wintersday (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wintersday) wrote2020-08-16 05:06 pm
wintersday) wrote2020-08-16 05:06 pm
Fic: Cover of Night
Title: Cover of Night
Fandom: Fallen London
Major Characters/Pairings: April/Sinning Jenny
Wordcount: 459
Rating: PG
POV: Third person
Summary: Ealing Gardens, as seen from outside the light.
The darkness is deeper out here.
Further east, lamps burn along every street, imposing their light like tiny earthbound stars. In this impoverished place, candles gutter and flame dies easily, and a few more lamps are broken every week. Liberation meshes uneasily with regulation, and for all the gunpowder she’s been ferrying to hidden cells, April can’t guess which one will win out.
There are changes, though, around the station: new shopfronts, brighter paint, broken glass traded for whole. Someone’s put up a statue of her companion – a waste of resources, an irrelevancy in the face of revolution. A fine likeness all the same, bared ankles and all. Jenny looks on it with amusement tinged with irritation. When she’d said she wanted to see what they were building here, April does not imagine she’d anticipated that.
The rest of it is no surprise. Industry will do what industry does. Back in London proper, the Board plies investors with promises of the renewal that they might bring to this benighted place, and April can see how someone would want to believe it. It’s all a fair enough facade, if you never look farther than a block or two outside the watch-tower’s radius – but night still pools in corners and alleyways, unbanished by the flame of progress. Charity occurs, and murder, and other violations of the law; contraband changes hand, and forbidden words are written. Jenny watches all of it with an assessing eye, and even now, April can’t tell what she’s thinking.
Meets expectations? she writes on her slate, and Jenny nods.
“Have you ever considered compromise?” she signs, in a graceful flurry of motion. Her hands are a pleasure to watch, like so many things about her; in those hands, pleasure is a weapon skillfully deployed, and April knows it’s good to remember that they’re on the same side now, and that they might not always be.
April shrugs. Jenny knows how much of a lie it is that monsters need the absence of light to thrive; the one they killed together moved easily in the lamplit world. It’s the people here who never could.
Liberation demands sacrifice, she writes. She doesn’t ask it only of others. When the lights go out, she’ll need the language of touch to know the world outside herself. But that world will be free, and humanity will change to be free in it, learning their way through darkness like she learned, submerged in silence, to feel music in the vibration of a drum.
Close your eyes, she writes, and Jenny does, a mark of trust delivered with a painted smile. April takes her hand, turns it over, traces letters one by one on her open palm:
WHEN THE LIGHT DIES
WE WILL REMAIN
Fandom: Fallen London
Major Characters/Pairings: April/Sinning Jenny
Wordcount: 459
Rating: PG
POV: Third person
Summary: Ealing Gardens, as seen from outside the light.
The darkness is deeper out here.
Further east, lamps burn along every street, imposing their light like tiny earthbound stars. In this impoverished place, candles gutter and flame dies easily, and a few more lamps are broken every week. Liberation meshes uneasily with regulation, and for all the gunpowder she’s been ferrying to hidden cells, April can’t guess which one will win out.
There are changes, though, around the station: new shopfronts, brighter paint, broken glass traded for whole. Someone’s put up a statue of her companion – a waste of resources, an irrelevancy in the face of revolution. A fine likeness all the same, bared ankles and all. Jenny looks on it with amusement tinged with irritation. When she’d said she wanted to see what they were building here, April does not imagine she’d anticipated that.
The rest of it is no surprise. Industry will do what industry does. Back in London proper, the Board plies investors with promises of the renewal that they might bring to this benighted place, and April can see how someone would want to believe it. It’s all a fair enough facade, if you never look farther than a block or two outside the watch-tower’s radius – but night still pools in corners and alleyways, unbanished by the flame of progress. Charity occurs, and murder, and other violations of the law; contraband changes hand, and forbidden words are written. Jenny watches all of it with an assessing eye, and even now, April can’t tell what she’s thinking.
Meets expectations? she writes on her slate, and Jenny nods.
“Have you ever considered compromise?” she signs, in a graceful flurry of motion. Her hands are a pleasure to watch, like so many things about her; in those hands, pleasure is a weapon skillfully deployed, and April knows it’s good to remember that they’re on the same side now, and that they might not always be.
April shrugs. Jenny knows how much of a lie it is that monsters need the absence of light to thrive; the one they killed together moved easily in the lamplit world. It’s the people here who never could.
Liberation demands sacrifice, she writes. She doesn’t ask it only of others. When the lights go out, she’ll need the language of touch to know the world outside herself. But that world will be free, and humanity will change to be free in it, learning their way through darkness like she learned, submerged in silence, to feel music in the vibration of a drum.
Close your eyes, she writes, and Jenny does, a mark of trust delivered with a painted smile. April takes her hand, turns it over, traces letters one by one on her open palm:
WHEN THE LIGHT DIES
WE WILL REMAIN