. The faint cries can hardly be heard, a storm lies beyond the horizon…”
Her voice is contrasted with itself, the dark, looming tones mixing with the airy high notes. New meets old in a gentle, elemental clash that puts that sense of dread into words and at the end of it all...it simply fades away.
And Christine is still all alone in this room. Finally, with the silence slowly suffocating her, she’s ready to assume the worst. Only, she no longer has to assume. Under the bed, there’s a stolen shipment of contraband sweets. In the pocket of one of her coats, half a pack of cigarettes. She takes both and heads up to the roof of Angel’s Requiem. She knows the way quite well. A secret passage here, another one over there…
The sky is far darker and the moon far redder, now. The moment she steps outside, Christine lights a cigarette and starts dragging on it. A bit faster than she probably should. She doesn’t particularly like sensation but it calms her fraying nerves regardless. She keeps forgetting that there’s something she can do now, powered by these vices.
Christine has still been adjusting to this newfound power of hers, though she finds more uses for them every day. She isn’t even entirely sure that this will be within the realm of her powers. She has tried similar things on a much smaller scale but nothing quite like this.
But she has to try. Hence, all the cigarettes and the stash of stolen candy to help with recharging her plasmid.
She flicks the spent cigarette to the ground and steps on it. Christine takes a deep breath and extends her arms. Dark feathers grow forth from them and her nails turn to claws. A moment later, in a cloud of shadows, there’s a literal murder of crows surrounding her. If she focuses, all of them can fly over the city and beyond and she can see what they do. It takes all her concentration, flipping between so many sensations. Her power fades quickly and soon Christine is chewing on candy and lighting up another cigarette to keep her crows going.
And then she finds it. The eyes of one crow pass over a wide-brimmed fedora sitting on the ground. She recognizes it immediately as Erik’s. With a sudden lead, her few remaining crows converge on the hat to search the area for clues. Evidence of some sort of scuffle. Footprints. A cracked white rabbit mask.
More and more pieces come together as Christine’s power drains entirely. She sorts them out, finding the suspected location of where this rabbit mask came from. There’s a few, brief moments of eyes darting around inside a theater cast in darkness. There’s figures moving about, she can make out the masks.
And she helplessly watches as a thin, tall figure is unceremoniously tossed into a cage. It unconsciously crumples to the floor and her crow’s vision cuts out. But that’s all she needs to see, needs to know.
It would seem as if Christine has been forced into making a monumental choice once more.
The dark, sulphurous clouds are swirling in such a colorful, enchanting way against the coppery red moon. The stars momentarily peek through the haze, twinkling in such a magical sort of way. Christine holds her phone towards the sky and snaps a photograph. She’d like to remember this sky once they’ve all left this town. She’d like to look at this picture and think that wherever he is, Erik might witness such beauty, too. Hope that for a moment, he might have been staring at the same moon as her camera lens. It’s something to hold onto while she’s gone. They’ll come back, of course, though that doesn’t change how guilty Christine feels for agreeing to leave Little Hades with Hancock and Elizabeth. She’s not giving up on her search for Erik, she will never give that up, it’s simply being put on pause momentarily. Christine has accepted that he is not the only important person in her (after) life. This isn’t about Hancock, Lord knows that Christine has been trying to avoid dissecting all of her thoughts concerning that man, especially since the zombie debacle Halloween spectacular. No, this is about Elizabeth. Her singular focus has been finding Booker for so long and now Christine wants to be there to witness this reunion.
Tomorrow morning, the three of them are to board the train and ride it straight to this city. Tonight, Christine finds herself in a position she’s been in so many times before. Standing on a high perch, white wings folded behind her, reminiscing and reflecting on all the things this city will now mean to her. She takes a step forward, only her heels left balanced against the sturdy concrete of this skyscraper. There’s only one building in Little Hades that’s taller than this one--Brimstone HQ. Most nights, she dares not fly so close to a place so ominous but this night, she decides the risk is worth it. A way to commemorate her departure from this town.
With a grin, the angel takes flight and soars through the layers of clouds, one by one, until she lands on the very top of Brimstone’s tower. She hangs off of the tallest radio transmitter, taking in the view. The heavy clouds are now far beneath her, the shadowed red sky and all the stars are no longer impeded and the moon glows an even deeper red. This is worth a photograph, too. She snaps one and tucks her phone away. Up here, the air feels different, it smells different. It’s still humid and sticky but the change in ambiance forces it to feel refreshing.
Christine is leaving Little Hades in the morning and she is loathe to admit that it makes her feel free. She’s been cooped up in this town for months. She’s been holding herself on some sort of twisted leash for months because she still hasn’t figured out what to do with herself since finding Erik. She’s been drowning in his presence since the first time she looked up at Angel’s Requiem, before her eyes had even lain upon him again.
She hatefully smothers the idea that she has been relieved this whole time he’s gone missing. If only because with his absence, the continuation of the search has given her something to focus on. A reason to jump head first into dangerous situations. A valid reason why she can’t ever seem to sit still and stay in one place.
With such little thought, Christine leans forward and her fingers slip away from the metal and gravity does the rest. Her body careens towards the ground at a violent speed. The hot air feels like searing knives against her skin. The wind rips through her hair and all Christine can do is stretch out her arms and fall. Through the sky, through the clouds, her stomach is doing flip flops, her dead, beating heart is pounding from adrenaline and this is the very definition of freedom. She’d laugh if the air wasn’t being sucked from her lungs in her descent.
She watches the ground swiftly approach and waits until the very last possible moment before adjusting the position of her wings to avoid impact. Her body abruptly swings back up into the air with so much momentum that Christine has to do very little in the way of steering before she’s back up to being level with rooftops. She soars through the air, easily dodging buildings at breakneck speeds.
Perhaps she is simply not meant to grow roots. That revelation sits at odds with what she wants. Who she wants.
Mid air, Christine feels a slight vibration in the pocket of her jeans. A text, probably from Hancock or Liz reminding her of the time they are to leave or something. Christine ignores it and moves on with her flight. As long as she keeps moving, she can keep thinking and her thoughts are not so bothersome when she can sort them through the air.
She flies over the Hive, meanders through the Drag and zooms along beside a speeding train. When her wings finally tire, she lands on an errant roof. It’s an interesting building. A rare architecturally beautiful place among the more dangerous streets of Little Hades. The bricks are crumbling in places, the roof is buckling in one of the corners. There’s a charge in the air here that she can’t explain. An instantaneous sense of anxiousness. She can’t escape this sudden sense of dread.
With an easy jump, she descends to the ground and tries to shake it off. Her feet carry her past a colorful display of fresh graffiti. She snickers at the sight, recognizing the bald man being defiled by that unicorn. A particularly irksome angel that works with the police, corrupt and cruel and entirely undeserving of that status. The exact sort of person that has convinced her that all these rules of angels and demons are complete and utter bullshit.
It’s the sort of thing that she and Hancock would have had a good drunken laugh over. That ass had gotten Hancock in hot water over absolutely nothing way back when. Her Hancock. The old Hancock. The one that’s still missing.
Still, Christine takes out her phone to snap a picture. Perhaps new Hancock will get a kick out of it, too.
The moment she slides her thumb across the screen, her stomach drops when she sees the name attached to the text message she had so blithely ignored.
Erik.
Panicked, she reads it over and over. Over and over and over again. It’s been weeks since she has heard from him, even longer since she has actually, physically seen him and she can hardly believe that this message is on her phone at all. Her eyes dart up towards the sky, as if the stars will give her answers, will somehow tell her this is real.
Forgetting about the photograph entirely, Christine’s new immediate goal is to get back to the Requiem as quickly as possible. There’s only one way to know if this is real or not or if she’s only imagining it. (It wouldn’t be the first time she has imagined something so vividly). She breaks out into a sprint, her legs carrying her as fast as they can possibly manage. When they are pushed too far, she takes flight once more, despite her wings’ aching protests. She can push harder, she can push farther, for Erik anything is possible. It doesn’t even matter that he wishes to speak of so called difficult things. All she wishes to do is hold his ugly face between her palms and kiss him absolutely senseless. She convinces herself in her hopeful naivety that conversations of difficult things are better than having no conversations at all.
Her muscles burn and twitch, threatening to give way and send her crashing against the ground but still, she perseveres. She’s gone through worse for far less. Tears prick her eyes both from the pain and the very idea of laying her head against Erik’s bony chest and feeling his arms tightly wrapped around her. She can almost hear the warm tones of his voice shushing her, rocking her gently and she is suddenly certain that there is no such thing as freedom unless he is by her side.
Christine damn near crashes through the front doors as she lands on the Requiem’s door step. When she had finally noticed that message, at least twenty minutes had passed and another fifteen had been added in her frantic travel. She runs through the halls, not caring about the noise she makes. The disturbance she’s causing. She rounds the corners and tells herself that he’ll be there waiting for her, in her room by now and everything will be fine. They’ll be fine. She doesn’t even notice in her quest that she nearly topples over the Rose of the Requiem. Luckily, a crash is averted, both women easily dodging another bullet.
It’s poetic, really. The two of them always just managing to miss the impending collision.
With shaky fingers, Christine slides the key into the lock on her door, a large grin preemptively spread across her lips. But her room is as empty as she left it last. She swallows harshly as she closes the door behind her.
“Erik?” She calls his name tentatively, “Erik, are you there?” A pause, “Please don’t play games, it’d be too cruel to refuse to show yourself now.”
Nothing.
She looks at her phone again, thinking that even after so much scrutiny, perhaps she was imagining things.
No, the message is still there.
“Erik, this isn’t funny, please stop hiding.”
Nothing.
It would seem as if that looming sense of dread followed her home. She sits on the edge of the bed and leans forward, looking rather defeated. She’s tired and all she can do now is wait. He’ll find her here, if he’s coming.
(There’s a voice in the back of her mind telling her that he won’t.)
When too much nervous energy has built up in her feet, she springs back to them and paces back and forth like a caged animal. He’s coming. He’ll send another message if he isn’t. When Erik says he is going to do something, typically he does not go back on that word. He’ll be here.
He’s still not here.
Obsessively, Christine checks the clock until at least an hour has passed. She stares at the bookshelf from where he typically emerges. She stares at the mirror, wondering if he’ll choose to use a more classic entrance. Every possibility is dancing across her mind except for the most likely one; that something has happened to detain him in the worst possible way.
Sometimes she forgets that this is Hell.
The process repeats for another hour. Sitting on the bed, pacing around the room, staring at bookcase, staring at mirror, checking phone. When the agonizing pattern has fatigued itself, Christine finds herself sitting at her desk, feet propped up on it. Idly, she strums her white-bodied ukulele. An instrument she had never intended on picking up and had instead found she liked it. The rhythmic motion is soothing, the harp-like sound of the instrument is hypnotizing and the improvised minor chord progressions leave a melody taking form in her head. She whistles along with the delicate sound of her strings to test it out. A moment later, a haunting song is pouring from her lips.
“Hush, hush, don’t say a word. The faint cries can hardly be heard, a storm lies beyond the horizon…”
Her voice is contrasted with itself, the dark, looming tones mixing with the airy high notes. New meets old in a gentle, elemental clash that puts that sense of dread into words and at the end of it all...it simply fades away.
And Christine is still all alone in this room. Finally, with the silence slowly suffocating her, she’s ready to assume the worst. Only, she no longer has to assume. Under the bed, there’s a stolen shipment of contraband sweets. In the pocket of one of her coats, half a pack of cigarettes. She takes both and heads up to the roof of Angel’s Requiem. She knows the way quite well. A secret passage here, another one over there…
The sky is far darker and the moon far redder, now. The moment she steps outside, Christine lights a cigarette and starts dragging on it. A bit faster than she probably should. She doesn’t particularly like sensation but it calms her fraying nerves regardless. She keeps forgetting that there’s something she can do now, powered by these vices.
Christine has still been adjusting to this newfound power of hers, though she finds more uses for them every day. She isn’t even entirely sure that this will be within the realm of her powers. She has tried similar things on a much smaller scale but nothing quite like this.
But she has to try. Hence, all the cigarettes and the stash of stolen candy to help with recharging her plasmid.
She flicks the spent cigarette to the ground and steps on it. Christine takes a deep breath and extends her arms. Dark feathers grow forth from them and her nails turn to claws. A moment later, in a cloud of shadows, there’s a literal murder of crows surrounding her. If she focuses, all of them can fly over the city and beyond and she can see what they do. It takes all her concentration, flipping between so many sensations. Her power fades quickly and soon Christine is chewing on candy and lighting up another cigarette to keep her crows going.
And then she finds it. The eyes of one crow pass over a wide-brimmed fedora sitting on the ground. She recognizes it immediately as Erik’s. With a sudden lead, her few remaining crows converge on the hat to search the area for clues. Evidence of some sort of scuffle. Footprints. A cracked white rabbit mask.
More and more pieces come together as Christine’s power drains entirely. She sorts them out, finding the suspected location of where this rabbit mask came from. There’s a few, brief moments of eyes darting around inside a theater cast in darkness. There’s figures moving about, she can make out the masks.
And she helplessly watches as a thin, tall figure is unceremoniously tossed into a cage. It unconsciously crumples to the floor and her crow’s vision cuts out. But that’s all she needs to see, needs to know.
It would seem as if Christine has been forced into making a monumental choice once more.