Burning the midnight oil (Sepia)

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Cara slipped through the White Oak barn wearing her old team tracksuit, the normal French braid that she wore was far from as neat as people expected, but at the moment she didn't care. Clutched in her hands was her mock-leather satchel. She had no idea what the time was as the only light was the soft glow of the solar-powered emergency lights that lit up the barn aisle so that if there was even an emergency people could easily find their was around the barn without the need for electricity.

Phoenix threw her head into the air as her stall door opened and lashed out with a front hoof at the intruder.

"Hush little one." The girl whispered as she flattened herself against the wall, used to the mare's not-so-nice greeting. "I need someone I feel safe." She slid the door closed and stepped up to the mare. "Careful!" She said as the mare wrapped her head around the girl.

Cara had just been dropped back at the Academy from a meeting with her trusted social worker, a man who had been far from impressed with the girl, especially after her actions in the arena a couple of weeks earlier. And he had let her know this. She wrapped her arms around the mare's solid neck and took a few moments to draw herself together before she released her hold on the golden mare and stepped back. "You don't mind if I stay here for a while?" She knew the horse couldn't understand her words, but Phoenix's personality just made her feel the need to ask the for the mare's consent in everything they did.

The young teenager settled herself down on the bedding in the mare's stall and pulled the satchel onto her knees. Out of the bag she pulled her sketchbook and her tin of pencils. Opening the book to the next blank page, she took the lid off the tin and pulled out her favourite pencil. She then began to sketch a simple image of Cinderella looking into a floor-length mirror...

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Sometimes, Lee decided, as he stared at his ceiling, maybe one just had to accept that he just wasn't going to be falling asleep any more tonight. Earlier in the evening, he'd fallen asleep almost as soon as he'd hit the pillow, but then a feeling of general anxiety had woken him up only a few hours after, leading to his current position. It wasn't actually that much of a surprise: he'd often displayed insomniac tendencies before, especially in the last year, and had been really pleased that he'd been sleeping so well at Blue Ridge.

Apparently, though, the novelty of a new situation had worn off, and he was back to his usual fragmented nights. He sighed, ran his fingers through his hair, then sat up. Clearly, he wasn't getting back to sleep, so he might as well go do something useful. There was a whole load of tack down in White Oak Barn that needed cleaned, having being soaked in an unexpected shower the day before, and he might as well go and do it now. It would be better than fruitlessly trying to sleep, anyway.

Only a few minutes after his decision was made, he was slipping out the door now fully dressed in casual trousers and a comfortable shirt, torch in hand, ignoring the confused look of a half-asleep dog, and shutting it quietly behind him. Only a few minutes after that, and he was approaching the barn, glad to see that the emergency lights were lighting the place up with their gentle glow. Switching the torch off as he gently slid the door open just far enough to let himself inside, he breathed deeply, the comforting smell of well-cared for horses entering his nostrils and dispelling most of the vague, unformed worries that had been preventing him from sleeping.

This had been a good idea, and with the number of hours he had until it got light, he could probably finish off most of the tack before breakfast. You are such a workaholic, a small voice in his brain said, but the majority of him ignored - as per usual - that little section, as he ignored the thought that, sometimes, he should maybe back off a bit from working so hard. Whatever: he enjoyed his work, and if he worked longer hours than the other stable hands, well, that was only his business.

A few sleepy heads poked over stable doors at him, and he gently greeted the few horses who'd decided to wake up and investigate the unusual intruder, when a faint, unfamiliar sound caught his ears. He froze, listen to the slight scritch-scratching that was only audible due to the barn being so silent, and determined it was coming from one of the stalls, slightly further down the aisle. Quietly advancing upon it, he frowned when he realised the noises - now accompanied by a slight shifting of bedding - were coming from Phoenix's stall, the volatile mare of the unusual Cara. Hmm.

Carefully approaching, he took a glance over the top of the door to see Cara, seated on the generously bedded floor of the stall, sketching something intently. Phoenix herself looked rather like a guarding sentinel, hovering behind the small girl. Huh, well, now what?

"At least I'm not the only one up at this ungodly hour," he said, tone managing to convey curiousity and concern, very carefully staying outside the stall and respecting the boundaries of both Cara and her mare. "I take it you're finding these midnight hours difficult to sleep in as well?"

[Ω-Admin-Cara-Ω]

Phoenix blew out her nostrils as she heard someone approaching, this alone was enough to make the girl jump - luckily she had lifted the pencil away from the paper at just the right moment. she looked at the mare who's ears flattened before she bobbed her head and blew softly onto the girl's hair.


"At least I'm not the only one up at this ungodly hour, "I take it you're finding these midnight hours difficult to sleep in as well?" "

A panic-stricken face turned to look toward the voice, her eyes flickered between relief and terror as she looked at Lee. "Midnight?" She repeated stupidly, wishing she could take the word back instantly. "I always find it difficult to sleep, Sir." She turned back to her sketching and began to work on the reflection in Cinderella's mirror. After lightly sketching the basic outline of the human form, she began to sketch the dress over the hinted lines that were already there. Making sure that she had the fullness in the skirt. Along the line of Jim Warren's: If I Were a Mermaid and You Were a Unicorn.

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Oh, dear, he should have remembered that the last time he'd come across Cara - that time in the gym - he'd managed to completely terrify her. He'd hoped that their reasonably long, for them, conversation while riding might have mitigated that, slightly. Though, he mentally acknowledged, him popping up over a stable door probably wasn't the most relaxing way of him appearing, especially given the hour and that Cara had probably thought she would be alone.

Way to go, Lee. Still, now that he was here, he felt he should really find out why Cara had felt the need to take herself off down to the stables and hide in the stall of her horse. It couldn't be anything good, after all. Not trying to look at her picture as he didn't want to intrude that far, he shifted position, slightly, trying to assume as nonthreatening a posture as he could while still being able to talk to the younger girl.

"Tell me about it," he said, quietly, not wanting to disturb the stillness of the barn too much. "I'm always finding myself waking up and being... intensely worried about... things and unable to sleep again." Well, slightly simplified explanation, there, given that he usually woke up worrying about his family and the way they seemed to be successfully ripping themselves to shreds, but he wasn't going to share that in a hurry. Which made his next statement rather hypocritical.

"Anything in particular keeping you up, or just general worry about life?" He chose his words carefully, stopping himself from using fear - a word clearly inspired by Cara's initial panicked face as she'd looked up at him - and going for a rather softer alternative. Worry could be used to describe so much, after all, and could be beautifully understated.

[Ω-Admin-Cara-Ω]

Cara continued her careful sketching of the dress as he spoke, taking much more care in this than she had the rest of the picture. She released a vexed hiss as she drew a line in the wring place, and carefully removed the page from the book. she was a perfectionist, and as she drew with charcoal pencils once a line was there, it was there forever. Releasing a breath she started again.

"Anything in particular keeping you up, or just general worry about life?"

She glanced up at him. "I don't like my dreams." She told him honestly. "So I don't sleep." No, I just live with a constant pounding in my head The last part she added to herself, as it was one thing she wished to keep from others as long as she could. "I also only just back on campus and do not wish to awaken my room-mate." She now wished that she had gone to the dorms though, she suddenly needed a shower. She wiped her hands on her pants and then wished she hadn't. "I knew that down here I wouldn't disturb anyone and I... I wanted to spend some time with Phoenix."

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Dreams. One of the things he'd never really suffered from, someone once telling him, rather bitterly, that he just didn't have the imagination to dream during a conversation that - oddly enough - had been rather similar to this one. He decided not to mention that he really didn't do dreams, and just nodded, instead, "Seems a somewhat reasonable plan, even if rather detrimental to one's health." Another thing to note about Lee was that as he got unsure in conversations he tended to use longer and more formal words and structures, beaten only by when he was angry - really angry - in which he tended to turn into a grammatically perfect thesaurus, spitting out words with very, very quiet fury, which he'd been told was actually really rather terrifying.

"That's being back very late," Lee said after a moment, then berated himself inwardly for his inane statement, even if it was true. "Would that have anything to do with the person...in charge of your life?" He really needed a better (snappier) description of the guy, though given that he wasn't entirely sure what his relationship to Cara was, that was how he had to refer to him currently. It was either that or something far ruder, anyway.

"Yeah, horses," he agreed, a slight smile tinging his face. "Always the best cure for anything." He wondered whether he might be better moving on and leaving Cara too it, but she seemed to be actually talking to him, so maybe she did want the company. Or maybe she was just being polite. It was a little hard to tell. He'd give it a little longer, anyway, then if Cara began to really look like she didn't want him here, he'd accept her wishes and leave. It would be only the right thing to do, after all.

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Cara gave a slight shrug about it not being good for her health to not sleep. "I'll live." She replied with as much compassion as a plank of wood.

She pressed her lips together, knowing that she'd said too much when he instantly guessed who she had been with. "More commonly known as my social worker." She supplied for him as she released a tired sigh. Her eyes flickered upwards as the mare above her echoed the sigh, ruffling the girl's hair. "We were going over a few things, and I got a lecture for doing something I shouldn't have." It was a half truth. Yes, she got a lecture, she just didn't put the rest to words. There was a part of her that wondered why she spent so much energy on protecting the man, but there was another part of her that was terrified about getting Mr Andrews in trouble.

She nodded at his comment about horses being the best cure for anything. At any given moment in the past, she had always had a horse... well pony... she could turn to when she needed an escape. The barn was the one place where she actually felt safe. Especially inside Phoenix's stall, where she knew that no one dared tread in fear of what the mare might do to them.

She finally finished the sketch and gently blew the excess charcoal dust off the paper before she took a good look at the picture, holding it in a way that Lee would also be able to see what it was without meaning to, wondering what the image would look like if coloured in. A tiny frown creased her forehead as she wondered what had inspired her to draw this picture.

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Ah, right, social worker, who apparently was doing anything but being a decent social worker. The world just got better and better, especially given that Lee was certain that Cara wasn't mentioning half of what was going on in her life. A thought drifted to mind of something he'd read, somewhere, that bad things always happened to nice people. He'd remembered thinking at the time that he was sure bad things happened to awful people, too, it was just that people cared less. Still, it seemed an apropos observation in this instance, given that Cara seemed to be about the least offensive person he thought he'd ever met. She was sensible and good with horses, about the highest praises one could get with Lee.

"Sounds like a charming individual," he deadpanned, taking his usual refuge in sarcasm. "Do you have to see him often?" Though he wasn't trying to look at Cara's picture, the angle she held it at made it almost impossible not to, and his eyes were drawn to the firm, smooth charcoal strokes. And then he felt obliged to comment.

"Something tells me you're wishing you were someone else," he observed, tone soft and as gentle as he could make it, Welsh accent becoming stronger as it usually did when he was trying to be comforting and/or understanding. "Alice, Through the Looking Glass, so to speak, Cinderella waiting for her Prince... Which, in retrospect, always struck me as a remarkably passive thing to be doing. Probably why I always preferred Alice to Cinderella."

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"He is the embodiment of the perfect gentleman." The rehearsed words came out of her mouth sounding as prim and proper as the woman she had heard those words from. She pulled her knees up and rested her chin on them. "I see him once a fortnight, or every week if he feels that I need more time." She suddenly felt drained and bed actually seemed like a good idea - if not for the threat of her past haunting her.

She tipped her head to the side so that she could see him out of the corner of her eye as he spoke of her picture. She placed a sheet of tracing paper over the drawing to protect the opposite page before she closed the book. "I wish I knew who I was." She returned. The death of her grandfather still occupied her thoughts, along with the information that this death had brought to light. Was it possible that she had really been drawing herself looking into the mirror and seeing a Princess in a fine gown? Nah, if she'd been drawing herself, the image in the mirror would have been wearing a royal kimono. "There are no happily ever afters." She said softly. She shook her head slightly to shake the cloud that was closing in on her conscious thoughts.

She could feel Phoenix's breath getting closer to her neck and she lifted a hand to rub the mare's muzzle and to give her the hint that she really didn't want the horse breathing down her neck. As gentle as the mare was being, the gentle wind stung the fresh wounds on her back. She clenched her teeth as she lowered her arm again, the movement of her skin hurt too.

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Hadn't the Baron Gilles de Rais been described as a perfect gentlemen - heck, he'd fought with Joan of Arc and had been a national hero - even as he was slaughtering children in his castle purely for the fun of it? Yeah, Lee, and that's not at all a overdramatic, gruesome comparison to come up with, don't you think you might be abruptly leaping to conclusions?

Perhaps. Or perhaps not, given Cara who, though initially giving the impression of being a very well-adjusted girl, clearly wasn't and, equally clearly, had a very good cause not to be. Introspective, unsure, and yet with an outer layer - as well as a core - of iron to prevent people from getting too close to the mystery that was her.

"Happily ever afters, I believe, have frequently been said to be over-rated," Lee observed, tone halfway between flippant and deadly serious, when a slight change of the expression in Cara's face, a tensing of the muscles all over her body that he probably wouldn't even have noticed if he hadn't been looking at her so intently grabbed his attention and began to ring alarm bells. He frowned, expression sliding into the 'Very Serious' end of the spectrum.

"That looked far too painful for simply raising your arm," he said, simply. "What's wrong?" He could guess - partially guess, anyway - and that guess made him have to clench down on a growing rise of anger. Apparently Baron Gilles hadn't been too much of an imaginative stretch, though at least Cara wasn't dead. The word 'yet' faintly rang in his head and he mentally slapped it down with some difficulty. No.

[Ω-Admin-Cara-Ω]

Cara's head shot up at Lee's words, her eyebrows also flew up as she searched her head for an honest answer that would hopefully appease the stablehand at the stall door. "I'm a little stiff from today's gym session." It was almost the truth, as she had been in the gym that morning. The half truth worked as well as when she told people that she had grabbed an apple that morning when asked what she'd had for breakfast. There was just the technicality of it that made it a lie.

She closed her eyes and looked away, unable to keep looking in Lee's direction when she knew that she was lying to him.

The urge to have a shower crossed her mind again. That was always the first thing she did when she got back from her sessions. She had a shower to try and make herself feel clean again. "Why are you awake at this time of night?" She thought that maybe throwing the question back at him would take the attention off her, as long as she didn't move her arms again and the mare ceased breathing down her neck.

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Lee raised his eyebrows, managing to project utter disbelief without saying a word. "Right," he said, in a tone of voice about as utterly inflectionless as it was possible to get. The fact that she wouldn't meet his eyes only heightened his certainty that she was either lying, or not telling the whole truth. His brother hadn't been able to lie to him about anything important, and in this instance, neither could Cara. Now all he had to do was find a way to phrase things so that he could help her, without her totally freaking out and clamming up on him. He went with his instincts.

Which, first, told him to answer the question. "Worries," he said, simply, then decided that this was one of those instances where he would have to elaborate, however much he disliked it. If he was wanting Cara to trust him, after all, he had to give her something trustworthy. "My dad died a year ago, and it pretty much shattered out family dynamics. My mother and I began to disagree on everything - mostly horses - and my younger brother..." He sighed, and closed his eyes for a moment. This was why he didn't usually talk about this!

"He got really depressed, totally changed in personality, partly because my mother and I were continually at loggerheads and that's when I decided I'd better get out of there. Didn't want to cause him any more problems. He's a lot better now, we keep in very close contact, but I still worry about him. Hence my being up at this time and in the barn. Got a letter from him, yesterday, which was cheerful, but... I worry." He rolled to a halt, watching Cara closely and, somewhere in his mind, wondering if this was his instinctive big-brotherness kicking in.

"I've got a medical kit back in my room," he said, after a pause, keeping his eyes fixed on Cara, even if she wasn't looking at him. "It's quite well-stocked and I'm not a bad hand with patching people up. Force of habit and my dad's insistence I took a few medical training courses when I was younger." He paused again, wondering both how to approach this, and how to express himself. "I daresay I'll ask far fewer question than any of the medical staff here." The offer was clear: please, let me fix you up, partially, and I won't ask you to say anything more until you're ready, and you can keep this as quiet as you want to.

[Ω-Admin-Cara-Ω]

Cara turned her head toward Lee as his story unfolded. She empathized with his pain of losing a parent, but she couldn't share his feelings as she had never known her parents where he had grown up with his father who had been ripped away from him. "I am sorry that in losing your father you lost the rest of your family too." She said softly. "I am glad that you and your brother still write to each other." She didn't know if having any siblings would have been better or worse for her, and quickly decided that it would have been worse as she would either have been separated from her sibling or would have to watch another go through the pain that she felt.

She turned away as she tried to fight a yawn and failed. Her shoulder's stiffened as soon as Lee mentioned a medical kit and she shook her head without looking at him again. "I can't." She whispered. A shiver ran down her spine as she thought about what would happen if Mr Andrews saw that her wounds had been treated the next time he saw her. "Thank you Sir, but I can't." She closed her eyes as a wave of tiredness washed over her, but quickly shook her head and forced herself alertness again.

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Acknowledging her sympathy - and empathy - with a dip of his head, Lee followed his usual tactic of ignoring his emotions and focused on the present, where he was having to deal with a fifteen year old girl who appeared to be being both physically and mentally abused by her 'social worker'. And, understandably, was rather reluctant to point any fingers, or admit to anything. Lee was as familiar as any cynic with the corruption in the system and, generally inclined to think negatively of humanity as a whole, could quite see Cara's point in not wanting to change her current status quo, on the basis that whatever could come along next could be worse.

Understanding her position, however, wasn't quite the same as agreeing with it. It was unlikely, though, that after only a few meetings and in these particular circumstances that he was going to fundamentally change Cara's mind about, well, anything really, especially her current lot in life. Therefore, he settled himself with damage control: he was assuming Cara didn't want medical treatment because she was worried about repercussions (though, surely, this social worker would presumably be rather annoyed if she died from infection of whatever injuries she did have, but that possibly wasn't the best point to bring up now).

"At least let me give you something to kill the pain." He quirked what was almost a smile. "I have some pretty decent painkillers," acquired almost legally from a slightly less than scrupulous pharmacist, "Which will at least mean you're not flinching for the next few days, which can only be a good thing." He paused, debated internally for a moment, then stopped there. He didn't want to go too far, feeling that dealing with Cara was remarkably like dealing with a mistreated, nervy horse - push too hard, and you lost everything that you'd achieved.

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Cara's eyes drifted closed again and her mind was drifting off as sleep embraced her. However, one flash of faces in her mind's eye caused the girl to sit up straight with a sharp breath as she shook her head again to wake herself up. She glanced toward Lee who was saying something about painkillers. "No thank you." She said, for the first time that night there was confidence in her voice as she declined his offer. She'd been an athlete for long enough to know the damage that painkillers could do to a person's system even while they were helping rid the pain. They never actually got rid of the pain anyway, they just covered it up with fluffy feelings. This was the main reason she had trained herself to ignore pain - that and the fact that every coach she'd had loved the words work through the pain.

She flinched as she felt Phoenix's breath on her neck again. She had obviously concerned the mare with her movement before. She gathered the neckline of her jacket and pulled it closed so that there was no gap between it and the back of her neck. Pain spread across her back as the uneven fabric on the inside of the jacket touched the wounds on her back and she bit down on her lower lip until she tasted blood. "You should make peace with your mother. Blood is thicker than water and all that." She said softly, moving back to his tale, as made a shooing motion with her fingers and the mare backed up a few steps - as asked - and lowered herself onto the ground behind the girl. "Take it from someone who caused the death of her parents."