notfaking_it | (no subject)

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?"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"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)