Ingrid's Funeral

Tag: Surrounded by tease and torment, in the shadow of the ghost light, a delicious love story spins toward a lethal curtain call....

Why, Buffelyn, why???: I don't know! MR was calling me... I had to take a little side-trip from my usual Mummy haunt or my muse was going to be very disappointed and beat me over the head with my keyboard. Just the way it goes.

Disclaimer: Baz owns the characters. The café Les Deux Moulins is from Amélie, but it's an actual place:) though I've switched the country. The songs belong to their respective owners, which I'll mostly credit in the text. I wrote the Ingrid's Funeral text, it's mine, all mine! Mwahaha.

Have fun. :) ~Buff

Excerpts from Ingrid's Funeral by Christian Gilkey:

The orchestra pit is open, though no musicians grace it. Five waist-height wooden crosses line center stage. Open umbrellas scatter the stage in tribute to Wilder. On the scrim, the faint glimmer of a summer thunderstorm is projected, and every once in a while the weather rumbles across the sound system in slow, faint echoes. The lights dim, the thunder continues, and a young man climbs a ladder up from the orchestra pit. He takes time to study each grave, tracing names and dates on them that are invisible to the audience.

Wesley: "Sometimes I wonder... What would have happened if I had never met her? Or if I had met her six months earlier. Or a year later. Or never. Never would have been better. I wouldn't be here, left with only the memory. And this ache inside me that pounds through my veins like the tortured music of a soul gone wrong."

He pauses at the second grave from stage left, then shakes his head and rushes downstage, stuck with a memory so vivid he cannot contain it.

Wesley: "It was raining, that night, but the stars shone bright through the clouds and the moon glowed orange. I guess what made that night remarkable was the fact that I was in love. Every night after that was remarkable for the sheer fact that she loved me, too..."

--Act I, Scene I

Colors flashed crazily in his eyes, one after the other in quick, violent succession, always following the same pattern. Green, yellow, blue, fuchsia, green, yellow, blue, fuchsia... He blinked and white dots took the place of the colors, floating to the edge of his vision as the colors intruded again. If he didn't blink, they all sort of blended together in a liquid rainbow of light.

Christian blinked again and his eyes were torn away from the swirling colors that streamed across the dance floor. After a minute his vision cleared somewhat and he focused bleary eyes on the figure across the little table. The sight that greeted him was overly blond, overly vivacious, over-sexed. She held a tall, dainty glass filled with something alarmingly green between two fingers, and a cigarette dangled between pinkie and ring finger. Christian could think of no reason why this Barbie doll had chosen to fixate on him for the evening, but she was proving to be less fun than he'd thought, and annoyingly hard to get rid of.

"So anyway," she was saying, "I told the director that a nude scene was absolutely out of the question. I mean, I am a professional actress." She paused to take a long drag from her cigarette, then leaned close, blowing the smoke in Christian's general direction. "I mean, just because it's a adult film doesn't mean it has to be tasteless, ya know?"

"Mmm hmm," Christian agreed, trying his best not to choke on the smoke that floated about his head. "Natasha, not that I don't find this fascinating..."

"Nicolette." She placed the cigarette in her mouth again, the glass of green stuff tipping precariously. "You can call me Nikki, doll."

"Right, Nikki. I have to, um..." Christian looked about the nightclub, trying to come up with an excuse that the Barbie doll would buy. "Get a drink. Yeah, I have to get a drink. Excuse me."

He leapt up from his chair, abandoning all pretenses of politeness as he escaped from the cloud of smoke and back into the blissful anonymity of the dance floor. If he hid long enough in the mass of people and lights, hopefully the Barbie doll would get confused and forget about him.

Christian slouched against a far wall and closed his eyes, enjoying the beat of the music as it pulsated in his throat and chest. He didn't usually venture this far out into the floor, preferring to observe the crowds from a distance. He found that when people danced, eventually they completely let go of their inhibitions and let their true nature shine through. It made for a fascinating character study, and more than one unsuspecting dancer at this very club had made their way into Christian's writing. If he ever had to put one of those fictional character disclaimers on anything, he was going to run into a moral dilemma.

Little did he know, another dilemma was about to land right in his lap. She came in the form of a pale, long-legged redhead, who came crashing around the corner and straight into him. "Sorry!" she cried, still leaning on him perhaps more than was necessary. After an embarrassed moment she regained her balance and was able to stand upright on her precarious heels, but he held onto her arms to prevent a repeat performance.

"It's okay," he said, noticing in sequence blue eyes, defiant chin, plunging neckline. Her magnificent hair obscured half her face, and she blew it out of the way with seductively curled lips. Everything about the woman screamed sensuality, though she also gave off the air that she wasn't even trying.

"I'm good now," she said. Her voice was sultry, breathy, innocent, as if she were simultaneously a million different people. "You can let go."

"Right. Yes. I've never understood women."

She blinked and he noticed that she wore almost no make-up past a bit of mascara. He also noticed that he'd said something incredibly idiotic. He had a tendency to do that sort of thing. Fantastic.

"What?" she said, cupping a hand to her ear. "I couldn't hear you!"

He leaned closer, enjoying the faint smell of her perfume. "I said, I've never understood why women wear high heels. They don't seem very logical."

She smiled, and didn't move away from him. "True. But without the clumsiness they produced I might never have met you. I'm Satine, by the way." She held out her hand. His skin tingled with the contact.

"Christian," he said back, and she kept on smiling. The fact that she was still talking to him rather amazed him. He didn't usually get this far in conversations with women. Unless, of course, you counted the Barbie doll.

"Dance with me?" she said, and without giving him a chance to reply, pulled him out into the middle of the dance floor. People twirled and writhed around them as the music morphed into a slower, methodical beat. How convenient, thought Christian, as Satine slid her arms around his neck, the flow of the music necessarily pressing her body closer to his. The night seemed blessed with coincidence.

"I got a mind full of wicked designs," mouthed Satine along with the music. He could feel the faint breath of her silent words warm against his cheek.

He decided to throw caution to the wind and joined her in singing. "I'm in a building that has 2000 floors and when they all fall down, I think you know it's you they're falling for..."

Satine laughed then, and it echoed in his ear as though it were the only sound in the world. Poe's voice continued to buzz in the background, but it was all secondary to the moment.

"Hey pretty, don't you want to take a ride with me through my world... Hey pretty, don't you wanna kick and slide...through my world..."

A new beat began to interweave with the throaty lyrics, the dancers around them began to move faster, but the sound was hushed, the movement dim. Two people stared into each other's eyes, both desperate to look away, not sure what held them there.

Satine swallowed, and her voice sounded strangled, out of air. "Want to get a drink?"

Christian nodded and let her lead him out through the mass of dancers, up the stairs, to the neon-lined world that was the bar. She took a stool and gestured to the bartender with a flick of her fingers. Christian noticed with only a slight pang that he came running to her like a puppy dog.

"Yes, miss?"

"A Cosmopolitan, please. And for my friend..."

"Uh..." Christian paused, trying to think of a drink that didn't sound dirty. "Same."

The bartender gave him a funny look, flashed a smile at Satine, and moved away. "Original," she said, raising her eyebrows at him.

"I'm not much of a drinker."

"You know the words to Poe, you don't drink, and you don't understand women." Satine placed a hand on his arm, the slight pressure of her fingers enough to set his finally-slowing heartbeat up to critical mass again. "Anything else I should know?"

"You said you couldn't hear me."

"Au contraire. I decided to give you a second chance." The bartender set two glasses in front of them, giving Christian a glare and gracing his companion with a smile. Satine ignored him, however, and took a delicate sip of her drink. "Mmm. What do you think?"

Christian had to fight not to spit the stuff out, but he swallowed it valiantly and set the glass down with a rather hard clunk. "That's disgusting!"

She laughed again, and this time Christian couldn't help but join her. "You just have to develop a taste for it. So...What do you do?"

"I'm a writer."

"Really?" Her eyes lit up, and Christian hoped to God that she wasn't an actress. "What kinds of things do you write?"

"Little of this, little of that. A lot of songs. Musicals. That sort of thing."

"Small world."

He took another stab at the Cosmo but couldn't swallow it. "How so?"

"Well..." She seemed embarrassed now, and hid her face behind her glass. "I sing. Oh, you must think I'm such a liar. You must hear it all the time. I sing, I act, I waitress. I do exactly what everybody else does in this town."

"Somehow I get the feeling, Satine, that you do all those things better than everybody else."

She didn't answer for a moment, the delighted flush of a suitor's compliment rising in her cheeks. "Oh, that's certainly not true. I'm a terrible waitress. Quite clumsy. I spill things."

"You can't mean it. You're so..." Christian's subconscious nature suddenly came rushing back, and he mumbled the last word. "...graceful."

"Graceful! I'm the one who ran into you, remember?"

"Yes, but it was quite an elegant fall. Just blame the shoes."

"Okay." She sipped at the last of her drink, licking her red lips. "You'll have to stop by sometime. Two Windmills down on tenth."

"I'll do that. Maybe I could... I mean, maybe..."

"Maybe we could go out sometime?" Satine supplied.

Christian nearly fainted with relief. "Yes!"

"Maybe you could pick me up there tomorrow at seven?"

"Yes!"

"Glad we have that straightened out." Satine elbowed him teasingly. "You're really good at this, aren't you?"

"Oh, please. I had you at 'I've never understood women.'"

Satine laughed, but it quickly died in her throat as she saw something beyond the bar. "Oh, Jesus," she muttered, trying her hide her tall frame behind Christian's non-existent bulk. "He's back."

Christian looked around, but didn't see any obvious threat. "Who?"

"This jerk, smashed out of his mind, probably high too. He was harassing me earlier." Satine snuck a peek over Christian's shoulder and cringed. "Oh God, he saw me. Can we get out of here?"

"Yeah." Christian placed a protective arm around Satine's waist and guided her away from the bar, down the steps, out through the dance floor. Her steps steadily picked up speed until they'd reached the exit.

"Thank you," she said as they stepped out into the alley, a blast of cold air . "That creep was scaring me."

"No problem. Hey, are you cold?"

Satine was indeed shivering, but she looked as though she were trying to be brave. "I left my coat inside. Don't worry about it, I don't want to go back there."

"I'll get it for you. The coat check is right inside the door. Wait right here."

She still looked worried. "It's the red jacket with a fur collar. Hurry."

Christian stepped inside the warm air of the club once again and headed straight for the coat check. "'Scuse me," he called to the attendant. "I'm looking for a red jacket with a fur collar."

The coat check attendant looked him up and down. "Yeah, I'm sure red's a nice color on you."

"It's not mine," Christian objected as the attendant turned to the rack. "It's my...she's...well, I guess she's--"

"Yep." The attendant handed him the jacket. "I believe you. Nice coat."

Christian didn't even bother, instead heading for the exit again. He didn't want to leave Satine alone for too long. He hadn't caught a glimpse of the guy, but she had really freaked out. Somehow it was very important to Christian that she was safe. He was terrified that she'd vanish before his very eyes, this girl who was perfect in every respect that he could see so far, this girl...

Someone screamed outside the club, and it took Christian a moment to register that she'd screamed his name.

~*~*~*~

Was my muse on the right path? Let me know :)