Warnings: Trigger warning for abuse (particularly in this chapter) and internalised homophobia. Please let me know if I should add any more.

Notes: I love Kate and Leon's friendship, and I don't feel it gets explored nearly enough in fic. Here is my stab at exploring their dynamic. The songs Kate sings in this chapter are I'm a Fool to Want You by Billie Holiday, and One Song from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Disclaimer: All characters and environments belong to Michael Maclennan and Adrienne Mitchell/Shaw Media. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs belongs to Disney.

Marion doesn't look at anyone any more. Not men, not women. The moment she found out women can be twisted enough to want each other as lovers, men's hearts became that much more depraved by comparison. She has learned her lesson. She will mind what her father has always told her. She will never be so foolish as to think people don't mean her any harm, not ever, ever again.

Kate sings to her mother, to soothe her as she gasps for breath. Mother has always loved Kate's singing. They used to sing duets together when Kate was a child, while they cleaned house or walked to church. Kate sings all their special songs from long ago. It's like she's singing the story of their lives. Sometimes, tears prick at Kate's eyes when she thinks about how she has to take both parts of the duet now, but she wipes them away like dust. It doesn't matter how she feels. She has to think of someone else, for once.

Still, when she sings Lonesome Valley for Mother, she finds herself recalling a single, strident voice in the dark, joining with hers to assure her that she wasn't as lonesome as she thought.

Father's told Kate all her life that the only reason a man would want to be around her is so he could seduce her, but Leon Riley kept his distance. Kate was the one to pursue him. She liked that, liked setting her sights on someone and persisting until they gave her a chance.

(Kate did the same with Betty. Betty gave in much faster than Leon, which only goes to prove that women are just as dangerous as men. Maybe more so.)

When Leon finally agreed to teach her to sing the blues, Kate wondered if he was going to make a pass at her, and what she would do when he did. She felt like such an idiot when he behaved like a consummate professional, like a perfect gentleman.

What did you expect? Do you think you're such a raving beauty that no man could keep his hands off you? Anyone would think you wanted it to happen, you slut, she reprimands herself. Normally Kate hates words like whore or harlot or slut, but she's all right with thinking them about herself. Sometimes she feels like she's the only woman in the world who deserves to have those words flung at her.

One afternoon, when Kate was waiting for Leon inside Tangiers, a man and woman started shouting and slapping at each other. Kate was trapped in a corner booth and could only watch helplessly as the fight escalated. When Leon arrived, he punched the man in the jaw and threw him bodily into the street. The woman ran out after her boyfriend, shrieking words Kate couldn't bring herself to understand. Seeing that naked rage on Leon's face made Kate black out for a few seconds. When she came back into herself, her face was wet, but she couldn't remember crying.

Leon returned and slid into the booth beside her. Kate shrank from him, feeling more trapped than ever before, but Leon didn't appear to notice.

"It's pitiful, a man beatin' up on a woman." Face twisted from exertion and anger, Leon signalled for a drink. "I know it scared you to see me lay out that waste of space, but he got what he deserved, Church Mouse."

Kate stared at the tabletop. "I'm sorry, but I don't much feel like singing today, Leon. I'm sorry you've had a wasted journey. I'm sorry." She kept blurting that she was sorry, so sorry.

Leon looked sideways at Kate's shaking hands, her blank expression and her streaming eyes. He waited until Roy had put his Scotch down in front of him and moved away again before speaking. "Was it your boyfriend, Kate?" Leon asked quietly.

That was the one and only time Leon ever called her by her first name. Every other time, it was either Church Mouse or Miss Andrews. She didn't mind it too much. Church Mouse was the only friendly nickname anyone had ever bestowed upon her, and it was nice to be addressed as Miss Andrews, like she was worthy of respect. She still wishes she could remember what it sounded like, him forming that one syllable.

Kate dabbed at her eyes with her hankie and said flatly, "No." Kate's only ever told a handful of people, but a handful is enough for her to know that she hates the way people change once they know. Leon already seemed to look on her as a little girl. She was so, so tired of never being equal to anyone.

After a quiet moment, Leon said, "My stepdad. Man by the name of Sidney Buck – though 'man' is far too good for him." Kate didn't understand right away, but when the penny dropped, she must have looked appalled, because Leon gave a hollow laugh. "And now you're shocked."

"It's just – you always seem so happy."

"The happy singin' darky, without a care in the world. Yep, that's me."

"You know that's not what I mean," Kate replied, wounded."I don't care what colour a person is."

Looking shrewdly at her, Leon shrugged. "I gotta be happy, Church Mouse. He already wrecked my childhood and my family. If I ain't happy, that bastard gets to ruin me as a man, too. It means he wins."

"What did he do to you?"

Leon shook his head. "He was a mean drunk, and that's all I'm saying about it. Let's not go into the gory details."

Something about the phrase made it so Kate couldn't help but picture Leon's back marked with scars, a photographic negative of her own. She shivered, and it wasn't in the way women were supposed to shiver around a good-looking man.

"But he's not around any more," said Kate. "It's in the past?" Kate didn't mean it to, but the first remark, intended as a question, came out as a statement of fact, and the second part, intended as words of comfort, emerged as a question.

"In a sense. My mama, my sister Abigail and I suffered under him for nine years. Abby's married to a decent guy, and they've got two boys. I haven't met either of my nephews. Abby and me, we don't speak any more. She doesn't want anything remindin' her of those years … but if she's happier that way, I can't complain too much."

"Where's your stepfather now?"

"Last I heard, he was in prison. Not for beating my mama, for manslaughter. He punched out a white man, who fell and hit his head." Leon chuckled mirthlessly. "If I'd have known that'd be what'd fix him, you can bet I would've been trying to get him into a fight with a white man since I was eight years old. Best moment of my life, seeing him get hauled off by the cops. I changed my name from Buck back to Riley, my dad's name. Mama passed on three years later. She wouldn't change her name. She died as Eudora Buck. Breast cancer. I read somewhere you can get it from being hit..."

Kate touched his shoulder. "It wasn't your fault," she said softly. "You couldn't stop her from getting sick." They were the kind of words Kate had always longed for someone to say to her, even though she knew she didn't deserve them.

He allowed her to keep her hand there for one, two, three seconds, before gently pulling away. Not here, the gesture said. Not anywhere, not ever. "I couldn't stop a lot of things."

"Leon, at least you stayed. I … I walked out on my family. I'm here, just having the time of my life, while he's probably taking it all out on them." Her voice shook. She had as good as said that her father was the reason she had run away. She felt so disloyal, talking ill of her father … even if it was the truth.

He looked at her critically. "Escaping ain't the same thing as walking out."

"I ran away." She managed, with every ounce of willpower she possessed, to hold his gaze. "If I were a man, you'd be calling me a coward for not staying to protect my mom and my brothers. You'd be right to."

"I'll bet you don't regret it, though."

Kate hates herself for it, but at that moment, Betty's face popped into her mind. Like a fool, she smiled, thinking about how she loved Betty. She hadn't known to feel bad about it, not then. "Good things have happened for me. I just wish I didn't have to give up my family for them to happen."

"Well, that's a start."

"Is that why you saved me from Donald?" she asked tentatively. "Because of your mother and Abby?"

"What else could I do? Would you have walked on by?"

Kate was taken aback. "I couldn't hit anybody. I'm not strong. I'm just a woman." She paused. "But … I'd do what I could, if somebody needed me, to keep them from being hurt. I've done it before." Her scars stung so horribly at the memory that she was surprised they didn't all open at once, staining the back of her pink flowered frock crimson.

Leon nodded gravely. "Then you're better than your father, Miss Andrews. Remember that."

They sat for a moment, listening to the clinks of glasses and the swish of rags as Roy and Frankie tidied behind the bar, two veterans of the same war.

Kate clasped her hands in her lap, holding one thumb tightly. The feeling gave her strength. Kate ventured, "Leon, I think … I think I could stand to sing a little something, if you don't mind playing for me. You didn't hurt your hand, hitting that man, did you?"

Leon gave a genuine smile. "I'm all right. Ain't the first time I've thrown a punch, and it won't be the last."

"Good." Kate blushed. "I mean, it's good that you're all right, not good that-"

"I know what you mean." He got to his feet. "C'mon, we'd best get this under way. Club'll be opening, before too long."

Sitting at the piano, Leon led Kate through her warm-up exercises. He began to play the song he'd given her to practice that week. He played the introduction, but when it got to the part where Kate was meant to start singing, her voice failed her.

She cleared her throat. "Play it again," Kate said. There was a certain tension in her voice that had nothing to do with the fact that he was a man, or handsome, or a Negro.

Leon replayed the introduction. Kate held onto her own thumb again. She didn't feel strength this time, just a vague sort of sadness. Somehow, that sadness was what got her to sing. "I'm a fool to want you, I'm a fool to want you..."

Kate had borrowed the record from Moira after Leon mentioned he thought it might be a good song for her. The first time she heard it, Kate was so overcome that she had to lie down. Jeannie and Dolores teased her when she emerged from her room in a daze, asking what dreamboat had her playing Billie Holiday's I'm a Fool to Want You seven times in a row. It wrong-footed Kate. She'd thought it was the saddest song she'd ever heard, and here the other girls seemed to think it was about a grand romance.

Still, they knew more about this sort of thing than her, so all the week leading up to her lesson with Leon, Kate practiced it as a love song, picturing herself singing it to some dark, handsome scoundrel. It hadn't gone right, not once in all the dozens of times she practiced it in her bedroom. But as she sat at the piano with Leon, knowing they were the same on the inside, knowing they'd been through the same things and still had music inside them, it came out differently.

"Time and time again, I said I'd leave you. Time and time again, I went away. But then would come a time when I would need you, and once again, these words I had to say. I'm a fool to want you." She abruptly ran out of breath there, and had to stop for a moment. Kate breathed in all the right places, and yet she found her lungs totally empty. Billie Holiday had a habit of doing that to her. "Pity me, I need you. I know it's wrong, it must be wrong, but right or wrong I can't get along without you. I can't get along without you..."

It wasn't the very first time that Kate felt something and then sang, but it was the first time it happened in front of other people. The feeling that made her sing wasn't the feeling of fancying Leon; it was the regret she felt at walking out on her family. She sang the song to herself in the past, and to her father, wherever he was then.

Usually, Frankie and Roy liked to cheer and wolf-whistle whenever Kate sang at the piano, liked to yell, "Brava!" and "Encore!" But as she finished her song, they just clapped a few times, and went back to their work, like they didn't want to intrude on something private. It was the way Kate felt when she listened to Billie singing that song.

"That's more like it, Church Mouse," Leon said quietly, and she knew for sure that he understood.

She remembers the way she used to dress up for their singing lessons: bright lipstick, carefully styled hair, earrings sparkling in her lobes. The longer she was around Leon, the more she knew their singing lessons were most emphatically not dates, but she liked looking pretty anyway. It's hard to think she had the time and the inclination to take such pains with her appearance, considering how she looks now. Tidying the trailer, as quietly as she can so as not to disturb Mother, Kate catches sight of herself in the small mirror that Father and Richard use to shave. It's a shock. She looks pale and exhausted, her hair is in need of a wash and comb and she realises, with a creeping shame, that she's worn the same dress three days running. It's like all the things that bad boys used to chant at her to make her cry as a child have come true.

Kate hates the smell of her own sweat, but it's become all too familiar. She's gotten used to hot showers six days a week, and baths in the evening too. Now, going back to washing fully clothed, with a china jug of water and a damp cloth … it used to be enough, but now it's like her body can't cope. She feels disgusting.

"To heck with it," Kate mumbles. Her family can hardly begrudge her the opportunity to wash herself, like everyone else in the world. She's doing this thing properly, or not at all.

Even with her newfound recklessness, Kate doesn't quite have the nerve to strip completely, but she undresses down to her bra and panties. She attacks her head with powdered shampoo while a saucepan of water heats. Once her hair is clean, she begins to wash, slowly and methodically. When she was Marion, she used to wash herself guiltily in the corner, even when she was alone. Now she stands in the middle of the trailer, singing little snatches of hers and Mother's songs as she washes herself.

She remembers a day a few years ago, when she and Mother went to see the film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. They considered taking Kate's youngest brother Walter with them, but knew he couldn't be trusted not to tell Father. It didn't matter, in the end. Father found out anyway. Father finds everything out, one way or another.

Despite how angry her father was afterwards, Kate still loved the film. She didn't think she liked cartoons much. Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse have never really held her attention, but she was enchanted by the way Snow White looked like a fairy tale book come to life. She especially loved the songs. She would've felt silly buying the record album – a grown woman buying the music from a children's film – but once she got her first pay check from Victory Munitions, the first silly thing she bought herself was the song book from the film. She accidentally took it along to one of her lessons at Tangiers once. Leon raised his eyebrows when he glimpsed it. Kate went scarlet and blurted something about buying it for her friend Edith's little girl Daphne. He smiled, shook his head and said nothing more about it.

As she washes, she starts to sing one of the songs from the film. Kate doesn't sing Whistle While You Work, or Someday My Prince Will Come. She sings One Song, the one the prince sings to Snow White when she's trapped in the evil queen's castle. Kate has no business singing a man's song, but she does it anyway.

"One song, I have but one song. One song, only for you … one love that has possessed me, one love thrilling me through..." It's wicked, but as she sings the words, standing half-naked and clean and bold as brass, she's not thinking about Mother any more. She's not thinking of Leon, either.

The door opens with a bang, and a cold breeze blasts through the trailer as Walter comes in, unwinding his woollen scarf and taking off his cap. Kate lets out a cry of surprise and scrambles to cover herself. Her shoulders hunch forward, her head ducks and her elbows clamp to her sides as though she's anticipating a blow.

Mother moans softly from her bunk. It's unbelievable to remember how strong she was for the first seventeen years of Kate's life, before she started getting this trouble with her lungs. Even in those last weeks before Kate ran away, Mother was such a pillar of strength: obtaining fake documents, organising a place for Kate to live, putting away a little of the housekeeping money each week so that Kate could take enough to tide her over until her first pay check. Kate remembers their last afternoon together, when Mother tried to take their minds off what was about to happen by teaching Kate to put on makeup. Kate had always been expressly forbidden from painting herself, so when Mother handed her lipstick, rouge, an eyebrow pencil and a powder compact, it was like she was being set free.

Kate is Marion again. She can't want to be free any more. She has to stay and watch her mother fade away.

"Marion, cover up," Walt says automatically, closing the door behind him. He says it quietly, being mindful of Mother. She should be proud of how considerate he's getting. Yet she can't help but bristle at the abruptness of it. No greeting, no apology for barging in while Kate was washing, just an order to get dressed. A familiar ritual that makes it sink in, at long last, that Kate is home and never leaving again.

She holds her dress against herself, folding her arms to keep it in place. Walter looks expectantly at her, almost sneering. She's always thought him an adorable child, but the sneer makes him look almost ugly … almost frightening.

Kate takes a deep breath. "I really wish you would think, Walt," she says, almost irritably. "You're thirteen years old, not a little boy any more. You knew I was in here and you came barrelling in anyway. A gentleman would knock before entering a lady's room." Even as she says it, Kate knows she sounds ridiculous. The trailer is not her bedroom; it's their family's home. Why on earth should he have to knock, coming into his own home?

Walter looks away, shamefaced. Kate is just about to apologise for biting his head off when he mutters, "With everything you did while you were away, nobody would call you a lady, Marion."

Up until six months ago, Kate's world comprised four people, none of whom could be allowed to see her anger. Her father was so terrifying, her mother so purely good, her brothers in need of care and protection. She turned all her anger in on herself. Now she has so much of it, burning millimetres below the surface. She's almost splitting apart with all the anger she has. She is not good or sweet any more. She is just pretending, all the time.

Her second baby brother is looking at her with such contempt. It should make her want to crumple and weep. Instead, Kate throws her dress to the floor and stands openly, not trying to cover herself, staring her little brother down. Though she is facing him, she has enough scars peeking around her waist, enough marks on her ribs, to give an unpleasant hint at the state of her back. She took so many blows so he wouldn't have to. It is written all over her skin.

"Walter Rowley, you apologise right this minute," she hisses. It is the most harshly she's ever spoken to him. She's always thought she would grow up to be her mother, patient and good, cowed and dominated. Maybe she's turning into her father, instead.

Walt's bravado melts away. He stammers out, "I never saw them before, in the daytime."

Kate thinks he means he never saw a woman before, in the harsh, revealing light of day. "Of course you have," she snaps.

"I hurt you," he says, backing away. It dawns on Kate that he's talking about her scars. "I held you down, I helped him hurt you."

"Oh, darling..." Her anger is stifled by compassion, and she opens her arms, meaning to hug him. "Walt, it wasn't you, honey."

He looks at her like she's about to strike him, and bolts from the trailer. Walter's not back when Father and Richard get back from their meeting. Feebly, Kate makes up a story about sending him out to buy groceries. This is fortuitous, because when Walt finally reappears, he's bleary-eyed and his clothes are dirty. Kate's lies become increasingly fluid as she claims that some bigger boys knocked him down and stole the grocery money.

"Poor Walter. Never mind, sweetheart," she says, putting her arm around him and kissing the top of his head. "Nobody blames you."

She showed anger in front of a male, and the world didn't end. She deliberately thinks male, not man. Kate knows the only reason she was able to stand up to Walter is because he's half her age, dependent on her for meals and haircuts and help with his homework. Kate can order him to show respect because she is an adult and he's a child. In a few years, Walt will be taller and stronger than she is, and Kate won't be a grown-up to him any more, she'll be a woman. She'll learn to fear her baby brother if she knows what's good for her.

Kate always thought, looking at Leon, that she wanted him to see her as a woman. Perhaps that wasn't it. Perhaps what she really wanted was to see him as a man and trust him anyway.