(Untitled)

[ladyfirestarter]

[Out of Milliways: And if the fires burn out, there's only fire to blame]

The front door opens onto a hallway in Taos, New Mexico.

Charlie McGee steps in with the slow careful movements of extreme exhaustion, leaning on a cane, and holds the door for Charles Wallace Murry.

"Here we are," she says to him, with a tired but beautiful smile.

Comments

[aj_crawley]

Crowley's in a booth near the door tonight, boots propped up on the opposite bench and a somewhat incidental bowl of fried paradoxes on the table. There are many reasons why she might pick an out of the way table, that's true, but tonight, it's because she's reading a book - purple, white, paperback; the sort where the cover announces the author's name on a substantially larger scale than the title.

So.

Luckily for Charlie (or something like that), the collection's first story sounds a little gruesome for snack-time; Crowley's in the process of skipping to the second, as well as her fried paradoxes, when she's distracted by a flash of red hair out of the corner of her eye.

[aj_crawley]

"No?"

Crowley's been doing her homework, courtesy of Susannah and the Dark Tower for Dummies dossier. The next thing to jump to mind isn't the house.

(These ones are - )

No, she decides. Charlie'd hardly be so cheerful, otherwise.

"And I expect it'd be rude to press, what with you being an invalid and all?"

[ladyfirestarter]

"Oh," she says with determined cheer, "I killed something indestructible that needed killing."

She folds her hands on the tabletop demurely.

[aj_crawley]

Something indestructible. Crowley's nails tap once against the tabletop.

"What, just - by the by? You must have a very exciting to-do list. 'Wash hair, return DVD, kill indestructible menace'."

[ladyfirestarter]

"Oh no," she says, "this one wasn't planned. I had other things to do that night, and they included sleeping."

[aj_crawley]

"Ah," Crowley says solemnly. "I hate it when that happens."

[ladyfirestarter]

"And I had other things to do the next day, and they didn't involve sleeping, but there you go." She lifts one hand, lets it drop.

[aj_crawley]

Crowley's eyebrows draw together a little - puzzlement, surely, rather than anything else.

"How long ago was this?"

If Charlie looks like she does now...

[ladyfirestarter]

"About ... five days? Five days. Ish."

[aj_crawley]

"Ouch."

(With anyone else, the hissing sound that came first might be a better indicator of sympathy - a higher marker on the sliding scale of fellow feeling. This is Crowley, though, slit-pupilled and fork-tongued, so it's probably better not to read too much into it.)

"Still," she waves a careless hand, "I suppose if sleeping was the worst you were doing..."

[ladyfirestarter]

Amused: "As opposed to being dead? Yeah, I like this a lot better."

[aj_crawley]

"...Well, really I was drawing more of a distinction between 'sleeping' and, say, 'lying unconscious in an emergency room somewhere', but yeah. That'd, er. Be the other end of the scale."

[ladyfirestarter]

"Dead, lying in an emergency room, stuck forever in the dead space between worlds ..." A faint flaw belies the light tone on those last words. "Lot of worse ways I could've spent the past few days."

[aj_crawley]

There might be something sharper in that vivid yellow gaze, all of a sudden -- but sometimes, with eyes that other, it can be sort of hard to tell.

Under the table, Crowley's hand drifts to her book, cover half-hidden by the dark sprawl of her coat. Dry and quiet, her thumb riffles the pages at the corner.

"Todash," she says finally.

Heigh ho.

[ladyfirestarter]

Charlie's head comes up. Partly in recognition, partly in ... something else.

"Yeah."

[aj_crawley]

There aren't quite words for how much Crowley wants to ask - but even her experience at Milliways doesn't seem to be providing her with anything in the way of the proper etiquette. There's manners, after all, and then there's Manners - and only one of those tends to apply only to other people.

(Crowley might be a demon. But in some profound and indefinable way, some fashion not in the least connected to actual geography - on what you might, in fact, call a spiritual level - she's also... well, an Englishman.)

"Fair," she says. "I think I'd prefer sleeping, too."