Cassandra Cain

There's a ghost lingering outside of the music store. Gwen didn't mean to find her. She'd been walking, shoulders hunched against the chill, and she'd noticed her there across the street. There's no sign of how she'd died — no flicker to another form, no gaping wound smearing blood along her hair or clothes. Like she'd just gone to sleep and hadn't woken up.

Maybe that's exactly what'd happened.

“Stop staring at me,” the ghost says, then cuts Gwen a look.

They're the same age, Gwen realizes. Fuck, that's always so sad.

“Sorry,” Gwen says. “I was—”

“I know what you were doing,” the ghost says. “You were figuring out if I have unfinished business. I can feel you the same way you can feel me,” she adds. “Why do you think ghosts always find people like you?”

Gwen has always known that she found the ghosts, or that they found her, but she hadn’t really thought about the how of it before. Dan had mentioned it, surely, her first time here, but it’d been something she’d sort of taken for granted and then moved on from. Hearing it aloud now, it’s like a reminder. They’re beacons for each other, whether they want to be or not.

“I guess I hadn't thought about it like that,” Gwen admits. The ghost gives her a look like No kidding and then resumes looking into the music store window. Gwen rolls her eyes, but smiles. “I'm Gwen.”

“Lisa. And no, I don't. Not the way you think. It's just this place. Darrow, not—”

“Not the music store, right. You're like me? From somewhere else.” Maybe she has unfinished business after all. Everyone in Darrow does, right?

Lisa nods. “People can see me, but people like you can tell what I am. Which gets really fucking tiring when you keep trying to banish me to the afterlife.”

Gwen feels a familiar defensiveness rise up inside her and she frowns.

“I'm not trying to banish you,” she argues. “I'm trying to help you move on, y'know, to rest? And I'm not even doing that right now.”

Lisa rolls her eyes. “Right, because the living know so very much about moving on. You don't even know where I'd go.” She turns to lean against the wall beside the music store's window, so Gwen leans beside her.

“Actually, I have an inkling,” Gwen says, frowning. She looks over at Lisa. “My mom's there. She says it's beautiful. So. If you want, maybe I can—”

“I don't want,” Lisa cuts in, and this time Gwen actually does feel a little bad. Maybe she should be less pushy. Where’s the line between helping and harming? Lisa sighs. “What I want is to play the clarinet again.”

“Is that your unfinished business?”

Lisa sighs. “God, no, okay, I don't have unfinished business! I'm not that kind of ghost!”

“Okay, fuck!” Gwen says, raising her hands defensively.

“I just miss playing,” Lisa says, still tensely but calming. “I wasn't even any good, I just… it'd be nice to do something familiar again.”

“I get that,” Gwen murmurs. She really does, she thinks.

They talk a little more. Gwen puts together that Lisa can't exactly pick things up. She's not strong enough, or Darrow is stopping her, one of those. Sometimes, Lisa explains, she can move things in the house. A door here, a curtain there, like she and the house are both ghosts.

Maybe they are, in their own way.

Gwen starts to realize that maybe she isn't meant to help Lisa the way she normally would. Maybe not all ghosts want to rest so much as they want to just be.

And that's how Gwen finds herself spending her afternoon in the music store, dropping more money than she'd realized on a clarinet for a ghost who can't even pick it up.

[ joint EP! Help Gwen and Lisa shop for a clarinet, or bump into either of them alone at a different point in the EP. Open until always and ST/LT welcome! ]