notfaking_it | (no subject)

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She's been seeing Nina for days.

At first Lily had assumed it was just someone who looked like her, but then she'd begun to show up at the studio. She'd danced across the rehearsal space while Lily stared on in something bordering on horror. She's done it twice now, she's suffered the loss of Nina twice and she can't do it again, and so she only stands at the edge of the rehearsal floor and she watches. She doesn't call out for her, she doesn't ask Nina what the hell she thinks she's doing, she doesn't do anything. She only watches.

But she keeps showing up. It's been days now and Nina keeps showing up and Lily is getting more and more exhausted with each passing day. It hurts so much, this wrenching pain in her chest, until she finally can't take it anymore and she gives in.

It's after rehearsal, she's freshly showered and changed into her street clothes and there's Nina, standing at the edge of the door, one foot outside. It's like she's waiting and Lily savagely ties her hair back, ignoring the reflection of Nina in the mirror, ignoring her until she finally can't. She feels like she's going mad, like she's starting to understand what it was Nina felt when she came to her that night, desperate and terrified that someone was following her.

"What?" Lily asks, spinning around. "What do you want?"

But Nina doesn't answer. She smiles and she walks away and Lily, frustrated and exhausted and broken down, follows. She calls her name once or twice, but Nina doesn't even turn, so Lily just lets herself be lead down the street.

It isn't until she's in the subway station that she realizes where they're going. It's surprisingly empty and she turns on the platform, looking for Nina again.

"I get it," she says, her voice exhausted. "This is where you died. What do you want from me?"

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At first, Eduardo isn't even sure it's real. Then, he isn't even sure it's actually her. Nina died months ago, and it isn't as if there couldn't have been other people who looked like her. Hell, Nina herself had the face of an actress who went to Harvard at the same time he did, and strange as it might be, characters from fictional media walk around here just like anyone else. But something about her stance, the sharp lines of her body, the way she's dressed, makes him doubt that it could be some coincidence. Of course, the alternative is that he's losing his fucking mind, which he really doesn't like the thought of, but there's only one way to find out. She walks down the sidewalk, and trying to catch up, he follows her.

He doesn't realize until he walks down the stairs to the subway platform that he isn't the only one doing so. "Lily?" he asks, brow furrowing. Maybe it was just her he saw. Maybe he hasn't dealt with Nina's death as well as he thought he had.

"Did you see her?" she asks, voice much more frantic than she likes and she pauses to catch her breath, to clear her throat. She doesn't know Eduardo well, but she knows enough to understand that Nina had liked him, that she had trusted him when she'd trusted so few people and it's for that reason alone that Lily asks at all.

Because he's the only other person here and if she's seeing Nina, maybe she isn't the only one.

Maybe she isn't losing her mind. Maybe there's something happening, something bigger than the two of them, and she's never believed in ghosts, not even in this place, where she's dating a man who used to live in an underwater city, but maybe Nina is trying to tell them something.

The words just about knock the breath out of him, both because that isn't a question that should be coming into play at all, and because it's a relief. Eduardo still can't wrap his head around any of this, but he knows that to be seeing Nina — actually her, not just some lookalike or something imagined — should be impossible. The implications of that aren't anything he'd want to have to consider, though, and if Lily's asking without any kind of prompting from him, then he can only guess that she saw Nina, too. If it wasn't only him, then it wasn't just in his head. It still doesn't make any sense, but as long as that's the case, he can deal with it.

"Yeah," he says on a heavy exhale, nodding. "Yeah, I saw her." Pausing a beat, though he already knows the answer, he asks, "So did you?"

"I've been seeing her for days," she admits, letting out her breath in a long sigh. She should feel more relieved, she thinks, knowing she's not going crazy, that she's not the only one seeing Nina around the city, but it doesn't actually help all that much. It makes it real, it makes this thing that's been happening to her an actual event instead of just something in her mind and while she hadn't wanted that, she doesn't think she wants this any more. No matter what, something is wrong, and Lily hates when her life is disrupted.

It's selfish and she doesn't care.

"This is where she died," she says, turning back to look at the tracks. She can't quite believe the station is so empty, but they're the only ones here. She squints into the darkness of the tracks, then shakes her head. "I don't know why she would have led us here."

"Neither do I," Eduardo says, quiet, a little distant. It's still a difficult thing to think about at all, that Nina could have led them here when she's been dead for months. Strange shit happens in this city all the time, and he's faced plenty of things that seemed like they should be impossible, but this is something else — not creepy kids' toys on the attack, not monsters from legends roaming around, not people with powers finding themselves with different ones. And while he's always believed that there might be something after death, too scientific to put much stock in anything concrete but not about to discredit what his religion tells him, there's a difference between that and someone communicating with them, appearing to them, seemingly for some kind of purpose. He doesn't know what that purpose might be. Now that he's here, he isn't sure he'd want to. "But if you've been seeing her for days and now we're here... I guess there's got to be a reason."

Lily nods, quiet and thoughtful, and she doesn't notice the shift in temperature at first. She's too busy looking the tracks where Nina died, wondering what possessed her, wondering why she had done it. But the station gets colder and colder until her breath puffs out on a cloud of steam and she turns to look at Eduardo, her brows drawn together in confusion.

And it's then she sees the pendant. It's cheap looking, pink and cracked, but it catches the light all the same and although she's tired and cold, her mind not working the way she thinks it should, she recognizes it. Sitting on a bench not far from them, it looks like it's mocking her.

"She had that," she says, pointing at it. "She was wearing it clipped to her bag before she died." She wants to flinch away from the words, but she can't. Nina is dead no matter what she says or doesn't say. "I remember it, she kept toying with it the night she came to my apartment. She said someone was following her and she couldn't stop touching it. Jesus Christ, it's so cold down here."

"What the fuck," Eduardo says, his arms wrapping around himself. The cold hasn't taken him long to notice at all, with what an unseasonable change it is. He's never dealt well with cold weather anyway, but not having had any reason to expect it, it's even worse. Usually, it seems that much warmer down by the subway platforms, the air thick and muggy. Right now, though, it's goddamn freezing. Something about this isn't right. He knew that already, seeing what could probably best be described as a ghost makes that clear enough, but now he's even more sure of it. "It's supposed to be July."

Distracted by that, it takes a moment for what Lily has been telling him to sink in. He frowns slightly then, though. Nina was always troubled, he knew that, but he wasn't aware that things were bad, and he hadn't been told the first thing about this. "What's it still doing here, then?"

Her hair is still damp and the cold air of the station sends a chill through her, but she crosses to the pendant anyway, shivering as she reaches for it and picks it up. "I don't know," she says, turning it over in her hands. There's a dark hair caught in it, tangled in the cheap claws that hold in the pink jewels and she wonders if it's Nina's.

For some reason, the thought of her dead friend's hair being caught in the pendant makes her stomach roll and she almost drops it, but in the end just clenches her hand around it.

"I remember looking for it in her things after she died," she says, turning it over. "It's ugly, but she seemed to like it so much that I wanted to keep it. I couldn't find it anywhere, I thought it had probably been on her when..." She trails off, her head tilted thoughtfully. "Do you hear that?" It sounds like strains of music drifting down the tunnel.

"Hear what?" Eduardo asks, not aware of any sound, at first, in large part because he doesn't expect there to be. Down here, there shouldn't be anything but people's conversations — if there were any others around — and trains rattling down the tracks towards them. Drawing in a shaky breath, though, still shivering from the cold, he realizes then that he can hear it. It's faint, but it's there, the sound of music playing from down the tunnel. That doesn't make any more sense than the rest of it. The stops aren't that close together; even if someone at another platform had speakers, it wouldn't be audible here. None of this seems right. He'd turn and leave if he weren't too intent on finding out what's going on. "Okay, yeah. Something is weird about this, right? Something's wrong."

"It's The Young Juliet," she says, though she's not sure if she's talking to Eduardo or herself at this point. It's music she recognizes, music she's danced to, music she's sure Nina has danced to, but it's nothing personal, nothing shared between the two of them. She's not sure what she was expecting, but it isn't this. The cold, the music, the empty subway station and the damaged pendant.

If Nina is trying to tell them something, none of it is connecting in Lily's head and it's as she turns back to Eduardo to tell him she doesn't know that she sees her again.

At first she thinks it's Nina and she steps closer to Eduardo, reaching blindly for his arm, because something feels wrong. The girl turns then, dangerously thin, her hair dark and swept back from her face, but it isn't Nina's face. Her eyes are a deep, dark nothing and her mouth is twisted in rage and jealously and Lily's hand clenches around the pendant tight enough for the jewels to cut into her palm. "What the hell..."

Edited 2014-08-21 14:43 (UTC)

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