Work Text:
People tell stories about a Golden City in the clouds, a singing city, a place where a person can find whatever their heart desires. The keeper of the city is a patchwork woman, corpse-pale and ghost-quiet, who walks the rooftops and punishes the greedy.
No one knows what the woman desires. Still, some people say that she's waiting for her lost love, Sinclair.
They also say that Sinclair is a girl of staggering beauty, with an ass like a peach and legs up to here.
In most of the stories, the patchwork woman will wait for centuries, until the city crumbles and she dies. As her life fades, she will have one last vision of Sinclair standing before her, a dainty hand held out to take her to the next life.
But that's complete crap.
What'll happen is this:
One day, Christine will be sitting in a watchtower with her rifle, keeping an ear out for the perimeter alarm while she re-reads the notes she's made on the feeding habits of the locals. The watchtower contains a small computer terminal, and its screen will start flashing. Christine will notice this and discover that the security system in the Medical District has been switched off. She'll panic for 0.2 seconds, then check the log.
And one of the lines in the log will be: STATUS: MEDICAL DISTRICT OFFLINE 09/22/85 18:31 USER: imveronicadontshootme
And Christine will re-read it, then re-read it again, and want to throw up.
She'll get halfway down the ladder before she'll wonder if the isolation has finally made her crack. Or it could be one of Elijah's tricks. That might be worse.
Then she'll decide that she doesn't care.
And she won't walk across the rooftops, she'll run, and the Ghost People will scamper out of her way.
Sure, when she finds Veronica, there'll be distrust and even fear. They'll be strangers to each other. But during the time it takes for Christine to sprint towards the Medical District, none of that will matter. The last decade will be made irrelevant.
Running through a malevolent holiday resort isn't quite the same as running through a meadow full of butterflies, but you take what you can get.
The universe will open its hands and grudgingly offer the chance of a happy ending, and Christine won't be so beaten-down that she'll reject it.