Title: Southern Gothic
Act I: Blood - Scene I
Fandom: X-Men: Evolution
Author: Carmine LaCroix
Summary: A love story. A haunting. A story of survival against all odds.
Rating: Teen
Pairing: Rogue/Remy
Warnings: AU

Southern Gothic
Act I. Blood – Scene I
New Orleans, Louisiana, Present Day
...

"The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? Any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person's nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell."

(Truman Capote. Other Voices, Other Rooms)

Danse, Calinda, danse.

You can shut your eyes against it, fist your hands against your heart to try to still its march, but if there's one thing I've learned, it's that the gumbo ya-ya comes at you in a clatter, with every voice tryin' ta outdo the next.

It's so easy ta get swept away in the pace that hearsay sets; easier, after a time, ta follow the jangle of sound to the places we'd like ta forget if we could. Rarer still than try, we sometimes do… until we come back, that is. Well. Easier for others; some of us have never left.

Boudoum. Boudoum.

One thing I can tell ya, surer than anything I've ever set myself to before, is that everyone takes their mind and their opinion 'round here as fact while the words in all their embellishments still hold to their skulls. Only a few of us have memories that reach that far back, so watch yourself, sugah; when the sickness is catchin' it'll have you like yellow fever if you let it – all that talkin' without sayin' anything about the seed of truth buried at the heart of the matter.

Danse, Calinda, danse.

Tell you one thing, before some old woman tries ta do my reputation in – not that there's much left ta be done to it – I wouldn't trade my ghosts for nothin'. Only one story really matters to those who know it enough to call it their own, and it begins with a simple declaration:

I have danced to the drums of Congo Square.

Boudoum. Boudoum.

- New Orleans, Louisiana, 1822 -

There is a pomegranate tree in the courtyard that spills over the small, ornamental fountain visible from the porte-cochère and Rue Royal beyond. Under its orange blooms, she sits on a bricked bench, breathing deeply through her nose, and exhaling out her mouth. If she were to incline her head, looking past the trunk of the fig tree, and the enormous cluster of ferns and banana plants choking the flags, and if she were to lean an indecent two inches two her left, and arch her back just so – she would catch the eye of one of the young men dallying on the corner of St. Louis opposite.

The scandal would surely alert Mama before the boys took to climbing the gateway bars, she thinks…

Like they did last time.

With the fountain burbling black and silver water, its lion's head spout spitting an uninterrupted stream that tastes vaguely of copper, she remains motionless, watching the last of the sinking purple twilight above the gables that wall her in with the sweetly scented honeysuckle. The bricks are still warm beneath her palms, though she can not yet safely take off her gloves – not before she can smell the jessamine as it blooms.

It's a measure of her condition; albeit, one of the more pleasant ones – the condition that seems more like a curse: she should remained covered at all times, and shielded from the harsh light of the sun due to an incurable "weakness" of the skin, according to Mama's physician. For fear of contagion, she's been garrisoned indoors and out of harm's way. It's been over a twenty years since the city's last smallpox outbreak, and though her ailment has no relation to the disease that sent nearly six hundred to the hereafter, Mama takes no chances.

Subsequently, Anna Marie Darkholme has not seen past the rooftops of the surrounding buildings in six years.

The good doctor is hardly a doctor at all to have prescribed her such a torment, she tells herself glumly, though she won't readily declare that the company Mama keeps isn't proper. She'd likely find herself fixed for the trouble; her footsteps peppered with goofer dust or a bottle of war water smashed against the banquette before the front door. Anna plucks irritably at her gloves – fine things, they are – French instruments of entrapment meant as signs of her resistance. Everything in the house these days is French, she thinks with some resentment. It's Mama's show of solidarity; a spit into the face of the Americans who look at the Creoles and the Acadians and the Houma Indians and the slaves from Santo Domingo and say the same ugly things about them all. Nevermind that Mama is quadroon; it is the meaning behind the insult that fosters retaliation, she'd say.

But to what purpose must a young lady cover herself from chin to toe in the finest imported fashions when the temperatures in the shade reach that of a bread oven?

Surely, it does more harm than good to keep her secluded like this. There are such interesting things beyond the bars of her prison, too…

Anna shifts over an inch, her skirts brushing the ginger plant. The boys in the street holler to each other, spying a glimpse of her through the foliage. They make it a game, calling enticements to draw a little nearer; to catch a little more of her pallor through the waxen leaves. Guardedly, Anna casts a glance to the windows of the second floor where the lamps have been lit for Mama's arrival from her daily calls around the city.

She gives a start, jerking backwards in surprise.

A stern face looks down on her; lips pursed and eyebrows furrowed in a cocoa-coloured face. Forearms the size of ham hocks are pressed to bursting on the sill. "Whacha doin' down there, Miss Anna?" Mathilde calls, her voice ringing against the walls.

She glowers, forcing a smile for the servant's benefit.

"Takin' some air?" she ventures, commanding herself to not look to the street. Flapping at her skirts and resettling them about her legs distracts her; it keeps her from pointing out the misstep with her gaze. The hollering has tapered off some, but a curious sensation has taken up residence at the periphery of her awareness. It's unsettling, like one of the boys on the Rue Royal has drawn close enough to spy on her through the par terre garden's greenery.

"You know Mam'zelle don't appreciate you lurkin' about 'fore full dark, Miss. If you don't mind my sayin'."

"Thank you for your concern, Mathilde," she says drily.

"An' if the missus comes home and catches y' there, so close to indignity like y' are? Then what?" she presses, and Anna feels her patience fraying.

"It's a street, Mattie," she says hotly. "There's nothin' indecent about lookin', is there?"

"Not unless them boys are lookin' back at you."

The nerve! Glaring, Anna tears off her gloves, flinging them into the waxy green canopy behind her with a defiant flourish.

The skin of her hands tingles faintly – partly from the rush of power in such a small gesture, and partly from feeling the cooling air, fresh between her fingers.

"And what would be so wrong with that?" she hisses. "They're here. They're always here. I hear them call ta me, day and night, and I can't even say hello?"

Mathilde shakes her head sadly. "Chile." It's not her place to offer comfort, just as its not her place to reprimand, but that one word carries the agreement that the old woman thinks her circumstances are just as unfair as Anna imagines. It's far too dangerous to draw too near to anyone, lest her affliction befall them, she knows, but that knowledge doesn't smother the loneliness.

"Go back t' work. Leave me be."

"Sweet chile," she implores, her soulful voice a hymn to the night. The harmony in her deep-bellied rasp splintered with the knowledge of similar hardships. "There ain't no use in dwelling on dreams that aren't t' be."

Seated where she is, when Mama arrives, Anna will be just missed from the side entrance. No self-respecting Creole of any standing would be seen using the front door, not unless they were trying to hawk something on the American side of town.

"No use in tryin' Mam'zelle's goodwill neither." The implied threat is marked in her tone. Mama won't be pleased with her, trying to stir the boys up. They'll scatter, of course, if they were to see her coming, but Anna herself has no means of escape.

Mathilde has disappeared into the house in preparation, no doubt, for the arrival of the mistress from her daily social calls around the city. Anna, alone in the garden, her fingers twisted together in her lap, can only imagine the things waiting for her out there. She swallows a bitter sigh, and imagines instead her escape into the Quarter where she could easily be lost; where she could easily savour a few moments freedom before suffering an early, disgraced death as punishment for transgressions against her mother's wishes.

There is a chain and a heavy padlock binding the bars of the porte-cochère, but her entrapment stretches beyond the physical world and into the fading light. In truth, it's more than simple smithwork that holds her back; no one holds the title of 'Queen' among the Voudous without warrant, without winning it from their precursor.

Such victories can be dear, indeed.

It's not prudent to be overzealous when attempting truancy, least of all when it's said in hushed tones and under whispered breath in darkened corners amongst the servants that Mam'zelle Raven holds her title through making sacrifice of the Goat Without Horns.

It makes her skin prickle. It's too gruesome to conceive of, so the mind distends the reality around it; making it easier for Anna to think of it as a detestable pastime among the slaves to take delight in retelling such horrors to amuse themselves at Mama's expense. They speak in cautious, foreboding tones of the times when Mam'zelle sets herself to preparing her gumbo – a fish stew that she feeds only to her enemies that leaves them taken over with a deathlike slumber. There is talk of the altars around the Rue Royal house, set with candles prayed upon to Saints masking the heathen gods of Santo Domingo, and there are cautious words exchanged when the servants are unmindful of their hair and nail clippings. They say the Mam'zelle keeps an enormous serpent in her rooms, but this Anna knows to be untrue – Mam'zelle Raven keeps only her.

Mama neither confirms nor denies these rumours: allowing the myth to precede her. Such things give a person power, when enough people believe.

It's a flawless strategy, and even Anna has never dared to defy her to find out how much of it is mortared by fact.

Doubtless, much of the same is said about her, and perhaps its that same morbid curiosity that draws the boys to the street below her rooms each evening. She tries not to think on it too long. This cheapens the mystique of the world beyond the walls, knowing that they fear the illusions cast by her mother as much as they are tempted to see for themselves if any of the whispers about Mam'zelle Raven's girl are true. Anna is no fool, but it hurts less pretending that they are merely inquisitive. All she could ever desire is to know she would be met by their friendship, were she ever to leave this place.

Wetting her lips, she looks longingly to the street beyond the carriage gates – expecting either the nearing clop of mule hooves and the clatter of Mam'zelle Raven's carriage, or to drop dead of ennui. Whichever comes first.

What she discovers instead is something she can't be certain of; it's a shadow, certainly, or a trick of the twilight mingling with the dappled shade:

A boy is leaning against the locked gate, a wide-brimmed hat pulled low over his eyes.

He is inside the carriageway.

She turns away, her head snapping back just as quickly and finding there is nothing there but the trunk of an old, hacked-down, dying wisteria propped against the outdoor stairs.

Startled, Anna stands, her instincts telling her to run though the outdoor kitchen and back into the house, to scream for Mattie. Without the lamps lit, its easy to imagine shapes out of the darkness, and easier still to cloak oneself with their concealing shade. Furtively, she looks to the second floor; oblong slats of light fall through the opened doors of the upper gallery.

There is no one but her outside, and gradually, her breathing slows when she realizes she has startled herself.

No one would be foolish enough to breach these walls. Who would risk themselves?

As if in response, a whisper of the night breeze rolls through the courtyard, brushing the leaves back and forth and raising the down on the back of her neck. A fine, dewy sheen of perspiration blooms where it touches the small patch of bare skin between her collar and tignon, like the moist breath of a lover.

Slowly, Anna sinks into her seat, her pulse thrumming.

She is alone, she assures herself, but for a moment, she could swear that she has felt the light press of a mouth against her throat.

Post Script:

I would like, at this point, to extend my sincerest gratitude to the following individuals who reviewed the prelude: vikingprincess, jutwfiniei, baruchan, Anna-x11, enchantedlight, GothikStrawberry, Wiked Witch, Verre, Glyth, Zimo, allyg1990, Wiccamage, Elirrina, gambitfan85, Rae Rihanna, LithiumAddict, ishandahalf, and l'etoile du tricherie. In most cases, I've attempted to respond directly, but in the case that I've failed in that, please know that it is much appreciated that you've taken the time to leave a few encouraging words in your wake. It's at this point that I entreat you to do so again, thereby encouraging the writer in question to not fling herself from the nearest rooftop in a fit of despair. Ahem. Now, if you'll all excuse me, Loo Loo needs tending to. The last time I saw her, she was making a concentrated attempt at killing Etienne Marceaux and developing a guilt complex in the process. It's rather amusing. Really