SNC: The Story Needed Mending (Kate/Ashley, R) 1/2
Title: The Story Needed Mending
Author: Mad_Maudlin
Fandom: Sanctuary
Length: 18,372
Pairings and Characters: Kate Freelander/Ashley Magnus, Helen Magnus, Will Zimmerman, Henry Foss
Spoilers: Through season 2
Warnings: drug use, canon character death, disturbing imagery, rampant abuse of folklore
Summary: Once upon a time there was a girl, and a ghost. Then it got complicated.
A/N: Written for kuwdora's Sanctuary Ficathon, for shopfront. I think I ended up accidentally hitting multiple prompts in this one, which is no surprise considering how long it ended up. Hopefully that's makes up for it being a little late? ::puppyeyes::
This is asymptotic to canon for season 2, but I'm assuming that "Haunted" occurs chronologically before "Sleepers," since there are dialogue cues to that effect in the latter episode; the fic goes full-tilt AU as of "Kali II." This fic was inspired by Sara Bareilles' song "Fairy Tale," and I play off quite a few here, most notably "Tam Lin" and "Cupid and Psyche;" but there are allusions to a ton of others, so if you recognize it, it's probably not mine. (The legend about Kali and Shiva is TOTALLY not mine, and made the episode "Kali" make a million times more sense after I read it!)
THANK YOU to ceilidh and linnet_melody for beta-reading!
The Story Needed Mending
by Mad Maudlin
Once upon a time...
No, that's not right. There were two kinds of fairy tales in what passed for Kate's childhood, and the ones in Hindi didn't start that way. Those were boring anyway, and so far removed from Chicago's south side that she wouldn't have even looked at them if her mother hadn't pushed. The other kind of fairy tales came courtesy of the Walt Disney corporation, and those were a little better, even though it still seemed like only the princes ever got to do anything. At least the other kids in her class had heard of those, and when they played pretend at recess Kate could be Prince Charming and Prince Eric and Aladdin-
("Wouldn't you like to play the princess sometimes?" one of her teachers once asked her in a worried tone.
Kate had shrugged. Yes, she would've-Princess Jasmine especially, who actually looked a little like her-but whenever she did, the other girls would screech at her for not waiting for the prince, for not following the plot, for doing it all wrong. If she couldn't fight her own monsters, she'd settle for the next best thing.)
But then her dad was killed, and Kate gave up on fairy tales. At least cynicism never let you down, right? Of course, she ended up in a line of work where dragons and curses and magical potions weren't totally out of the question-but she knew better than to expect white knights and fairy godmothers to go with them. Real life didn't work that way, and she wasn't wasting her time waiting on a happy ending.
XXX
Once upon a time, there was a princess in a castle in the west, and she was beautiful and brave and strong and kind. But her mother the queen had many enemies, and one day an evil witch stole the princess away to her lair. The queen and her knights searched far and wide for the princess, but when they found her they made a horrible discovery: the witch had transformed the princess into a terrible dragon, and she sent the dragon forth to burn and savage the queen and all her people.
The queen fought bravely, and many of her knights fell, but the dragon could not be stopped. But a certain wild girl of the forest had escaped the witch, and came to the castle in the west seeking its shelter; and when the dragon seemed ready to devour the queen, the girl took up a sword and smote it through the heart. Thus the dragon was slain, and there was weeping throughout all the kingdom, and the queen grieved her daughter ever after.
XXX
If the Sanctuary wasn't haunted, it should have been: there were too many empty spaces, too many dark places, and Kate wondered why Magnus didn't keep a bigger staff just to fill up all the silence. Then again, her hiring practices did seem a little off the wall.
Kate went exploring a lot, because she liked to know where her escapes routes were, and only got in trouble twice. "What are you snooping around for this time?" Henry asked, still half-suspicious when he caught her setting off alarms.
"Not your business," the Big Guy snuffled, after she couldn't quite jimmy the lock on a dusty vault.
She wanted to remind them that she was one of them now, here with the boss's blessing, not a guest or a child. Instead she grumbled or flirted with them (as appropriate) and held her chin high, and tried to come back at a time when she wouldn’t get caught.
Kate went exploring, and Kate knew when she was being watched. Sometimes she thought it was one of the others, Henry or Big Guy or Will or maybe even Magnus, spying on her and trying to decide if they'd made a mistake. Sometimes it was probably just one of the residents (because Magnus won't "pathologize their existence" by calling them all patients, and they're not inmates if they can leave)-some of them were taking a while to warm up to her, some of them were still looking for someone else and had settled on Kate as the next best thing.
Kate knew she was being watched in the high airy chapel, where pointed arches flung themselves to heaven and clear glass stood in for iconography. There weren't any surveillance cameras here-that would be creepy, in this reverent silence-but Kate knew by now that just because she couldn't see anyone around, it didn't mean she was alone.
She tried to ignore the feeling, exploring the benches and niches, the pale stonework. A breeze ghosted across the back of her neck, and not a fan or a vent in sight. Kate ignored it until she heard a metallic crash, somewhere behind her-she spun around and found a stand of flowers laying on its side, a good ten feet away from her.
Kate folded her arms and raised her chin. "I'm not dumb, you know," she announced.
The breeze went still, but the feeling of being watched remained. She turned in a complete circle, not certain where to address her words. "My name's Kate Freelander, and you can come the hell out any time."
Nothing happened. The breeze had stopped, but she still wasn't alone.
"You can't scare me," she added, matter of fact. "I've dated weirder shit than I see around here."
No response.
"Fine, whatever," Kate said, and headed back to the stairs. She snagged one of the flowers off the floor and twirled it in her fingers, called over her shoulder. "But listen, in the future? Back the fuck off. This is my territory now, too."
(Maybe if she said it often enough, it would be true.)
XXX
Once upon a time there was a queen in a distant land who was good and clever and beautiful and kind. She was betrothed a handsome prince, and they had a beautiful baby daughter, and the queen thought they would live happily ever after.
But the prince had a terrible secret: when the moon rose, he transformed into a monster and devoured the young women of the kingdom. When the queen discovered this secret, she tried to help her prince, but the monster was too great and overcame her. So the queen fled to a land across the sea, where the monster would not find her; and she put her daughter the princess in an enchanted sleep for one hundred years, because the monster was so dangerous, and because the queen was so heavy with grief.
XXX
Kate had never met Ashley Magnus; she hadn't even laid eyes on her before the day she fired a rocket-propelled grenade into her torso. So everything she knew about the woman came in hindsight, second-hand, from stories and sighs and the pictures in Magnus' study.
"Where'd you learn to shoot like that?" she asked Will.
"What idiot set up you guys' armory?" she grumbled to Henry.
"Why do you have a metric shit-ton of Lucky Charms in the kitchen?" she asked the Big Guy.
"Who's the kid in the picture?" she asked Magnus.
Almost always, the answer was Ashley.
She knew people were comparing them-hell, she was comparing them herself. Henry complained about Kate's computer skills and Will joked about her attitude and the Big Guy kept trying to serve her Lucky Charms. And sometimes, when she should've been alone in a room, she felt those eyes on the back of her head, weighting and judging without ever revealing the score.
It wasn't exactly survivor's guilt, because she hadn't ever known the woman. It was more like Kate had fallen into someone else's life, and even if she could've fit in Ashley's size-nines she didn't really want to wear them. So she was loud and reckless and occasionally inappropriate, holding her chin up and daring them all to find her lacking. And when she reorganized the armory, nobody had an aneurysm, but the eyes on the back of her head didn't go away.
XXX
Once upon a time there was a girl who lived in the forest. She had no father and no mother and only a little bit of a brother, so she had gone into the wilderness to live by herself. She took only three things that she thought were precious: a mirror, a cloak, and a beautiful book.
The forest was dark and deep and frightening, and at first the girl was afraid. The first creature she met in the wilderness was a raven. "Give me the mirror," the raven said. "What do you need to look behind you for? I can teach you how to see like a raven, and I can spot a gnat in the dark from a mile away." So the girl gave away her mirror, and the raven taught her how to see, and the girl went deeper into the forest.
The second creature she met was a wolf. "Give me your cloak," the wolf said. "What do you need to hide for? I can teach you how to fight like a wolf, and I have teeth and claws and a tough hide to protect me." So the girl gave away her cloak, and the wolf taught her how to fight, and the girl went deeper into the forest.
The third creature she met was a serpent. "Give me your book," the serpent said. "What do you need other people's words for? I can teach you how to lie like a serpent, and I have two tongues and no one has ever caught me." So the girl gave away her book, and the serpent taught her how to lie; and the girl dwelled in the depths of the wilderness, and lived like a raven and a serpent and a wolf, and was alone.
XXX
Kate didn't like labels, really. She slept with men, but the kind of men she hung out with could go pretty fast from fucking to fucking you over. She slept with women, too, who weren't any less dangerous, but at least they usually understood that no means no. Either way, she tried to keep most of her clothes on and was careful about who she kissed on the mouth.
So it wasn't a big deal to dream about a woman, and that's all it was, a dream-images and feelings, disconnected and distorted, patternless. Not as memorable as the one where she was Princess Jasmine, or the one about the rats, or the one where she showed up to a Hindu wedding in a fluffy white gown, which she had a lot. (Will had tried to psychoanalyze that one for her; she'd said "Well, duh.")
She dreamed about women, or maybe one particular woman, disassembled into component parts-a hard bicep here, a stubbled knee there, hands that twine with Kate's like coffee with cream. She couldn't put all the pieces together but sometimes, when she woke up, she could still feel a warm presence, could still feel eyes on her in the dark of her room..
Sometimes she woke up and she was kind of surprised that her fingers were tangled in blankets, with no sign of long blonde hair.
XXX
Once upon a time there was a girl with no mother and no father and hardly any brother, and so she went to live in a castle in the west with her stepmother the queen. And the queen would summon her before the throne, and give her a task, such as, "I want you to bring me the sea at midnight and the sky at noon, and do not return until then."
So the girl went out into the town, and came back with a beautiful cloak of deep blue-black velvet lined with shining cloth-of-gold. The girl said, "I have brought what you asked."
"I suppose," the queen said, "you have done well."
The next morning the queen summoned the girl before the throne and said to her, "I want you to bring me the blue of the sky and the gold of the sun and the red of the heart's blood, and do not return until then."
So the girl went into the forest, and she came back with a bouquet of daffodils and morning glories and amaranth, which is called love-lies-bleeding. "I have brought what you asked," she said.
"I suppose," the queen said, "you have done well."
The next day the queen summoned the girl before the throne and said to her, "I want you to bring me love without loss, joy without grief, pleasure without pain and hope without despair, and do not return until then."
The girl went out into the wide world. She was never seen again.
XXX
Magnus was...hard. Magnus seemed to like Kate, hadn't pressed her about any Abnormal-aided assassinations, had made a space for her in her Sanctuary. But Magnus also kept Kate on a leash and didn't trust her with serious jobs or pointy objects. Magnus sometimes scolded Kate like she might've scolded a child. Other times she looked right through her.
And seeing as Kate's job interview had been shooting her daughter, Kate really didn't know how to complain.
When Magnus and Will went hunting for squid and Henry took the Big Guy surfing, Kate was alone in the Sanctuary, and she took that chance to explore all the places the rest of them told her not to. She found supply rooms and locked safes and Henry's porn collection (ugh), and a vault of peculiar machines gathering dust. Some of them looked old, like really old, with copper pipes and rotting leather bellows; a lot of them were damaged, not just by time, but with scorch marks and claw marks and melted wiring. They all seemed to have the same design, tanks and tubes and temperature gauges, but Kate couldn't quite figure out what they were for, or why Magnus would want to keep them all around. She locked the vault behind her and figured that she'd ask somebody, some time, once she came up with a good story for how she'd found them in the first place-or at least better than "I was bored and the door was there."
(There were always eyes on her now, always a little breeze tickling the fine hairs at the base of her neck, but Kate had learned to ignore it. Take that, you goddamn voyeur.)
When Magnus and Will sent out a distress call, Kate was the one who organized the search and rescue, all by herself, thank you. They were freezing and hungry when she pulled them out of the oil rig, their skin blistered and bloated from sun and salt water, but whereas Will curled up in the back of the plane and conked out almost immediately, Magnus limped over to sit by Kate. "Impressive work," she said, clutching a bottle of water in her bandaged hands. "I was afraid we'd have a much longer wait ahead of us."
"Hey, it's all in a day's work," Kate said. "Plus, this way you totally can't complain about the wild party I had while you were gone."
Magnus laughed a little, eyes cast down. "I've afraid I've been underestimating you, Kate," she said. "It's not a mistake I intend to make in the future."
"Thanks?" Kate said. "I think?"
"Sorry." She shook her head, stiff salty hair flying in clumps. "I've had...other things on my mind lately."
"Hey, no prob. I can-" She hooked a thumb at the cockpit. "If you wanna catch some shut eye. Wake you up when we're ready to land."
"Oh, that won't be necessary," Magnus said, but then she yawned hugely, hardly even able to cover her mouth. She blinked, frowning a little, as if the yawn had offended her by escaping without consent.
It was such a funny look that Kate had to laugh, not even bothering to hide it as she headed for the cockpit. "Okay. I'll be distracting the pilot and playing with the radio. Nighty night."
"Kate." Magnus held her eyes when she turned. "Thank you. You've been a huge help to me these past few months and...and I think Ashley would be grateful to you."
Kate hid in the cockpit for the rest of the flight.
XXX
Once upon a time there was a man, and he wasn't a very good man, though he was good at what he did. When he came before the fairy queen, she went through his bag and found in it a man's red blood, a woman's tears, and a child's heart. "Where did you get these things?" the queen asked.
"I stole them," the man admitted.
The queen said, "Then you must give them back."
First she sent the man to fight in a war, where he was injured; so he gave back the blood to the land. Then she sent him on a long journey alone, during which he wept; so he gave back the tears to the sea. Finally she sent him to save a young girl from a fire, a girl with no mother and no father and only occasionally a brother. The girl was injured, but the wound didn't pain her. "Why don't you bleed?" the man asked. "Why don't you cry?"
"I have no heart," the girl replied.
And the man understood. So he threw himself into the fire, and was burnt all to ashes, and gave the heart to the sky. The girl reached out to take it back, but the smoke slipped through her fingers and was gone.
XXX
Kate didn't want to talk to Will. Kate didn't want to talk to Magnus. Kate didn't want to fucking talk about it, any of it, so she took her painkillers and got as comfortable as she could with a bullet hole in her shoulder. If she didn't sleep she could blame the pain, not the explosions on the back of her eyes.
After all, Jimmy was dead. She was supposed to be happy about that.
She took her pills and lay down, and eventually she did sleep, and did dream. A smooth shoulder, a small breast, a forearm downed with translucent blond hair. She dreamed these things, and this time they joined up for her, sketching a place where Kate could weep.
Go on. I'm not judging you. The words fell into her, more felt than heard, the first thing in the dream to make sense.
Who are you? Kate asked in her dream, nosing along the elegant arch of a collarbone.
Hands, lips; there were still pieces that don't come together. I'm not here.
XXX
Once upon a time there was a princess in the distant west, who was strong and brave and beautiful and kind, and many people loved her, and those who didn't love her could not overcome her to do her harm. Except one day someone did, someone who burned her and beat her and bound her like a beast. But the princess had a secret, a magic that no one else knew, and she bided her time and waited for her chance to be free.
She tried to slip her chains and turn on her captors, but they had broken her strong arms. She tried to get the attention of the knights who once loved her, but her captors had scarred her beautiful face. She tried to plead for her freedom, but her captors did not listen, and she wore out her gentle voice. Finally, when she had the chance-when a girl with no mother and no father and a poor excuse for a brother cut her chains-the princess took the only route left to her: she summoned all her courage and leapt into the sea, and by her secret magic she changed herself to foam. She dissolved into water, and though her friends could not catch her, neither could her captors; she disappeared, and was finally free.
XXX
"So what's the protocol for ghosts?" Kate asked Will. She'd rather ask Henry, because Henry was way easier to lie to, but he'd gone with Magnus to see a thing about a guy. Will was still getting over the whole being-tortured-by-mobsters thing, and the floating-in-the-ocean-for-a-day thing before that, so he was spending a lot of time in the library and Kate would just have to spin up a good story.
"Ghosts?" he asked, like he didn't know what she was talking about.
"Y'know, vapor cases. Smokestacks." She rolled her eyes when he stared at her like she had lost her mind. "Abnormals without a solid body. We've got to have some place to stash them."
"There's a couple of holding tanks on the third floor," Will said, a little frown line between his eyebrows. "Why the sudden interest?"
"Old girlfriend of mine mentioned a rumor about somebody moving an ignifatus colony through town," she said casually, stealing his coffee cup instead of watching to see if he was buying it. "Wanted to make sure we had a place for 'em before I started trying to bring any home, you know?"
Will kind of coughed, and she wondered if she'd blown it; but then he said "Girlfriend?" in a funny voice. She looked up at him; the line between his eyebrows was gone, but he was still staring at her with big baby blues.
"Seriously?" she asked. "You're the one who's gonna freak out about that?"
"Oh, this isn't me freaking out," he said quickly. "Just wondering how I missed it. Profiler, remember?"
Well, either way she'd take the distraction. "Hey, I don't exactly bring 'em home to meet Magnus, you know?" she asked casually. "Hard enough to get laid with this job without the boss breathing down our necks."
"You make her sound like some kind of wicked stepmother," Will said, rolling his eyes. "What are you afraid she'll do?"
"How the hell should I know?" Kate asked. "She was around when people still went to prison for this kind of stuff."
Will shook his head. "I'm pretty sure Magnus is more open-minded than that."
"What, 'cause she adopts all the stray Abnormals who follow her home?" Kate asked.
He hesitated for a minute, then leaned over the table. "Let me put it this way: either Magnus is more open-minded than that, or Ashley was really good at keeping secrets."
Kate blinked at him for a minute, and all she could say was, "Oh."
(She checked out all the tanks on the third floor, beautiful equipment with double-sealed hatches and their own miniature EM fields; checked to see when any of them had last been in use. The answered turned out to be 2005.)
XXX
Once upon a time there was a girl who wanted to learn how to shiver. She went to haunted houses and hung around in cemeteries and wandered the dark forest, but she was never afraid, and never shivered. She played with mad dogs and walked on high wires and leapt from tall trees, but she was never afraid and never shivered. She read tales of horror and tended the sick and had a witch foretell her death, but she was never afraid and she never shivered.
So she dove to the deep sea, and climbed the high mountains, and walked the wide desert alone; she lay down in tombs and fought ogres and dragons and chased after treasures; she became famous in all the wide world. But she never did shiver, and she lamented this one night as she lay down with her lover.
And that night she finally shivered, but she was never afraid.
XXX
She ended up back in the chapel, after nothing else panned out: the airy space of glass and arches, open to the passive heavens. She ended up in the chapel because that's where it had begun and because she didn't want anyone else overhearing this conversation. She shut the door behind her and, because she couldn't find the light switch, lit a couple of the candles that were scattered around the room. Someone had put out fresh flowers up here, but other than that there was no sign that this room was ever used. Perfect.
"Okay," she announced, moving to the middle of the room, looking for the eyes on the back of her neck. "This whole Freddy Krueger of Girl Porn thing is not okay with me."
The barest breeze traced across her cheek.
"Seriously." Kate folded her arms and turned the direction the breeze had gone, for lack of anywhere else to focus. "Not that it wasn't good for me and all, but I kind of like to know when I'm in a relationship with a non-corporeal life-form."
Across the room, a candle guttered.
"No, you get over here and listen to me." Kate was pretty much resigned to sounding crazy here; had been feeling a little crazy since she figured it out. What she should've felt was threatened, or angry, or violated-this thing had been inside her mind, had played her body-except nothing very threatening had actually occurred. She was pretty sure her free will hadn't been compromised and nothing had broken skin; it was hard to even think of it as taking advantage, when the alleged perpetrator was so hard to define. The only real sin had been omission. "I want to know what you are," Kate declared. "I want to know why me. I want to know if Magnus knows you're here. And...yeah, actually, that's it. No particular order."
For a few minutes nothing happened. Kate held her breath and looked around, searching for proof that she wasn't hallucinating. Maybe this was all just funky dreams. Maybe she was thinking a little wishfully.
Then something moved, over near the-well, she wasn't sure what to call it, bier or altar or plinth. The candles were dimmer over there, the shadows deeper, except where they were pierced by starlight; something moved there, or seemed to move, and Kate slowly closed on it, carefully, like it might spook and flee.
It was the barest distortion, like coagulated air: and at first that was all, amorphous and indistinct, but as Kate watched the smoke and starlight shifted, taking on contours and dimension. She made out head, shoulders, hips; arms and legs sketched with blunt charcoal, just massy shapes without detail. It could've been anyone. It could've been anything. "Are you-?" Kate started to ask, but she didn't even know what the question was: are you really here, maybe, or are you copying me, or even, are you trying to show me something?
The figure shivered, and then shifted again; eyes and fingers and a fall of hair separated themselves from the whole. Kate took another step forward, trying to see more, and the thing reached out to her. She held very, very still, as it reached out and put a finger to her lips-
It felt like the zap of static electricity, and the shape dissolved into air.
Kate stood there for a long time, wondering just what the hell that was; after a minute she realized she'd pressed a hand to her tingling lips. There wasn't even a feeling of eyes on her anymore, as if her-her what, friend? Lover? Non-corporeal stalker chic?-as if she was really alone.
She waited in the chapel for over an hour, waited for something to happen, but nothing did; eventually she had to blow out the stubs of the candles and go back to her room. She even took another Percocet, but the only dreams that night were the glowing-purple-badger-with-a-gun kind, and she woke up feeling lonelier than she had in a long time.
XXX
Once upon a time there was a princess, who was brave and beautiful and clever and strong, and her father the king had given to her a magic potion that granted her great powers, and also to those princes who were her friends. But terrible things befell her and her beloved friends, and the princess's heart became so heavy with grief that she could hardly stand. So, because she was clever and gifted in magic, she contrived to remove her heart entirely, and put it away in a glass casket for a hundred years, and in its place she fashioned a heart out of iron that would not pain her.
She raised a castle in the distant west where she reigned as queen, and had many knights who served her and many lords that bent the knee; but she kept her iron heart, so she would remain strong. But after a hundred years, the queen was realized that her iron heart was beginning to rust; and she perceived that one day it would rust away, and she would become like the terrible witches of the north, uncaring and unkind. She decided that, because it had been one hundred years, she could replace her true heart, which would no longer be too heavy.
Twenty-three years later, she had to take it out again.
XXX
"You've been quite the busy bee lately," Magnus said, and Kate nearly jumped out of her skin. Possibly she'd had too much coffee. It was only...uh, midnight? Oh. So maybe she hadn't had enough coffee.
Maybe she was a little distracted.
Magnus was still looking at her.
"Yeah," she said, conscious that it was a beat too late, that a little vertical line was forming between Magnus' eyebrows. "I just, um...Ignifatus?"
"Will mentioned to me that you'd heard a rumor," Magnus said. "Did anything come of it?"
Kate shook her head, preferring to look at the book instead of Magnus' pale eyes. "Nah, looks like the job fell through before anything got to the Old City. But since I was doing the research anyway..." She gestured at the books she'd piled around her, hoping it would totally look like light background reading and not obsessive research.
Because she wasn't getting obsessive. Just...worried.
One side of Magnus' mouth quirked up in a wry smirk. "Henry will make a geek out of you yet," she said lightly.
"Ha, no." Kate prodded the book in front of her-the size of a phone directory, and almost as yellow, thanks to its age. "Half these books are me trying to figure out what the other half mean."
"Everyone has to start somewhere," Magnus said generously, but when Kate snuck a glance up that little line between her eyebrows still hadn't smoothed away.
It left Kate feeling absurdly exposed, like the first time her mom caught her smoking, except she wasn't doing anything. She was just reading. Figuring things out. She hadn't dreamed anything worth dreaming about in days, had no inkling of anyone watching her except the people and cameras she could see; and it wasn't like she missed it or anything, that constant presence just over her shoulder, the nights spent in some kind hazy mental cuddle with a person-thing-being she couldn't even properly see...
But she was worried. It was okay to be worried. Normal, even. Because whatever had happened in the chapel-well-could a ghost even get hurt?
Hence, the research.
Magnus had asked her another question.
"Sorry?" she said, looking up and trying to pretend it was the book that had distracted her, not the possibility that she'd accidentally zapped her imaginary friend out of existence.
"I said you missed our appointment," Magnus said, and the line was deeper than ever. "In the clinic. Your shoulder?"
Oh, shit, yeah. Kate grimaced. "Sorry. Kinda got, uh..."
"Lost?" Magnus suggested.
"Lost," Kate admitted.
"A situation I'm quite familiar with," Magnus said with a small smile. She picked up a book at random and flipped through it, and Kate had the paranoid thought that she could somehow extrapolate the whole story from a couple of marked pages, like how Will could study somebody's body language and predict whether they were lying and how they felt about their mother. Definitely too much coffee, and it wasn't even keeping her awake anymore.
"I'm just gonna go to bed," she declared, as if saying it would teleport her there. "Can I get a do-over on the checkup in the morning?"
"I'll hold you to it this time," Magnus said, only half teasing.
Kate should've made her escape then and there, while she had the opening, but she didn't have the energy to drag herself out of the chair and her eyes kept falling back on the books, on the stupid goddamn books that didn't explain anything and didn't make sense and didn't tell her why she'd been alone for three damn days. Surrounded by the Sanctuary, but still lonely.
(Maybe she didn't need the library. Maybe she needed Will. Or a prescription.)
"Kate," Magnus said, and she was staring now, eyes boring in X-rays, with a downward twist to her mouth. "I know you haven't take a sudden interest in the typology of non-corporeal Abnormals for no reason. You've been...distracted, lately, and I know someone has been using the cloister."
Cloister? Oh, the chapel. With a clarity that only came from caffeine intoxication and sleep deprivation, Kate pictured herself explaining everything to Magnus, laying out the evidence, talking around the sexy parts, asking for the answers she knew she needed. Magnus would give them to her. Magnus would figure it out. That was kind of her job description.
Instead she found herself saying, "I just need a place to, uh, think. About stuff."
Magnus nodded. "If you ever feel the need to talk-" She paused, appearing to weigh her words. "I know that I may not always be the most approachable person, but I hope you would feel comfortable coming to me if you needed a friendly ear."
Kate almost laughed at that. Not approachable, right. There were a couple of ghosts laying between them that they'd have to exorcise before they could talk about the one in Kate's bedroom, and as much as she liked Magnus, as much as she respected her, that was a conversation she still really didn't want to have.
"If I had known the details James' past," Magnus continued, and Kate started, "I would never have asked you to be involved in the drop."
"Would you have told me?" Kate asked, wondering how they'd changed the subject. "If you'd known he was the one?"
Magnus hesitated. "Knowing then what I know now? No, I would not have. Not when it's done nothing but cause you pain."
That hurt, kind of, but as least it was honest. At least it was well-intentioned. "Thanks, I guess," Kate said, and this time she really did drag herself to her feet. "See you in the morning, Doc."
"Good night, Kate," Magnus said. "Sweet dreams."
XXX
Once upon a time there appeared in the kingdom a knight of curious appearance: he carried no sword, wore no armor and rode no horse, but he dressed richly and wore a belt with the words SEVEN AT ONCE embroidered on it. Many men believed that this meant he had killed seven men with a single stroke, and they cowered in fear before him; but the queen invited him up to her chamber for an audience.
"It is said in the town that you a stronger than a giant, yet you carry no sword," she said.
"I am as strong as I seem," the knight said. "When that giant challenged me to feat of strength, I took a piece of new cheese and squeezed out the whey. He thought I had wrung water from a stone and conceded the contest."
"It is said that you are faster than a unicorn, yet you ride no horse," she said.
"I am as fast as I seem," the knight said. "When the unicorn challenged me to a race, I built a manniken out of sticks and grass and threw my coat over it. I hid this at the end of the path, and when the race began I ran only a little ways down the trail and then went back. The unicorn has very weak eyes, you see, and so when it saw my coat at the end of the path it thought I had beaten it there, and immediately challenged me to another length; yet when it returned to the beginning, there I was, not even out of breath; and so it went until the beast was exhausted and collapsed."
"It is said that you are more valiant than a dragon, yet you wear no armor," she said.
"I am as savage as I seem," the knight said. "I took the dragon sleeping, curled up with its nose at its great tail, and so I threw a stone from above onto its head; and when it woke up, stupid from sleep, it began to bite and scratch its own tail, and I could have my fill of its gold."
The queen studied the knight. "It seems that you are not strong, nor quick, nor valiant," she said, "but you are clever and wise, and well worthy to be a knight in my household. But tell me, sir, what is the meaning of your sash, that says SEVEN AT ONCE like a warning?"
"Ah," he said. "I did once kill seven with one stroke, and this was given to me as a little joke. It has been a cause for great misunderstanding ever since."
"Killed seven what?" asked the queen.
The knight smiled. "Flies."
XXX
Her shoulder healed, and she did her research, and she noticed that the guys were treating her funny: Henry wasn't teasing as much has he used to, the Big Guy started offering her Lucky Charms again, and Will was watching her when he thought she wasn't looking, doing psychological algebra without showing his work.
They thought she was still hung up about Jimmy, she realized. And sure, that was still pissing her off, but it was small and slow-burning, like a cigarette butt. It was something she could ignore. The ghost, on the other hand...she still couldn't find any record of a matching Abnormal in the archives, and she couldn't figure out where it had gone. None of her questions were answered and she was starting to get annoyed.
She was starting to get a little desperate, and she knew what that called for.
Will caught her again on her way out the door, and for a split second she was convinced he knew exactly what she meant to do, via some kind of scary nerd telepathy. But of course he couldn't, because he was good but not that good; instead he asked, "Finally coming up for air?"
"Yeah," she said. For some reason he was easier to lie to than Magnus, even if it was harder to get away with it. She felt a little guilty thinking that maybe he didn't matter in quite the same way. "Got a clean bill of health, an interesting scar, and a paycheck looking for a new home. Wanna come with?"
"No thanks," he said, laughing softly. "Not much of a clubber, really."
"C'mon, we can pick up girls together," Kate suggested, then paused. "Actually, we could also pick up guys together, with the way you dress."
Will put a hand to his chest like a Victorian maiden. "Ow. Seriously, ow. You expect me to take that lying down?"
"It's none of my business what position you take it in," she said with a smirk.
He kept smiling back, but something in his eyes shifted, and Kate was excruciatingly aware that she'd been transformed from a person to a patient without her moving a muscle. "You must be feeling better," he said speculatively.
"Already told you Magnus cleared the shoulder," she shot back, and realized immediately that was the wrong things to say. Denial might be a great coping strategy, but it seemed to affect shrinks and social workers like catnip. Time for evasive maneuvers. "Anyway, I'm gonna miss the opening act if I don't-"
"Kate." Will says it sharply, almost commandingly, and she would've bristled out like a cat if it were anyone else but him. Actually, she was just going to go ahead and bristle anyway-offense was the best defense. "You know you can talk to me about things, right? Just because I'm not a practicing clinician doesn't mean I don't believe in confidentiality."
"What I know," Kate told him sharply, "is that I got this lecture from Magnus a couple days ago, and I am not a troubled teenager, okay? I appreciate the sentiment, but you guys can keep the after-school special crap to yourselves."
Will bit his lip and stared at her for a moment, not really scowling. He looked...puzzled. "Sometimes I feel like I don't really know you," he confessed, apropos of nothing. "You've worked here for months and you're still holding us all at arm's length."
"What, you want me to throw a sleepover where we watch Disney movies and braid each others' hair?" she asked.
"I want to know that you trust us," Will said. "I want you to be comfortable here."
I am, Kate thought, I'm not afraid of anything here, but she was pissed off now, and Will had lost any heart-to-heart privileges he might once have had. Instead she went for the jugular, stupid and aggressive. "You want Ashley back."
It worked-she can tell he wasn't expecting that, and that it hurt. "Is that what you think?"
"Be honest, Will," she says. "If you had the choice? It'd only ever be her. I'm just the next best thing."
She'd had worse exit lines and she took this one, turning her back and letting Will draw whatever conclusions he wanted. Maybe that Kate had inadequacy issues, or that she wasn't whoever he'd thought she was-well, fine. Let him think whatever he wanted. At least she still had-
She stopped halfway down the driveway, turning over that thought in her head. She'd alienated everyone else in the Sanctuary, but at least she still had her ghost, except not anymore. And she was about to do something so very very dumb that if the others found out-
Goddamnit, when had her life gotten this complicated?
XXX
Once upon a time a woman was sent away to live in a high castle all alone; and she had heard that the owner of that castle was a terrible monster who devoured people. But when she got there she found the castle was full of invisible servants who made her delicious food and brought her beautiful clothes to wear, and led her to a bedroom with an enormous goosedown mattress. The woman decided this wasn't so bad, and put out her candle and fell asleep.
However, she had not lain in the dark long before someone else came into the room and lay down with her in the bed. The woman reached out to light her candle, but a hand on her arm stopped her. "Don't," said the other, "for if you see my face I will leave you here alone forever."
"Are you the owner of this house?" the woman asked.
"I am, and all within it."
"And are you a terrible monster?" the woman asked.
"Do you really want to know?"
The woman thought about the hand on her arm and the warm body beside her. The candle remained unlit.
XXX
She'd ruled out anything she'd have to smoke, because either Henry or the Big Guy would smell it on her; rules out injections, too, because Magnus would notice the marks. Kate had never been much of a user even the stupider parts of her youth, but she knew enough to be selective, and knew the right people to get it on the cheap.
She had to wait until the next night, had to wait through a day of Will eying her from across the conference table while they talked about the logistics of transferring a bunch of readers from Kenya to Canada, had to kill time on the shooting range. She told everyone she was having an early night, locked the door to her room, and pulled out the baggie with the two little pills that were definitely a lot stronger than Percocet.
She took the pills, switched off the lights, lay down on the bed. She concentrated on her breathing. Slowly everything began to spin and spiral, down into darkness...
...long blond hair that brushed over her knuckles, across her breasts. Short, blunt nails tracing the curve of her hip. Relief swept through her as crisp as water and she pawed at the air, seeking out contact where there was nothing to touch What are you? Kate asked, and she wasn't sure if she was speaking out loud, if she was dreaming or not.
Not real. The words floated out at her, through her, rippling against her like silk. Not here. Just pieces.
Pieces, right; lips or fingers or a stubbled knee that touch and nudge, but nothing comes together, not all at once. Does Magnus know? she asked, groping for some trace of skin or hair, something she could hang on to.
No! It vibrated in her like a guitar string, like a flashing caution. She can't know. Don't tell her.
Why not?
It was like a dream and it wasn't, because a part of Kate could think very clearly, but another part was at the mercy of the drugs and she couldn't peel herself off the bed, couldn't open her eyes. She reached for what wasn't there and it felt like static, like little electric prickles on her skin, like a finger on her lips except this time it didn't stop or fade.
She can't know, the ghost said again, warm and soft and ephemeral. She has to let go.
Kate finally relaxed into that warmth, spiraled down into it, like falling. Why me? she remembered to ask.
The light that bubbles up through her makes her think of champagne and meteors. You were lonely. You're pretty. I like you.
What's your name?
There was no answer; just disjointed touches, light and heat, stars bubbling up all around her, and when the drugs wore off in the morning she remembered nothing but a pair of sad blue eyes.
On to Part 2
Author: Mad_Maudlin
Fandom: Sanctuary
Length: 18,372
Pairings and Characters: Kate Freelander/Ashley Magnus, Helen Magnus, Will Zimmerman, Henry Foss
Spoilers: Through season 2
Warnings: drug use, canon character death, disturbing imagery, rampant abuse of folklore
Summary: Once upon a time there was a girl, and a ghost. Then it got complicated.
A/N: Written for kuwdora's Sanctuary Ficathon, for shopfront. I think I ended up accidentally hitting multiple prompts in this one, which is no surprise considering how long it ended up. Hopefully that's makes up for it being a little late? ::puppyeyes::
This is asymptotic to canon for season 2, but I'm assuming that "Haunted" occurs chronologically before "Sleepers," since there are dialogue cues to that effect in the latter episode; the fic goes full-tilt AU as of "Kali II." This fic was inspired by Sara Bareilles' song "Fairy Tale," and I play off quite a few here, most notably "Tam Lin" and "Cupid and Psyche;" but there are allusions to a ton of others, so if you recognize it, it's probably not mine. (The legend about Kali and Shiva is TOTALLY not mine, and made the episode "Kali" make a million times more sense after I read it!)
THANK YOU to ceilidh and linnet_melody for beta-reading!
The Story Needed Mending
by Mad Maudlin
Once upon a time...
No, that's not right. There were two kinds of fairy tales in what passed for Kate's childhood, and the ones in Hindi didn't start that way. Those were boring anyway, and so far removed from Chicago's south side that she wouldn't have even looked at them if her mother hadn't pushed. The other kind of fairy tales came courtesy of the Walt Disney corporation, and those were a little better, even though it still seemed like only the princes ever got to do anything. At least the other kids in her class had heard of those, and when they played pretend at recess Kate could be Prince Charming and Prince Eric and Aladdin-
("Wouldn't you like to play the princess sometimes?" one of her teachers once asked her in a worried tone.
Kate had shrugged. Yes, she would've-Princess Jasmine especially, who actually looked a little like her-but whenever she did, the other girls would screech at her for not waiting for the prince, for not following the plot, for doing it all wrong. If she couldn't fight her own monsters, she'd settle for the next best thing.)
But then her dad was killed, and Kate gave up on fairy tales. At least cynicism never let you down, right? Of course, she ended up in a line of work where dragons and curses and magical potions weren't totally out of the question-but she knew better than to expect white knights and fairy godmothers to go with them. Real life didn't work that way, and she wasn't wasting her time waiting on a happy ending.
XXX
Once upon a time, there was a princess in a castle in the west, and she was beautiful and brave and strong and kind. But her mother the queen had many enemies, and one day an evil witch stole the princess away to her lair. The queen and her knights searched far and wide for the princess, but when they found her they made a horrible discovery: the witch had transformed the princess into a terrible dragon, and she sent the dragon forth to burn and savage the queen and all her people.
The queen fought bravely, and many of her knights fell, but the dragon could not be stopped. But a certain wild girl of the forest had escaped the witch, and came to the castle in the west seeking its shelter; and when the dragon seemed ready to devour the queen, the girl took up a sword and smote it through the heart. Thus the dragon was slain, and there was weeping throughout all the kingdom, and the queen grieved her daughter ever after.
XXX
If the Sanctuary wasn't haunted, it should have been: there were too many empty spaces, too many dark places, and Kate wondered why Magnus didn't keep a bigger staff just to fill up all the silence. Then again, her hiring practices did seem a little off the wall.
Kate went exploring a lot, because she liked to know where her escapes routes were, and only got in trouble twice. "What are you snooping around for this time?" Henry asked, still half-suspicious when he caught her setting off alarms.
"Not your business," the Big Guy snuffled, after she couldn't quite jimmy the lock on a dusty vault.
She wanted to remind them that she was one of them now, here with the boss's blessing, not a guest or a child. Instead she grumbled or flirted with them (as appropriate) and held her chin high, and tried to come back at a time when she wouldn’t get caught.
Kate went exploring, and Kate knew when she was being watched. Sometimes she thought it was one of the others, Henry or Big Guy or Will or maybe even Magnus, spying on her and trying to decide if they'd made a mistake. Sometimes it was probably just one of the residents (because Magnus won't "pathologize their existence" by calling them all patients, and they're not inmates if they can leave)-some of them were taking a while to warm up to her, some of them were still looking for someone else and had settled on Kate as the next best thing.
Kate knew she was being watched in the high airy chapel, where pointed arches flung themselves to heaven and clear glass stood in for iconography. There weren't any surveillance cameras here-that would be creepy, in this reverent silence-but Kate knew by now that just because she couldn't see anyone around, it didn't mean she was alone.
She tried to ignore the feeling, exploring the benches and niches, the pale stonework. A breeze ghosted across the back of her neck, and not a fan or a vent in sight. Kate ignored it until she heard a metallic crash, somewhere behind her-she spun around and found a stand of flowers laying on its side, a good ten feet away from her.
Kate folded her arms and raised her chin. "I'm not dumb, you know," she announced.
The breeze went still, but the feeling of being watched remained. She turned in a complete circle, not certain where to address her words. "My name's Kate Freelander, and you can come the hell out any time."
Nothing happened. The breeze had stopped, but she still wasn't alone.
"You can't scare me," she added, matter of fact. "I've dated weirder shit than I see around here."
No response.
"Fine, whatever," Kate said, and headed back to the stairs. She snagged one of the flowers off the floor and twirled it in her fingers, called over her shoulder. "But listen, in the future? Back the fuck off. This is my territory now, too."
(Maybe if she said it often enough, it would be true.)
XXX
Once upon a time there was a queen in a distant land who was good and clever and beautiful and kind. She was betrothed a handsome prince, and they had a beautiful baby daughter, and the queen thought they would live happily ever after.
But the prince had a terrible secret: when the moon rose, he transformed into a monster and devoured the young women of the kingdom. When the queen discovered this secret, she tried to help her prince, but the monster was too great and overcame her. So the queen fled to a land across the sea, where the monster would not find her; and she put her daughter the princess in an enchanted sleep for one hundred years, because the monster was so dangerous, and because the queen was so heavy with grief.
XXX
Kate had never met Ashley Magnus; she hadn't even laid eyes on her before the day she fired a rocket-propelled grenade into her torso. So everything she knew about the woman came in hindsight, second-hand, from stories and sighs and the pictures in Magnus' study.
"Where'd you learn to shoot like that?" she asked Will.
"What idiot set up you guys' armory?" she grumbled to Henry.
"Why do you have a metric shit-ton of Lucky Charms in the kitchen?" she asked the Big Guy.
"Who's the kid in the picture?" she asked Magnus.
Almost always, the answer was Ashley.
She knew people were comparing them-hell, she was comparing them herself. Henry complained about Kate's computer skills and Will joked about her attitude and the Big Guy kept trying to serve her Lucky Charms. And sometimes, when she should've been alone in a room, she felt those eyes on the back of her head, weighting and judging without ever revealing the score.
It wasn't exactly survivor's guilt, because she hadn't ever known the woman. It was more like Kate had fallen into someone else's life, and even if she could've fit in Ashley's size-nines she didn't really want to wear them. So she was loud and reckless and occasionally inappropriate, holding her chin up and daring them all to find her lacking. And when she reorganized the armory, nobody had an aneurysm, but the eyes on the back of her head didn't go away.
XXX
Once upon a time there was a girl who lived in the forest. She had no father and no mother and only a little bit of a brother, so she had gone into the wilderness to live by herself. She took only three things that she thought were precious: a mirror, a cloak, and a beautiful book.
The forest was dark and deep and frightening, and at first the girl was afraid. The first creature she met in the wilderness was a raven. "Give me the mirror," the raven said. "What do you need to look behind you for? I can teach you how to see like a raven, and I can spot a gnat in the dark from a mile away." So the girl gave away her mirror, and the raven taught her how to see, and the girl went deeper into the forest.
The second creature she met was a wolf. "Give me your cloak," the wolf said. "What do you need to hide for? I can teach you how to fight like a wolf, and I have teeth and claws and a tough hide to protect me." So the girl gave away her cloak, and the wolf taught her how to fight, and the girl went deeper into the forest.
The third creature she met was a serpent. "Give me your book," the serpent said. "What do you need other people's words for? I can teach you how to lie like a serpent, and I have two tongues and no one has ever caught me." So the girl gave away her book, and the serpent taught her how to lie; and the girl dwelled in the depths of the wilderness, and lived like a raven and a serpent and a wolf, and was alone.
XXX
Kate didn't like labels, really. She slept with men, but the kind of men she hung out with could go pretty fast from fucking to fucking you over. She slept with women, too, who weren't any less dangerous, but at least they usually understood that no means no. Either way, she tried to keep most of her clothes on and was careful about who she kissed on the mouth.
So it wasn't a big deal to dream about a woman, and that's all it was, a dream-images and feelings, disconnected and distorted, patternless. Not as memorable as the one where she was Princess Jasmine, or the one about the rats, or the one where she showed up to a Hindu wedding in a fluffy white gown, which she had a lot. (Will had tried to psychoanalyze that one for her; she'd said "Well, duh.")
She dreamed about women, or maybe one particular woman, disassembled into component parts-a hard bicep here, a stubbled knee there, hands that twine with Kate's like coffee with cream. She couldn't put all the pieces together but sometimes, when she woke up, she could still feel a warm presence, could still feel eyes on her in the dark of her room..
Sometimes she woke up and she was kind of surprised that her fingers were tangled in blankets, with no sign of long blonde hair.
XXX
Once upon a time there was a girl with no mother and no father and hardly any brother, and so she went to live in a castle in the west with her stepmother the queen. And the queen would summon her before the throne, and give her a task, such as, "I want you to bring me the sea at midnight and the sky at noon, and do not return until then."
So the girl went out into the town, and came back with a beautiful cloak of deep blue-black velvet lined with shining cloth-of-gold. The girl said, "I have brought what you asked."
"I suppose," the queen said, "you have done well."
The next morning the queen summoned the girl before the throne and said to her, "I want you to bring me the blue of the sky and the gold of the sun and the red of the heart's blood, and do not return until then."
So the girl went into the forest, and she came back with a bouquet of daffodils and morning glories and amaranth, which is called love-lies-bleeding. "I have brought what you asked," she said.
"I suppose," the queen said, "you have done well."
The next day the queen summoned the girl before the throne and said to her, "I want you to bring me love without loss, joy without grief, pleasure without pain and hope without despair, and do not return until then."
The girl went out into the wide world. She was never seen again.
XXX
Magnus was...hard. Magnus seemed to like Kate, hadn't pressed her about any Abnormal-aided assassinations, had made a space for her in her Sanctuary. But Magnus also kept Kate on a leash and didn't trust her with serious jobs or pointy objects. Magnus sometimes scolded Kate like she might've scolded a child. Other times she looked right through her.
And seeing as Kate's job interview had been shooting her daughter, Kate really didn't know how to complain.
When Magnus and Will went hunting for squid and Henry took the Big Guy surfing, Kate was alone in the Sanctuary, and she took that chance to explore all the places the rest of them told her not to. She found supply rooms and locked safes and Henry's porn collection (ugh), and a vault of peculiar machines gathering dust. Some of them looked old, like really old, with copper pipes and rotting leather bellows; a lot of them were damaged, not just by time, but with scorch marks and claw marks and melted wiring. They all seemed to have the same design, tanks and tubes and temperature gauges, but Kate couldn't quite figure out what they were for, or why Magnus would want to keep them all around. She locked the vault behind her and figured that she'd ask somebody, some time, once she came up with a good story for how she'd found them in the first place-or at least better than "I was bored and the door was there."
(There were always eyes on her now, always a little breeze tickling the fine hairs at the base of her neck, but Kate had learned to ignore it. Take that, you goddamn voyeur.)
When Magnus and Will sent out a distress call, Kate was the one who organized the search and rescue, all by herself, thank you. They were freezing and hungry when she pulled them out of the oil rig, their skin blistered and bloated from sun and salt water, but whereas Will curled up in the back of the plane and conked out almost immediately, Magnus limped over to sit by Kate. "Impressive work," she said, clutching a bottle of water in her bandaged hands. "I was afraid we'd have a much longer wait ahead of us."
"Hey, it's all in a day's work," Kate said. "Plus, this way you totally can't complain about the wild party I had while you were gone."
Magnus laughed a little, eyes cast down. "I've afraid I've been underestimating you, Kate," she said. "It's not a mistake I intend to make in the future."
"Thanks?" Kate said. "I think?"
"Sorry." She shook her head, stiff salty hair flying in clumps. "I've had...other things on my mind lately."
"Hey, no prob. I can-" She hooked a thumb at the cockpit. "If you wanna catch some shut eye. Wake you up when we're ready to land."
"Oh, that won't be necessary," Magnus said, but then she yawned hugely, hardly even able to cover her mouth. She blinked, frowning a little, as if the yawn had offended her by escaping without consent.
It was such a funny look that Kate had to laugh, not even bothering to hide it as she headed for the cockpit. "Okay. I'll be distracting the pilot and playing with the radio. Nighty night."
"Kate." Magnus held her eyes when she turned. "Thank you. You've been a huge help to me these past few months and...and I think Ashley would be grateful to you."
Kate hid in the cockpit for the rest of the flight.
XXX
Once upon a time there was a man, and he wasn't a very good man, though he was good at what he did. When he came before the fairy queen, she went through his bag and found in it a man's red blood, a woman's tears, and a child's heart. "Where did you get these things?" the queen asked.
"I stole them," the man admitted.
The queen said, "Then you must give them back."
First she sent the man to fight in a war, where he was injured; so he gave back the blood to the land. Then she sent him on a long journey alone, during which he wept; so he gave back the tears to the sea. Finally she sent him to save a young girl from a fire, a girl with no mother and no father and only occasionally a brother. The girl was injured, but the wound didn't pain her. "Why don't you bleed?" the man asked. "Why don't you cry?"
"I have no heart," the girl replied.
And the man understood. So he threw himself into the fire, and was burnt all to ashes, and gave the heart to the sky. The girl reached out to take it back, but the smoke slipped through her fingers and was gone.
XXX
Kate didn't want to talk to Will. Kate didn't want to talk to Magnus. Kate didn't want to fucking talk about it, any of it, so she took her painkillers and got as comfortable as she could with a bullet hole in her shoulder. If she didn't sleep she could blame the pain, not the explosions on the back of her eyes.
After all, Jimmy was dead. She was supposed to be happy about that.
She took her pills and lay down, and eventually she did sleep, and did dream. A smooth shoulder, a small breast, a forearm downed with translucent blond hair. She dreamed these things, and this time they joined up for her, sketching a place where Kate could weep.
Go on. I'm not judging you. The words fell into her, more felt than heard, the first thing in the dream to make sense.
Who are you? Kate asked in her dream, nosing along the elegant arch of a collarbone.
Hands, lips; there were still pieces that don't come together. I'm not here.
XXX
Once upon a time there was a princess in the distant west, who was strong and brave and beautiful and kind, and many people loved her, and those who didn't love her could not overcome her to do her harm. Except one day someone did, someone who burned her and beat her and bound her like a beast. But the princess had a secret, a magic that no one else knew, and she bided her time and waited for her chance to be free.
She tried to slip her chains and turn on her captors, but they had broken her strong arms. She tried to get the attention of the knights who once loved her, but her captors had scarred her beautiful face. She tried to plead for her freedom, but her captors did not listen, and she wore out her gentle voice. Finally, when she had the chance-when a girl with no mother and no father and a poor excuse for a brother cut her chains-the princess took the only route left to her: she summoned all her courage and leapt into the sea, and by her secret magic she changed herself to foam. She dissolved into water, and though her friends could not catch her, neither could her captors; she disappeared, and was finally free.
XXX
"So what's the protocol for ghosts?" Kate asked Will. She'd rather ask Henry, because Henry was way easier to lie to, but he'd gone with Magnus to see a thing about a guy. Will was still getting over the whole being-tortured-by-mobsters thing, and the floating-in-the-ocean-for-a-day thing before that, so he was spending a lot of time in the library and Kate would just have to spin up a good story.
"Ghosts?" he asked, like he didn't know what she was talking about.
"Y'know, vapor cases. Smokestacks." She rolled her eyes when he stared at her like she had lost her mind. "Abnormals without a solid body. We've got to have some place to stash them."
"There's a couple of holding tanks on the third floor," Will said, a little frown line between his eyebrows. "Why the sudden interest?"
"Old girlfriend of mine mentioned a rumor about somebody moving an ignifatus colony through town," she said casually, stealing his coffee cup instead of watching to see if he was buying it. "Wanted to make sure we had a place for 'em before I started trying to bring any home, you know?"
Will kind of coughed, and she wondered if she'd blown it; but then he said "Girlfriend?" in a funny voice. She looked up at him; the line between his eyebrows was gone, but he was still staring at her with big baby blues.
"Seriously?" she asked. "You're the one who's gonna freak out about that?"
"Oh, this isn't me freaking out," he said quickly. "Just wondering how I missed it. Profiler, remember?"
Well, either way she'd take the distraction. "Hey, I don't exactly bring 'em home to meet Magnus, you know?" she asked casually. "Hard enough to get laid with this job without the boss breathing down our necks."
"You make her sound like some kind of wicked stepmother," Will said, rolling his eyes. "What are you afraid she'll do?"
"How the hell should I know?" Kate asked. "She was around when people still went to prison for this kind of stuff."
Will shook his head. "I'm pretty sure Magnus is more open-minded than that."
"What, 'cause she adopts all the stray Abnormals who follow her home?" Kate asked.
He hesitated for a minute, then leaned over the table. "Let me put it this way: either Magnus is more open-minded than that, or Ashley was really good at keeping secrets."
Kate blinked at him for a minute, and all she could say was, "Oh."
(She checked out all the tanks on the third floor, beautiful equipment with double-sealed hatches and their own miniature EM fields; checked to see when any of them had last been in use. The answered turned out to be 2005.)
XXX
Once upon a time there was a girl who wanted to learn how to shiver. She went to haunted houses and hung around in cemeteries and wandered the dark forest, but she was never afraid, and never shivered. She played with mad dogs and walked on high wires and leapt from tall trees, but she was never afraid and never shivered. She read tales of horror and tended the sick and had a witch foretell her death, but she was never afraid and she never shivered.
So she dove to the deep sea, and climbed the high mountains, and walked the wide desert alone; she lay down in tombs and fought ogres and dragons and chased after treasures; she became famous in all the wide world. But she never did shiver, and she lamented this one night as she lay down with her lover.
And that night she finally shivered, but she was never afraid.
XXX
She ended up back in the chapel, after nothing else panned out: the airy space of glass and arches, open to the passive heavens. She ended up in the chapel because that's where it had begun and because she didn't want anyone else overhearing this conversation. She shut the door behind her and, because she couldn't find the light switch, lit a couple of the candles that were scattered around the room. Someone had put out fresh flowers up here, but other than that there was no sign that this room was ever used. Perfect.
"Okay," she announced, moving to the middle of the room, looking for the eyes on the back of her neck. "This whole Freddy Krueger of Girl Porn thing is not okay with me."
The barest breeze traced across her cheek.
"Seriously." Kate folded her arms and turned the direction the breeze had gone, for lack of anywhere else to focus. "Not that it wasn't good for me and all, but I kind of like to know when I'm in a relationship with a non-corporeal life-form."
Across the room, a candle guttered.
"No, you get over here and listen to me." Kate was pretty much resigned to sounding crazy here; had been feeling a little crazy since she figured it out. What she should've felt was threatened, or angry, or violated-this thing had been inside her mind, had played her body-except nothing very threatening had actually occurred. She was pretty sure her free will hadn't been compromised and nothing had broken skin; it was hard to even think of it as taking advantage, when the alleged perpetrator was so hard to define. The only real sin had been omission. "I want to know what you are," Kate declared. "I want to know why me. I want to know if Magnus knows you're here. And...yeah, actually, that's it. No particular order."
For a few minutes nothing happened. Kate held her breath and looked around, searching for proof that she wasn't hallucinating. Maybe this was all just funky dreams. Maybe she was thinking a little wishfully.
Then something moved, over near the-well, she wasn't sure what to call it, bier or altar or plinth. The candles were dimmer over there, the shadows deeper, except where they were pierced by starlight; something moved there, or seemed to move, and Kate slowly closed on it, carefully, like it might spook and flee.
It was the barest distortion, like coagulated air: and at first that was all, amorphous and indistinct, but as Kate watched the smoke and starlight shifted, taking on contours and dimension. She made out head, shoulders, hips; arms and legs sketched with blunt charcoal, just massy shapes without detail. It could've been anyone. It could've been anything. "Are you-?" Kate started to ask, but she didn't even know what the question was: are you really here, maybe, or are you copying me, or even, are you trying to show me something?
The figure shivered, and then shifted again; eyes and fingers and a fall of hair separated themselves from the whole. Kate took another step forward, trying to see more, and the thing reached out to her. She held very, very still, as it reached out and put a finger to her lips-
It felt like the zap of static electricity, and the shape dissolved into air.
Kate stood there for a long time, wondering just what the hell that was; after a minute she realized she'd pressed a hand to her tingling lips. There wasn't even a feeling of eyes on her anymore, as if her-her what, friend? Lover? Non-corporeal stalker chic?-as if she was really alone.
She waited in the chapel for over an hour, waited for something to happen, but nothing did; eventually she had to blow out the stubs of the candles and go back to her room. She even took another Percocet, but the only dreams that night were the glowing-purple-badger-with-a-gun kind, and she woke up feeling lonelier than she had in a long time.
XXX
Once upon a time there was a princess, who was brave and beautiful and clever and strong, and her father the king had given to her a magic potion that granted her great powers, and also to those princes who were her friends. But terrible things befell her and her beloved friends, and the princess's heart became so heavy with grief that she could hardly stand. So, because she was clever and gifted in magic, she contrived to remove her heart entirely, and put it away in a glass casket for a hundred years, and in its place she fashioned a heart out of iron that would not pain her.
She raised a castle in the distant west where she reigned as queen, and had many knights who served her and many lords that bent the knee; but she kept her iron heart, so she would remain strong. But after a hundred years, the queen was realized that her iron heart was beginning to rust; and she perceived that one day it would rust away, and she would become like the terrible witches of the north, uncaring and unkind. She decided that, because it had been one hundred years, she could replace her true heart, which would no longer be too heavy.
Twenty-three years later, she had to take it out again.
XXX
"You've been quite the busy bee lately," Magnus said, and Kate nearly jumped out of her skin. Possibly she'd had too much coffee. It was only...uh, midnight? Oh. So maybe she hadn't had enough coffee.
Maybe she was a little distracted.
Magnus was still looking at her.
"Yeah," she said, conscious that it was a beat too late, that a little vertical line was forming between Magnus' eyebrows. "I just, um...Ignifatus?"
"Will mentioned to me that you'd heard a rumor," Magnus said. "Did anything come of it?"
Kate shook her head, preferring to look at the book instead of Magnus' pale eyes. "Nah, looks like the job fell through before anything got to the Old City. But since I was doing the research anyway..." She gestured at the books she'd piled around her, hoping it would totally look like light background reading and not obsessive research.
Because she wasn't getting obsessive. Just...worried.
One side of Magnus' mouth quirked up in a wry smirk. "Henry will make a geek out of you yet," she said lightly.
"Ha, no." Kate prodded the book in front of her-the size of a phone directory, and almost as yellow, thanks to its age. "Half these books are me trying to figure out what the other half mean."
"Everyone has to start somewhere," Magnus said generously, but when Kate snuck a glance up that little line between her eyebrows still hadn't smoothed away.
It left Kate feeling absurdly exposed, like the first time her mom caught her smoking, except she wasn't doing anything. She was just reading. Figuring things out. She hadn't dreamed anything worth dreaming about in days, had no inkling of anyone watching her except the people and cameras she could see; and it wasn't like she missed it or anything, that constant presence just over her shoulder, the nights spent in some kind hazy mental cuddle with a person-thing-being she couldn't even properly see...
But she was worried. It was okay to be worried. Normal, even. Because whatever had happened in the chapel-well-could a ghost even get hurt?
Hence, the research.
Magnus had asked her another question.
"Sorry?" she said, looking up and trying to pretend it was the book that had distracted her, not the possibility that she'd accidentally zapped her imaginary friend out of existence.
"I said you missed our appointment," Magnus said, and the line was deeper than ever. "In the clinic. Your shoulder?"
Oh, shit, yeah. Kate grimaced. "Sorry. Kinda got, uh..."
"Lost?" Magnus suggested.
"Lost," Kate admitted.
"A situation I'm quite familiar with," Magnus said with a small smile. She picked up a book at random and flipped through it, and Kate had the paranoid thought that she could somehow extrapolate the whole story from a couple of marked pages, like how Will could study somebody's body language and predict whether they were lying and how they felt about their mother. Definitely too much coffee, and it wasn't even keeping her awake anymore.
"I'm just gonna go to bed," she declared, as if saying it would teleport her there. "Can I get a do-over on the checkup in the morning?"
"I'll hold you to it this time," Magnus said, only half teasing.
Kate should've made her escape then and there, while she had the opening, but she didn't have the energy to drag herself out of the chair and her eyes kept falling back on the books, on the stupid goddamn books that didn't explain anything and didn't make sense and didn't tell her why she'd been alone for three damn days. Surrounded by the Sanctuary, but still lonely.
(Maybe she didn't need the library. Maybe she needed Will. Or a prescription.)
"Kate," Magnus said, and she was staring now, eyes boring in X-rays, with a downward twist to her mouth. "I know you haven't take a sudden interest in the typology of non-corporeal Abnormals for no reason. You've been...distracted, lately, and I know someone has been using the cloister."
Cloister? Oh, the chapel. With a clarity that only came from caffeine intoxication and sleep deprivation, Kate pictured herself explaining everything to Magnus, laying out the evidence, talking around the sexy parts, asking for the answers she knew she needed. Magnus would give them to her. Magnus would figure it out. That was kind of her job description.
Instead she found herself saying, "I just need a place to, uh, think. About stuff."
Magnus nodded. "If you ever feel the need to talk-" She paused, appearing to weigh her words. "I know that I may not always be the most approachable person, but I hope you would feel comfortable coming to me if you needed a friendly ear."
Kate almost laughed at that. Not approachable, right. There were a couple of ghosts laying between them that they'd have to exorcise before they could talk about the one in Kate's bedroom, and as much as she liked Magnus, as much as she respected her, that was a conversation she still really didn't want to have.
"If I had known the details James' past," Magnus continued, and Kate started, "I would never have asked you to be involved in the drop."
"Would you have told me?" Kate asked, wondering how they'd changed the subject. "If you'd known he was the one?"
Magnus hesitated. "Knowing then what I know now? No, I would not have. Not when it's done nothing but cause you pain."
That hurt, kind of, but as least it was honest. At least it was well-intentioned. "Thanks, I guess," Kate said, and this time she really did drag herself to her feet. "See you in the morning, Doc."
"Good night, Kate," Magnus said. "Sweet dreams."
XXX
Once upon a time there appeared in the kingdom a knight of curious appearance: he carried no sword, wore no armor and rode no horse, but he dressed richly and wore a belt with the words SEVEN AT ONCE embroidered on it. Many men believed that this meant he had killed seven men with a single stroke, and they cowered in fear before him; but the queen invited him up to her chamber for an audience.
"It is said in the town that you a stronger than a giant, yet you carry no sword," she said.
"I am as strong as I seem," the knight said. "When that giant challenged me to feat of strength, I took a piece of new cheese and squeezed out the whey. He thought I had wrung water from a stone and conceded the contest."
"It is said that you are faster than a unicorn, yet you ride no horse," she said.
"I am as fast as I seem," the knight said. "When the unicorn challenged me to a race, I built a manniken out of sticks and grass and threw my coat over it. I hid this at the end of the path, and when the race began I ran only a little ways down the trail and then went back. The unicorn has very weak eyes, you see, and so when it saw my coat at the end of the path it thought I had beaten it there, and immediately challenged me to another length; yet when it returned to the beginning, there I was, not even out of breath; and so it went until the beast was exhausted and collapsed."
"It is said that you are more valiant than a dragon, yet you wear no armor," she said.
"I am as savage as I seem," the knight said. "I took the dragon sleeping, curled up with its nose at its great tail, and so I threw a stone from above onto its head; and when it woke up, stupid from sleep, it began to bite and scratch its own tail, and I could have my fill of its gold."
The queen studied the knight. "It seems that you are not strong, nor quick, nor valiant," she said, "but you are clever and wise, and well worthy to be a knight in my household. But tell me, sir, what is the meaning of your sash, that says SEVEN AT ONCE like a warning?"
"Ah," he said. "I did once kill seven with one stroke, and this was given to me as a little joke. It has been a cause for great misunderstanding ever since."
"Killed seven what?" asked the queen.
The knight smiled. "Flies."
XXX
Her shoulder healed, and she did her research, and she noticed that the guys were treating her funny: Henry wasn't teasing as much has he used to, the Big Guy started offering her Lucky Charms again, and Will was watching her when he thought she wasn't looking, doing psychological algebra without showing his work.
They thought she was still hung up about Jimmy, she realized. And sure, that was still pissing her off, but it was small and slow-burning, like a cigarette butt. It was something she could ignore. The ghost, on the other hand...she still couldn't find any record of a matching Abnormal in the archives, and she couldn't figure out where it had gone. None of her questions were answered and she was starting to get annoyed.
She was starting to get a little desperate, and she knew what that called for.
Will caught her again on her way out the door, and for a split second she was convinced he knew exactly what she meant to do, via some kind of scary nerd telepathy. But of course he couldn't, because he was good but not that good; instead he asked, "Finally coming up for air?"
"Yeah," she said. For some reason he was easier to lie to than Magnus, even if it was harder to get away with it. She felt a little guilty thinking that maybe he didn't matter in quite the same way. "Got a clean bill of health, an interesting scar, and a paycheck looking for a new home. Wanna come with?"
"No thanks," he said, laughing softly. "Not much of a clubber, really."
"C'mon, we can pick up girls together," Kate suggested, then paused. "Actually, we could also pick up guys together, with the way you dress."
Will put a hand to his chest like a Victorian maiden. "Ow. Seriously, ow. You expect me to take that lying down?"
"It's none of my business what position you take it in," she said with a smirk.
He kept smiling back, but something in his eyes shifted, and Kate was excruciatingly aware that she'd been transformed from a person to a patient without her moving a muscle. "You must be feeling better," he said speculatively.
"Already told you Magnus cleared the shoulder," she shot back, and realized immediately that was the wrong things to say. Denial might be a great coping strategy, but it seemed to affect shrinks and social workers like catnip. Time for evasive maneuvers. "Anyway, I'm gonna miss the opening act if I don't-"
"Kate." Will says it sharply, almost commandingly, and she would've bristled out like a cat if it were anyone else but him. Actually, she was just going to go ahead and bristle anyway-offense was the best defense. "You know you can talk to me about things, right? Just because I'm not a practicing clinician doesn't mean I don't believe in confidentiality."
"What I know," Kate told him sharply, "is that I got this lecture from Magnus a couple days ago, and I am not a troubled teenager, okay? I appreciate the sentiment, but you guys can keep the after-school special crap to yourselves."
Will bit his lip and stared at her for a moment, not really scowling. He looked...puzzled. "Sometimes I feel like I don't really know you," he confessed, apropos of nothing. "You've worked here for months and you're still holding us all at arm's length."
"What, you want me to throw a sleepover where we watch Disney movies and braid each others' hair?" she asked.
"I want to know that you trust us," Will said. "I want you to be comfortable here."
I am, Kate thought, I'm not afraid of anything here, but she was pissed off now, and Will had lost any heart-to-heart privileges he might once have had. Instead she went for the jugular, stupid and aggressive. "You want Ashley back."
It worked-she can tell he wasn't expecting that, and that it hurt. "Is that what you think?"
"Be honest, Will," she says. "If you had the choice? It'd only ever be her. I'm just the next best thing."
She'd had worse exit lines and she took this one, turning her back and letting Will draw whatever conclusions he wanted. Maybe that Kate had inadequacy issues, or that she wasn't whoever he'd thought she was-well, fine. Let him think whatever he wanted. At least she still had-
She stopped halfway down the driveway, turning over that thought in her head. She'd alienated everyone else in the Sanctuary, but at least she still had her ghost, except not anymore. And she was about to do something so very very dumb that if the others found out-
Goddamnit, when had her life gotten this complicated?
XXX
Once upon a time a woman was sent away to live in a high castle all alone; and she had heard that the owner of that castle was a terrible monster who devoured people. But when she got there she found the castle was full of invisible servants who made her delicious food and brought her beautiful clothes to wear, and led her to a bedroom with an enormous goosedown mattress. The woman decided this wasn't so bad, and put out her candle and fell asleep.
However, she had not lain in the dark long before someone else came into the room and lay down with her in the bed. The woman reached out to light her candle, but a hand on her arm stopped her. "Don't," said the other, "for if you see my face I will leave you here alone forever."
"Are you the owner of this house?" the woman asked.
"I am, and all within it."
"And are you a terrible monster?" the woman asked.
"Do you really want to know?"
The woman thought about the hand on her arm and the warm body beside her. The candle remained unlit.
XXX
She'd ruled out anything she'd have to smoke, because either Henry or the Big Guy would smell it on her; rules out injections, too, because Magnus would notice the marks. Kate had never been much of a user even the stupider parts of her youth, but she knew enough to be selective, and knew the right people to get it on the cheap.
She had to wait until the next night, had to wait through a day of Will eying her from across the conference table while they talked about the logistics of transferring a bunch of readers from Kenya to Canada, had to kill time on the shooting range. She told everyone she was having an early night, locked the door to her room, and pulled out the baggie with the two little pills that were definitely a lot stronger than Percocet.
She took the pills, switched off the lights, lay down on the bed. She concentrated on her breathing. Slowly everything began to spin and spiral, down into darkness...
...long blond hair that brushed over her knuckles, across her breasts. Short, blunt nails tracing the curve of her hip. Relief swept through her as crisp as water and she pawed at the air, seeking out contact where there was nothing to touch What are you? Kate asked, and she wasn't sure if she was speaking out loud, if she was dreaming or not.
Not real. The words floated out at her, through her, rippling against her like silk. Not here. Just pieces.
Pieces, right; lips or fingers or a stubbled knee that touch and nudge, but nothing comes together, not all at once. Does Magnus know? she asked, groping for some trace of skin or hair, something she could hang on to.
No! It vibrated in her like a guitar string, like a flashing caution. She can't know. Don't tell her.
Why not?
It was like a dream and it wasn't, because a part of Kate could think very clearly, but another part was at the mercy of the drugs and she couldn't peel herself off the bed, couldn't open her eyes. She reached for what wasn't there and it felt like static, like little electric prickles on her skin, like a finger on her lips except this time it didn't stop or fade.
She can't know, the ghost said again, warm and soft and ephemeral. She has to let go.
Kate finally relaxed into that warmth, spiraled down into it, like falling. Why me? she remembered to ask.
The light that bubbles up through her makes her think of champagne and meteors. You were lonely. You're pretty. I like you.
What's your name?
There was no answer; just disjointed touches, light and heat, stars bubbling up all around her, and when the drugs wore off in the morning she remembered nothing but a pair of sad blue eyes.
On to Part 2