‘ SOUTHERN GOTHIC ’
@excop asked: 💀 + 1 // maggie ( @fervs ) / there’s an old mansion that’s been empty for years, but the master bedroom light is always on when you drive by at night. our muses investigate.
National City had always been brimming with strangeness. Alex’s entire life, much like Maggie’s, was steeped in the extraterrestrial, in the covert and everlasting cohabitation with alienkind, in the pursuit of justice and peace for humans and non-humans alike. The DEO’s mission meant that delving into the alien underworld was in Alex’s blood as much as her choice of whiskey; It meant combating the very anti-alien and human insurgences of terrorism that snaked through town with the same quiet, intangible persistence as the glimmer of the city’s towering, sleepless skyline.
A lonesome light blazing in an abandoned manor’s upstairs window shouldn’t have seemed quite so odd in comparison, but Alex had fleetingly noticed it before, on nights that’d required her to take her Ducati or one of the DEO’s SUVs out toward the waterfront. That it’d always been the same window, always the same inconsistently eerie blink of yellowing light. That from appearances alone, the rest of the building had seemingly fallen into disrepair, its decaying exterior closed off to the barren land around it with enough nth metal razor wire to carve a dominator army into shreds.
No one could have passed its chained up gates in years, and yet...
“ You’re seeing that, right? ” Alex inquired, her timbre no louder than the rumble of Maggie’s car, laced with about as much wonder as trepidation.
Hand bracing the bend of Maggie’s wrist, the other reaching for the bag she’d stowed in the footwell, she reached for the safety-latched grip of her DEO issue sidearm. After everything she’d seen at Cadmus’ abandoned headquarters, after everything she’d unearthed --- she couldn’t be sure that this was nothing.
With a huff of breath through her nose, a sharp, albeit evanescent nip of teeth biting into the inside of her glossed lower lip, Alex cast Maggie a look that fell somewhere between vaguely guilty and overcome. Had they stayed home, stayed away from whatever deigned to exist out here beyond the National City’s foundry and warehouse district, maybe she wouldn’t have tempted fate. Maybe one night of peace with her girlfriend wouldn’t have seemed so out of reach. “ This is what I get for carrying on date night. ”
