[for marcus]

[daughterofawolf]

[Backdated to 10/28]

Eponine had returned home after the catastrophe that was La Fin Absolue, half feeling as though she was in a dream and half more aware than she'd felt in months. Angry, almost, for the form her sins had taken and the speaker of her crimes. That was the proper response, she felt. Angry. How dare this forsaken place, or whatever God or devilry might rule it, send him to her to castigate her for her life? To hell with it all: she wasn't going to let it bother her.

But she wakes up in a panic, a sort of overwhelmedness of pain and loss and anger and terror, and has to hide herself in the toilets to half retch, half sob. For the last -- three months, almost -- she hasn't felt this strongly. She'd perfected the art of going away, to the point where days seem a blur. She hasn't been keeping up with friends, for she can hardly keep track of what they're doing and she needs to keep them safe from what she's been doing, she and Octavia and sometimes Eleanor and Rosie. She's been forging signatures acknowledging that she's doing badly in classes and needs to improve.

Something she had presumed about this place, about herself in this place, has been stolen from her, and it can't be given back and she's not sure she deserves for it to be.

Somehow, she dresses herself and leaves, in the still-frosty purple light of morning, and makes it to Marcus' apartment. Verity might be there, sleeping. Marcus might be asleep. Her face shows she's been crying, and she hates it, hates that vulnerability.

She rings the buzzer -- once, and after a moment twice more -- anyway.

Comments

[pushbackthedarkness]

Marcus doesn't sleep much, a byproduct of the life he'd had before Darrow, and especially lately, after everything that had happened at that damned movie. So many people in this city are hurting, many of them people he cares about, and still he worries about himself and the things he's said and done.

At some point he needs to go speak with Matthias. Seeing Mouse, hearing those awful things spewing from her, he knows what he needs to do. He knows how he needs to change.

He's in the middle of a cup of tea, sitting thoughtfully at his sketchbook, when the sound of the buzzer surprises him. At first he thinks he's imagined it, but then it goes a second time and he gets up to open the front door, revealing Eponine on the other side.