allthatgoes | AU: Le Fantôme du Burlesque, Part II

Rating: PG
Word Count: 1,871
Pairing: Cary/Iz
Summary: Cary's dead. Isabella isn't. Neither can quite move on, in very different ways.
Notes: Okay, so when I thought it was going to be two one-and-a-half-thousand word parts, I was wrong; it's actually three or four, because this part felt finished and it got longer than I was expecting.

le fantôme du burlesque, part ii

Time passed.

Weeks, months. Maybe even years. It didn't matter. Time passed. Time passed and the ghost who was once the man who was once Detective Inspector Cary Vaughn-Blair didn't care one bit. He was someone else now. Someone dead but there. Sort of there. Sort of.

He had a few friends, all of them dead as much as he; they didn't talk about it, though. Being dead. Haunting a place. Not things anyone would talk about. They didn't even really talk about much - didn't really talk at all. What the others were doing never concerned him all that much. The only thing that concerned him was her.

His Isabella. His beloved Iz. He wondered sometimes if she had forgotten him, now that she wasn't seeing him anymore. Not just romantically seeing but literally - unless she reallywas hallucinating he didn't think she was seeing anything of him, except maybe a photograph or two.

(Or fifteen. Isabella had fifteen photographs of him, some with her, some with other people, some alone, in frames in her office. He didn't know that, though. He never went in there. It was her space and she had told him to go away.)

But he saw her, when she went by out on the floor, when she interacted with her employees and her audience. She never came too close to him (to them, to the dead, but mostly to him, because when it came to her he never care about the others anyway) or to his corner table, but it seemed as if she might've somehow known he was there. She avoided that table. She did and everyone else did; it was his table, or at least his chair when the tables weren't out, where he sat on the main floor of the Burlesk House day and night and watched the people come and go and thought. Thought and thought and wondered how he got there. Wondered how he'd let this happen. Wondered how long he'd been dead, and why he didn't walk away from Isabella to go see his family. Why he was just staying there.

It wasn't as if it wasn't a good show.

But there wasn't one on constantly and he never watched the show. Only her. Only ever her and when he remembered to feel anything at all, he felt somewhat like a stalker. A stalker who'd died and still couldn't let go – that didn't make it okay, what he was doing.

And then she'd come by his seat – seat, though he could've had a box, because a table was a lot less creepy inside the parts of his mind that still worked – and he'd forget everything except the fact that he needed to be near her, dead or alive.

* * *

"Iz, you have a problem."

Isabella turned, suddenly; she hadn't expected the man in that particular box to speak. He very rarely ever did. He sulked there behind his coat and didn't ever take out his camera, despite the fact everyone knew he had it. Or at least Isabella knew he had it, and a few others had seen it, and a few others still could assume it was there. To be attentive to detail, he wasn't really just a man, either – or at all a man, if one were to ask him. He was frequently there and almost always silent.

Until the odd moment when he would speak suddenly and make his idea very, very clear to anyone nearby.

This time, it was just Isabella, and she was grateful. He would say some strange things sometimes.

She hadn't expected it to be quite this strange.

"I do?" she asked, quickly. A bit nervous. What was this problem he was talking about? What had he found that was going on, illicit, behind her doors that she didn't approve of? What important official was cheating on his wife? What massive crime was being hidden? Her friend – and he was her friend, despite whatever relationship he had with her mother, which she didn her best not to think about and pretended when he would go to Tory Island for weeks on end that he was simply working elsewhere – had a tendency to find these things, though less of a tendency to share than others she knew, and Guidry didn't often stop in. When she did she left her notebooks and cameras behind.

"Yes." Typically, he didn't elaborate. Nobody had yet asked him to.

"And what is it?" she demanded, sounding harried.

"Well." Dragomir Petrescu leaned over the box, arms folded on the edge of it, smiling crookedly, hair falling into his eyes. "The place being haunted, I think, is beginning to have a hand in the mood."

Isabella stared at him.

What was he talking about, haunted?

"It's not haunted," she insisted. "No one's died here. There's no reason for it to be haunted – do you see any ghosts?"

She hoped he would say no, and he did say no; he shook his head, clicking his tongue a bit. "I do not. But I think I know that they are there. They have a temptation to them the same as any other soul, but different. Very different. In my years I've learned to tell."

"Learned to tell," Isabella repeated. Learned to tell that a place was haunted – why would her club be haunted? What brought ghosts there? What was she supposed to do about it? "Why are you telling me this?"

"Be careful not to make them angry."

Isabella was just more lost. "How would I make them angry?"

"That young fellow you've been seeing –"

"I haven't been seeing anyone!" She was having a lot of sex with a lot of people. It had been a year since Cary's death and she needed it. Not love, not anything like that, but just empty sex for the feel of it, for the feel of something to keep her alive. She'd told her family she would stay and she had things to stay for and she did stay, and it didn't stop the physical need (and the psychological needs that went with it – men worshipped the ground she walked on and always would, and it felt good to know she could still do it). In order to stay, she acted like herself. Toyed with men. That was what she did, and why would Cary's ghost mind?

Cary's ghost? Where had she gotten that?

"You've kept a few of them around," Dragomir said diplomatically. "Simply do not let him see."

"Him?"

"The Inspector. It does make sense, does it not?"

"No! He's dead!" He was dead and he was gone, because he'd never been a ghost, never haunting her – ghosts haunted places, not people. You couldn't haunt a person. That had been a hallucination, and she had told it to go away after being plagued by it for weeks – and it had. Would most hallucinations just leave when you told them to? Maybe it had been his ghost – and she'd told him to go away! Why had he gone away?

"As are most ghosts," Dragomir pointed out, breaking her train of thought.

Isabella swallowed hard. "Well," she said stiffly.

"What?"

She had no idea. "I don't know," she admitted.

* * *

He saw them, sometimes. She'd tried to hide it but he'd see them. The way she just let people touch her, the way she had before, back when they were just a fling all those years ago – she'd let anyone touch her just to get the feeling of it. He knew she liked that, because she liked to feel something, and sex was very intense with her. For both parties. He couldn't begrudge anyone the desire for her, and he couldn't even, when he was thinking clearly, be upset with her for wanting to move on, at least physically.

But he didn't have a concept of time, and didn't know how long it had been. It wasn't clear. What if it had only been two weeks, and she had simply disregarded him?

Hadn't she loved him enough?

Cary was losing control. Slowly, but he was. He'd managed to be unseen, somehow, unseen simply by thinking about it or because that was the way the magic in the air wanted to swing him, he didn't know. He'd never learned much about magic. Nicole had been curious how it worked; he simply accepted it. Maybe he should've learned more before he'd learned he had to die. Maybe that would've helped.

He'd learned she could've made him immortal and didn't. He'd learned that much. In life, he hadn't gotten angry about it, he'd accepted it – why had he done that? Just to let her move on to being a common slut again? What was wrong with her, what was –

– what was wrong with him, he thought, because he was getting angry.

He'd seen another man kiss her neck the way he did, right there, after hours. Some man he didn't even recognize. Some man he didn't know or want to know and he just wanted him gone and that was when the hanging lamp had fallen, manifest of his own anger, even if he didn't know that better than he had anything else. The man had started, and Isabella had screamed, and Cary wanted to whisper shh, I didn't mean to scare you into her ear (he didn't mean to scare her he just wanted that other man to go away because she was his and how was that so hard to understand?) but he couldn't because she'd told him to go away.

He just kept getting angry suddenly. Kept feeling things strong enough to make things like that happen. Hanging lights fell. Chairs moved. Electricity turned on and off. Random things that shouldn't have been magnetized became temporary magnets and attracted anything in their orbit.

What was he, some kind of poltergeist?

And he was scaring her.

He was scaring her. That would never do. He'd have to come up with some way to fix it, some way to talk to her – but she'd told him to go away! She'd told him to go away. He couldn't. He should really go away, leave her club alone, stop plaguing it with his presence. He was causing problems. How long had he been causing problems? He had only just begun to notice them. He had only just begun to notice all the other ghosts were gone; maybe they had been creations of his mind, to keep him company, and suddenly he wasn't paying attention anymore. He was only paying attention to Isabella, because she'd moved on.

Did that mean it was time for him to? Where was he going to go? Where could he go, how could he go away from her?

There was only one answer.