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They stand outside a red door, waiting for someone to open it after they knock.
There’s a small hole protected by iron bars in the middle of the door, the symbol Vi got from Jericho’s note looking back at them in the little door closing it. The hole opens and a green eye faces them. Behind Vi, Caitlyn flinches and looks down, and Vi looks up.
The little hole closes, the door lock clicks and the door opens, showing them a long dimly lit by candles corridor with tapestries and silks hanging around the walls.
Before stepping in, Vi turns to Cait, who so desperately wanted answers and was going out of her way to be annoying about it. She couldn’t wait for the girl to realize where they had come to get them.
“The one place where all secrets are spilled,” she muses, Cait sighs and walks in behind her.
There’s music and chatter filling the corridor, sipping out from rooms on both sides as they walk by. Vi isn’t bothered by any of that, she knows who she needs to talk to to get answers to her questions, but Cait is curious, so she looks around.
They pass through a room, the door is open and there’s a couple lounging on a couch. The man, clothed up from toes to neck, wears a white mask; the woman wears only a black full-body lingerie and a black cat mask, head resting on the man’s lap as he threads his fingers through her hair. The woman inhales languidly from a long and delicate pipe, a purple smoke being exhaled from between her lips just as they pass by.
The next room they get to lightly see is a bathroom, filled with bubbles overflowing the bathtub and floating around, soft chatter and gasps can be heard coming from it, and Vi passes too fast to fully understand what’s going on, but she notices Cait’s steps stopping behind her, taking a moment, and then her voice.
“How exactly do you propose we go about this?” There she was.
Vi stops walking, turns her head to look at her.
“Let ‘em think you work here.”
And now that the idea was out, before she could think about what she was saying, she felt a shiver running through her as the possibilities started crossing her mind.
Cait, in her defense, looked affronted.
“Excuse me?” she traces Vi’s face with her eyes, expecting a joke, then her eyes got a little wider when she realizes it won’t come. “I will not.”
Vi, with so many emotions running through her body now, so many thoughts, thoughts she had pushed away every single time they had tried to make their way into her lucid brain because there was just no way in hell she would be attracted to an enforcer of all people, much less wonder what it would be like if she dressed as one of the ladies she had seen working in this place before, but it was too late. A key had been turned, a lock had been opened and now the force of all those thoughts was running free. She turns her full body and starts walking towards her.
“You know what your problem is?” she hears herself saying, voice coming a bit rough for her own ears.
“Please. Tell me.”
She doesn’t even realize when she starts talking again. “You expect everyone to give you what you want. If you really want people to talk to you, you have to let them think you have what they want.”
The first part she says looking into Cait’s eyes, and then her mind and body and eyes take over her senses and she’s walking around the other girl’s form, eyes wandering when she thinks she’s not looking, but Cait’s eyes are following her, body also turning to keep up with the movement.
She sounds confused, unsure when she says.
“And what do I have?”
And now Vi fully allows herself to look at her, up and down, and she shakes her head, stepping closer into Cait’s personal space.
“You’re hot, cupcake.”
And if it wasn’t so dark in the hallway, she was sure she would have seen Cait blushing under her gaze, for the way she startled and tried to step back, tripping on the process and landing with her back pressed against the wall. Vi followed her swiftly, slamming a hand by the side of her head and leaning over, heads so close, she gave Cait no time to recover before continuing with her reckless and mindless behavior.
“So what’ll it be, man or woman?”
And once again Cait’s reaction was already all she could take in, everything she wanted to, as she gasped and stammered and tried to look for an answer. She only wished the lights were a bit brighter to allow her to memorize every smooth curve of Cait’s face, the way the color would change and warm it up.
Steps behind them manage to take Vi out of the loop of thoughts she found herself in, she turned and grabbed the passing man by the arm before the moment became too much for the both of them.
The man, wearing a stupid full-faced clown mask, says “hi”. And Vi hates herself a little as she’s scolding her expression into a blank one. She doesn’t say anything, keeps starring at him deadly, she can’t make herself speak.
The man continues, “I’m Pim. What’s your name?”
He was a customer, how convenient. She doesn’t know what’s gotten into her today, must have been all the fresh air and the scrutinizing gaze of a certain enforcer all day on her, so she says the first thing that crossed her mind, the stupidest thing too, for that matter. And she hates herself a little more as soon as the words leave her mouth.
“Matilda,” what a ridiculous name. But she keeps going, pushing every word slowly out of her mouth, voice low, strangled, she’s forcing her lips to move. “But you can call her whatever you want.”
And she only looks back at Cait when she’s finished.
The dark-haired woman inhales sharply, eyes going wide, then she looks at the man, sheepishly, smiling.
“Ah, yes. Matilda,” Cait gesticulated, her voice coming out so forced that Vi couldn’t see a way the man would believe a single word she was saying. But whatever, she meant it when she said she was hot, the man would certainly see that too. “My parents named me Matilda.”
What a stupid situation she had just put the both of them in.
She leaves the both of them, continuing her way down the corridor.
“After my great-grandmother Matilda, the, uh…” she purses her lips as Cait’s voice becomes lower when the distance between them grows, and then she reaches the place she had been looking for.
She pushes the velvet red curtain to the side and enters a red room. Red-lighted, red furnished, red decorated, all red, all around, as the hair of the old lady sitting behind the desk in front of her.
The lady looks up, and she watches her expression change as she’s recognized.
The lady says, “would you believe it?”
Time goes by as she talks with the lady, and by the end of it, she just wants to leave. She should have done so before the conversation verged back to her family.
"Sweetheart, I was real sad to hear about Vander. And the kids. Just terrible.”
The lady had moved from behind her desk, Vi had sat in a big armchair and she sat across her, at the edge of a love couch, also red.
“By the looks of it, no one down here lifted a finger to stop Silco,” she had been thinking about this since the first moment she saw the heart of her hometown bleeding sadly after so many years of mistreatment.
“A few tried but Silco’s got the muscle… and the money. He took over the Last Drop.”
“I saw,” and it had filled her with sadness, a sadness she was sure was showing now.
The lady continued, “things have changed without Vander looking out for us.”
Vi could tell. She felt it from the first moment he was gone, the moment her life had changed for good, but she had been stuck in a cell for years… She could only wonder how it had been like to her little sister.
“Have you heard anything about Powder? I think Silco has her.”
The lady shakes her head, looking away and then back at her.
She had to go, “I have to find her.” She pushes herself up and out of the couch, and heads to the entry of the room.
“Silco’s number two’s a regular. I can have Miguel tell you where to find her.”
She looks back one last time, “I owe you.” And leaves the room.
Vi walks down the corridor, too deep into her own thoughts, when she hears a woman laughing, and then a sound she had never heard before but that made her heart skip a beat as she recognized it could only be Cait, giggling.
She stops, looks to her side, and there she is. Leaning on a love couch, surrounded by delicate flowers and leaves, a white moose’s head on the wall behind her, and a white stuffed peacock next to her. She’s got one arm on the backside of the love couch, holding her head, her other hand resting on a beautiful white mask on her lap. And close to her, there’s a woman, leaning over, one arm also propped on the backside of the love couch and a smile on her face.
The woman says, “I’ve only ever imagined the gardens.”
And Vi could only wonder what they were talking about.
The woman laughs and Cait smiles, eyes never leaving her face, a fond and soft expression on her own.
The woman continues, “this is all I’ve seen.”
And Vi can’t quite recognize the feeling that bubbles up inside her and threatens to spill, she had never felt it before. A burning, an aching, a desire to punch a hole through a wall.
Woman it is, then.
Vi smiles to herself, scoffs, shakes the thoughts away, and keeps walking.