To All Those Brave and Lovely

the angels are falling

This one goes out to abeautifulmind, who over the past few days has voted on almost every chapter in here and made me smile with each vote. Thanks for reading!

"I'm sorry." She was still stuck in that same room with Tony. Nora was sitting in the window seat, staring out over the dark lawn, at the crumbling statues that loom out of the grass like monsters and the fountain that had coins glittering at the bottom, towards the tree line that seperated them from the rest of the world.

There was a fence there, hidden somewhere a mile away. It's on all sides, caging them in. The only way to open them up is with a remote, and it's all buzzing with electricity. Janus had taken her out on them her first day there, to the very edge. He made her hold her fingers an inch away so she could feel the buzz, have the hairs on her arm stand up from all the energy. And he showed her the animals that had tried to cross, too, their bodies burned and rotting on the ground where they fell.

(There had been so many. Birds, bunnies, deer, and even a dog, a spot of darkness in all this expensive beauty.)

The dirt had stained the trail of her dress. Nora's been wearing ball gowns and expensive suits since she got here, and every day a girl comes in to do her hair and make up, thanks to Janus' decree that she was going to be treated only as a most honored guests, except for the fact that she can never leave. Nora can still see the dress she wore to the fence, crumpled up on the floor beside the bed where it had fallen when she tore it off, a reminder of what was waiting if she tried to escape.

"I was so stupid." Tony doesn't respond, just keeps working at picking the lock, biting his lip between his teeth. "I thought I could come here, and bust us out. That everything would be okay."

Nora just kept talking. it was the only thing left for the two of them to do, talk in order to keep themselves sane. As far as Nora knew, Tony hadn't left this room since the first day, but Janus comes for her sometimes, just to talk to her.

"I guess I got used to being around heroes." The hair pin in Tony's hand broke, and he cursed, loud and angry. "Thought I could be one, too."

"Don't worry." Tony looked over at her from his spot on the floor, holding the broken pin in his bleeding hands. "I'll get you out of here. I'll make sure of it."

that's what I had thought, too. But there's no way out of here.

Janus calls her for dinner.

She's in a gown that sweeps the floor, and it makes her lean on him to help her down the stairs. Janus likes to have her dressed up, like she's a doll for him to use any way he wants.

But that's not quite right. Most of the time, when he takes her out of her room and shows her some aspect of the house (the dining room, the lawn, the library, the ball room), it's like he's lonely, looking for a friend, even if that friend is one that has to be there. He's perfectly polite, and the one time that Nora had let herself get so angry she slapped him, he didn't yell or hurt her back. He just blinked, and told her he really was sorry that they had the unforutnate aspect of the kidnapping between them, and asked the housekeeper lurking in the shadows to take her back to her room.

If things were different, or if Nora was especially sick of being on her guard all the time, she can even pretend that they were friends.

"Tell you what." Janus set down his fork and smiled at her. He'd finally stopped only letting her see the one side of his face. Before, he would always walk on the left side of her, so she would see the part of him not marred by the scar. Now, though, he would look at her straight on. "You want to leave. I want you to like me."