A/N: Hi, everyone! This isn't my first time at the fanfiction rodeo, but I haven't written anything for years. So I decided to turn over a new leaf, get a new account and a new fandom, and write this story because I can't get it out of my head. There will be Cade, and maybe some Tandre, so, yeah, make sure you at least like those ships. Also rating will probably go up in later chapters, etc., etc. But you aren't even reading this anyway, so why am I still typing?

Tori is the first friend Cat has at the asylum. Tori is nice and Tori is safe and Tori's not even crazy, just depressed and broken and confused. When she talks about the accident that brought her here, she doesn't sound sad, she sounds normal. Cat is pretty sure that this is why she's in an asylum to begin with, because people who are alright cry and scream about their feelings, which Tori can't seem to do. But Tori will learn how to do this, Cat knows, because the doctors always talk to her like she has a future on the outside of the white walls, the brick. They don't talk to Cat that way, and they don't talk to anyone else like that, either. There's a difference between trauma and crazy, is what they think, and they think Cat's crazy. Cat's not crazy, for the record, she's just a little out there. Nothing about her is uncontrollable or dangerous, not like her brother – her mother described her at the intake session as a carton of milk that's one day past its expiration date, that's alright to drink but it's not quite what you want or expect. Cat knows that she's not even here because her parents think she's lost her mind, since they don't think that. They know what it's like to see that happen to someone. When Cat's brother came back from Germany he stopped being her brother and started being someone else. He took his gun outside and woke the whole neighborhood up with his target practice before even the fishermen had gotten up for work. He never smiled at Cat, or anyone else, and liked to listen radio plays based on H.P. Lovecraft's stories. He told Cat he loved her, and every time he said it he made it sound like this would be the last time. So one time their parents forced him into saying it the last time and they took him away – or, really, they let other people take him away. He didn't protest much, he just kept saying that they had better have the radio wherever he was going, they had better have the radio. Cat's only here because her parents didn't know what else to do after Colin left (always left, never taken, and never, ever gone), and catching her in her room with another girl's hand between her legs was a good enough way to dispose of her as well. Cat thinks that her parents probably pretend that they didn't have any kids at all, ever, like their lives have turned out alright. Maybe they've taken down all the pictures in the house of Colin and Cat, cleared out their rooms for the space they've always wanted – a drafting room for father the architect, a crafts room for mother the community organizer. They were always better with other people's kids than their own.

But Tori. Cat thinks Tori's family was probably pretty normal before they died, or else Tori wouldn't miss them so much. She sits in their room at night and sings the notes of a song over and over again. She says that there are words, but that she's forgotten them. Cat knows this a lie, yet it doesn't bother her. People are always lying, in here, especially to her.

"What are you going to do when you get out?" Tori asks one evening. There's pink light coming in through their window, the bars surrounding it making funny shadows on the hard floor. Cat thinks it's silly that they have hard floors when they're so careful about everything else – it wouldn't be hard, if you were determined enough, to bash your head on it so hard that you'd stop thinking at all.

"I'm not going to get out," Cat says.

Tori frowns. "Why not?"

"Because I'm not the kind of person you can cure."
This gets her to pause for a moment, looking down at her hands. Cat knows she's searching, searching for a loophole. "Well, what was it that got you here in the first place? What happened to you?"

"Nothing happened to me. I was just born wrong, that's all." Cat shrugs. She lies down on her bed and curls up as tightly as she can. "You had a bad thing happen to you, and you have to get better. I never had anything bad happen to me, so I can't get better."

Tori stares and stares and keeps staring, long after Cat has stopped watching her. "What do they think is wrong with you?"

"They think I'm too stupid and too weird," Cat says. She leaves out what really brought her here – Tori's normal, and something like this might bother her. "Maybe you can help me be how they want me to be."

"Yeah, OK, I'll try." It's all the same tone, everything Tori says, the whole time.

Tori first mentions the train on one of their afternoons outside. Cat likes these, because she likes flowers and sunlight and plucking berries straight off the vine to eat. She has to be careful about this last one, because the nurses and the orderlies don't like when that happens. Together they're sitting on a bench, each working on something. The orderlies let Cat knit, because she's proven that she won't stab herself to death with one of the plastic needles. Tori looks over the scraps of family photographs she keeps tucked in the pages of a notebook filled with big, loopy handwriting. Cat knows that Tori writes in small, precise letters, so she figures the notebook belonged to Trina, Tori's sister.

"Have you ever heard of the Crescent Express?" Tori asks.

"No. What is it?" Cat has been knitting socks for the past three months – not one pair, but many pairs. She likes making them for the other patients.

Tori fidgets, shuffling through the photos. "I'm not really sure. It's a train. It goes to somewhere called Crescent Hill Manor."

"I've never heard of that either."

"Oh." Tori goes back her pictures, back to beaches and Christmases and sing-alongs by a fire. Cat thinks her family might have been like that, once, but she doesn't remember it much.

The ticket is on Tori's bedside table while she's in the shower. It's another day, after they've been gardening. Whenever they're allowed to garden Cat lets herself stay dirty, ruins her sheets. The nurses say fine, if she doesn't mind sleeping on muddy sheets until the next washing. Cat tells them she doesn't, and until they do laundry again she will wake up with dark smudges on her face and her forearms and her legs.

It's almost like Tori wants her to find it, so obvious there on top of what Cat is now certain is Trina's diary. The ticket is normal-sized, stapled to sheets of paper, but it's a deep red, almost like blood but if blood were pleasant to look at, with white lettering stamped onto it. The paper is the regular off-white Cat's accustomed to seeing, seeing doctor's do their dirty work on and tacked up to the bulletin board listing names of people who missed phone calls from home.

"Crescent Express: Admit One," it reads. Under the destination header, the words "Crescent Hill Manor" are printed. The date is in three days – "Friday, October 2, 1947, 10:24 PM." The departure field is left blank. Cat thinks this is stupid – how is anyone supposed to know where to get on the train? Maybe that's why there's so much paper, there was a problem and they couldn't get the information on the ticket itself.

Cat picks up the paper, peels back the ticket so she can read what's printed. The first page is a letter, an invitation of sorts. It's advertising a party at Crescent Hill Manor, promising a party "like nothing you've ever seen." There will be contests, it says, and prizes for the winners. Prizes "like nothing you could ever imagine." Cat laughs at this, because the doctors are always telling her that she has an active imagination, and she's sure that there's none of those prizes that she couldn't guess. She can't even think of a prize that she wants, right now. Prizes come with prices, that much Cat knows.

The next page is a list of instructions on how to get on the train. It's a short list. All it tells you to go to a train station, alone – the ticket will only work for one person, and one person only. Wave the ticket in the wind. The train will come. The ticket is good for one ride and one ride only, but there will always be tickets at the manor for those who ask.

"Where did it come from?" Cat has the ticket sitting on her lap, the paper sagging between her thighs in her criss-cross applesauce position.

Tori doesn't even need to look at Cat to figure out what she's talking about. "I found it by the road. After the accident." Steady voice, even her small fingers don't tremble as she folds them on her lap. "I showed it to the police, but they thought it meant nothing. They didn't even want to take it to the station with them. So I kept it. You saw the date?" Cat nods. "It's stupid, anyway. It's not real."

"My brother went to a train station by himself once," Cat says. "He sat on the bench in a lion suit for three hours and roared at people."

Emotion flounders across Tori's face, just for a little bit, and one Cat can't even identify, but it's there. "Well, it's not real. I'm not going."

"OK." To Cat this is the end of the discussion. She puts the ticket on her bedside table and rolls onto her side, closes her eyes. Sometimes she sucks her thumb to make herself feel better, but she's been doing it less and less with Tori around.

"I mean, we couldn't even sneak out..."
"Yes, you can," Cat tells her. "The girl who was here before you was really smart and she figured out how to get the bars off the window."

"We're on the second floor."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

There it was again, something flowing across Tori's face barely long enough for Cat to register it. "Nothing. Just that, well, we can't jump from the second floor."

"Oh." Cat smooths out the edges of her blanket and picks at them with her nails. "The girl before you used to tie together our blankets and go down. I was always cold, but she yelled at me, so I had to hide under the bed."

Tori hesitates, hitches her breath a couple of times before she can let words follow. "Would you come with me, if I went?"

"I thought you didn't believe in it."

"Didn't you read the letter?" Tori settles into her own bed now, and their conversation pauses for a moment as the stony steps of the orderly pass by. A click, and Tori and Cat are locked in for the night.

When Cat speaks again, it's a whisper. "Yes."

"And you don't care about it at all?" Tori is on her back – Tori always sleeps on her back. The doctors tell Cat that women sleep on their backs, only children and deviants sleep on their stomachs or their sides. Cat thinks it's funny that they think she's both of those things, an innocent child and a sinful deviant. They can't decide.

"I don't want any prizes."

"You don't even know what they are."
"I know I don't want them!" Cat raises her voice, just a little. She's never been good at being forceful; it always turns whiny and she usually starts to cry if she has to keep it up for too long.

Tori lets them both stew in the silence, waits until she hears Cat's breathing return to normal. "OK, OK. Maybe I do." Her voice cracks on the last word.

"For your parents. And your sister."

"They left." Left, like Colin, not taken and not gone. "I want them back."

"Aren't they dead?" Cat scrunches up her nose in the dark, trying to remember all she knows of Tori's story. A lonesome bridge in the middle of the night, a rainy night. A car that hit a puddle too fast at the wrong angle, spun out and smashed into the side of the bridge. Flipped over it, landed on the sand, thank god. In the water, and there would be no survivors instead of one. Cat thinks that Tori mentioned in a group session once that they were heading back late from her grandparents' house because her father had an important business meeting the next morning. "Tori? They're dead, right?"

"They left."

Cat is spread-eagle on the floor of the common room during free time. She makes chugga-chugga-chugga train noises with her wet lips and watches Marge's ankles twitching in front of her. Marge is alright most days, only sometimes she thinks there are people who come to her room at night and put their hands over her mouth so she can't scream. Then they leave. During free time she stands in the corner with a phone cord wriggled around her wrist, muttering to her daughter, or she does what she's doing now, sitting on the couch as Bethany teaches her how to cross-stitch. Bethany is only 24, just six years older than Cat, and everyone calls her Nurse Bethany except Cat, who she lets call her just regular "Bethany." Sometimes Cat dreams about her, the naughty dreams that make her blush if she thinks about them too long. She wishes she didn't have these dreams, then she would be OK. If Cat looks at the floor all day and fills her head with thoughts of boys' chests and hands, she doesn't mind so much. It's the dreams that remind her of what she's missing.

Soon enough Tori comes over from the phone, though she won't say who she's been talking to. Cat thinks it's probably her grandparents or an aunt or an uncle or something; friends almost never bother calling. "Was it your boyfriend?"

"No." Tori sits on the squishy blue couch, on the opposite side from Bethany and Marge. She curls her legs up underneath her body so that Cat can't see her at all.

"No because you don't have one, or no because you were talking to somebody else?" Cat keeps spouting out train noises, whistling when she thinks Tori's taken too long coming up with a lie to answer her question.

But it's not a lie, not a whole lie. "I don't think I have one anymore."

"What's his name?"

"Jasper."
Cat giggles, the wheezing kind she gets when she's been rolling around in dust. "That's a funny name."
"I liked him."

"Are you going to go on the train?"

"I don't have anything to lose." There's the hesitation again, and Cat is struck by the thought that Tori would probably look gorgeous if she ever would smile. "Will you come with me?"

"I can't. The ticket said it was only good for one person." Cat whistles, rolls over, giggles again. Now that she's looking up she can see Tori peering at her. She has her glasses on, and she suddenly looks older. Cat wiggles uncomfortably and shuts her eyes. "How did you get a ticket?"

"I told you: I found it after the accident."
"Maybe I'll find one."

And find one Cat does, the next day. It's been warm for October, so they're gardening again. Bethany supervises them, standing off to the side by the more troubled patients who aren't allowed the small trowels that Cat and Tori are holding, who do nothing but hold the flowers in their hands and try not to let them fall.

Tori talks but Cat doesn't listen, because Cat can never listen when there's dirt and plants and freshness and life surrounding her. It buzzes in her mind and nothing can overcome it, not Bethany and not her parents and not even Colin. Even Tori's chattering in the air next to her ear can't get through the haze, and she doesn't mind, neither of them do. The dirt seeps between Cat's fingers and flows from her back into the earth, into the hole she's been digging. She doesn't mind if she gets a flower in the ground or not; she just wants the brown smears across her body, it makes her feel alive, less insane. Not that Cat thinks she's insane, of course, no, she doesn't think that. It's just that she doesn't really fit in anywhere else, and she sort of fits here in the hospital, so maybe she has to be a little crazy. But in the dirt, she is small and young and free again; children fit anywhere they choose, small enough to stuff themselves into the slivers and cracks of the world, where they belong. And then they grow up and they get too big for the spaces they're supposed to wedge themselves into, and they have to pick somewhere that isn't quite right.

"Trina used to do this thing where instead of just celebrating her birthday, she'd make us celebrate it for the whole week," Tori is saying. "We'd give her a present every day. I think my parents did that so they could ignore her for the rest of the year. She writes about it in her diary sometimes. She was always so sure of herself, and I thought maybe she was really lonely." Tori pauses, like she might have chuckled if she'd been in the mood. "But she was the same Trina in her diary as she was in real life."

It's in Cat's hand before she realizes what she's holding. At first she doesn't notice, keeps playing with the dirt, and then she feels something that won't slip through, won't go back down. She lifts it, sifts it, pulls it up. Tori has stopped talking. It's two pages, stapled to a ticket the color of blood if blood were pleasant to look at.