Thanks to my cousin for telling me lots of things about elevators that I ended up not using.

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Relativity For Beginners
by afrai

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If you managed to dodge the dolls, you could take the lift from Dollis Hill to Kingsway Below. Not many people knew this -- Richard, the Marquis de Carabas thought, might appreciate the information. The Warrior was often in need of a handy escape route; even one that required entering the dolls' domain would be valuable. The Marquis considered selling the information to him, playing with the thought idly.

Or he could hold the knowledge to himself, hoard the power until it was needed. There were always more favours to be asked. The Marquis smiled, knife-sharp, white teeth glinting in the dark, and slammed the butt of his palm against the button. The elevator ground to a stop.

The doors opened with a sound like tearing metal. The light inside was orange and flickering, somehow greasy. There was no-one in it, of course. The Marquis waved aside a puff of smoke with delicate distaste, and stepped into the elevator.

The doors closed. He was smearily reflected in them, a tall dark man with an expression too amused to be a sneer.

So was she.

"Hello, kitty," she breathed in his ear. "Take your hand off that nice knife, Marquis-san."

The Marquis bristled. The woman's reflection smiled back at him: that expression, too perpetually amused to be a sneer. The grime blurred the details of her face, but it was one he could have recognised any time, anywhere. He scowled, baring his teeth, and she threw back her head and laughed out loud.

"I could cut your throat," he said; it came out with more of a yowl in it than he would have liked.

"But what would that accomplish?" She took her hands off his shoulders with a little pleased flourish that made the Marquis twitch. He shook himself, one quick whole-body ripple, and folded himself back into composure, ignoring her gaze.

"I hate it when you do that," he said.

"Surprised that I still can?" she said. "I bet you thought I'd gotten soft, living in the world."

"I can't say I ever thought about it," said the Marquis crisply. She made a little moue that broke up after a split-second into one of her grins. It ruffled the Marquis despite himself; his shoulders rose for a brief moment, before he caught her eye again and forced them back down.

"I like what you've done with your hair," she said appreciatively, reaching up to touch it. He caught her hand.

"Yoruichi. What are you doing here?"

Yoruichi yanked her hand back, rubbing it and rolling her eyes.

"Jeez, you're as uptight as ever," she said. "This world's been bad for you. Didn't I tell you, you have to learn to relax?"

The Marquis's lips quirked.

"'Uptight' isn't the first word my associates would use to describe me," he said.

"That's because they don't know you," said Yoruichi.

"No. It's because they don't know you," said the Marquis. "I'll repeat my question, since you clearly weren't able to hear it the first time. What are you doing here?"

She didn't answer, of course. Not answering questions had been their besetting sin -- her and all the damned smug dead he'd left behind when he'd disappeared. He'd thought he'd escaped all of this.

"What a rude little boy," she sighed. "What, I can't drop by to see you? A hundred years I've been in the world, and we haven't hung out even once in all that time."

This was so ridiculous it did not require an answer. The Marquis ignored it, going straight to the important point.

"I don't live in 'the world'," he said. "This is Below. The rules are different here."

"Mm, not that different if I can still surprise you. It's the same, Marquis-san," she said. "They're humans here, aren't they?"

"Only some of them," said the Marquis. Yoruichi shrugged.

"Living, then. Whether they live in the sun or stew underground -- " she touched the wall with the tip of a finger, twisting her lips at the shiny trail it left -- "it's the same. This is the world, too. You don't belong here."

The Marquis watched his face harden in the glass.

"So that's it," he said. "You're here to take me back."

"Home," said Yoruichi.

"It's not my home," said the Marquis precisely. Yoruichi rolled her eyes again.

"Kisuke might have the right idea after all," she said to the air. To him: "Of course it's your home. You wouldn't be trying so hard to run away from it if it wasn't."

The Marquis laughed. It sounded like a death rattle.

"Home? That abode of dead men squabbling over the scraps they snatched from life as they left it?" he said. "As if it wasn't enough to live a small, petty life, they repeat the same thing over in death. The same mistakes, over and over .... I may have come from that, but if you think you're taking me back, you are sadly mistaken."

"Yes," said Yoruichi. The Marquis blinked.

"I'm not here to take you back," she said. Her face in the glass was suddenly dead serious, leashed power and beauty breathing by his side. His equal, possibly even -- probably his superior. He had forgotten what that felt like. "I'm asking you. De Carabas. Come with me."

The Marquis looked at himself, the dark reflection at his side. It had been a long, long time.

"There's a war on," said Yoruichi. "Bigger things are at stake than your dislike of boredom. Are you really going to stay here in your dirty little city of the lost, haggling with little people, playing little games? Forever? You have power. You could help us."

"Fighting the wars of the dead," said the Marquis distantly.

"And the living," said Yoruichi. "You always forget, we fight all our wars for the sake of the living. And this is a bigger war than we have ever faced before, Marquis-san."

The Marquis looked straight ahead.

"Call me by my name," he said.

If he didn't know better, he would have thought the woman's face in the glass had turned blurrily tender.

"You gave it away," she said.

"Ah," said the Marquis de Carabas. "I remember."

There was a silence, smoke-dry. Floors slipped past, the lit numbers flickering and dying in quick succession. It was a long way down.

"If you come with me," said Yoruichi, "I can give it back to you."

The Marquis smiled, knife-sharp. Yoruichi frowned, and his smile widened. It bore a remarkable resemblance to her own.

"Keep it," he said. "Thank you for the offer, but I decline. I intend to stay alive. I have business here yet."

Her face fell. She had always been able to afford to be more honest than him.

"Really," she said.

"There's no profit in being dead," said the Marquis. "Nothing worth doing in death."

"And what you're doing now is worth doing, is it?" said Yoruichi.

"All my games are going somewhere," said the Marquis.

"Yes," said Yoruichi. When she moved, it was so quickly the Marquis couldn't see it -- he really did hate it when she did that -- and she was outside the elevator, in the darkness, perching just beside the open panel in the ceiling.

"Down," she said. The impression of movement above, and the machinery gave an ominous shriek. The Marquis staggered and put a hand against the wall. The wind whipped Yoruichi's hair about her face as the elevator plummeted.

"When you want your name again, little brother, remember," she said. "The offer still stands."

Then she was gone, melting into the darkness with a last mocking gleam of cat's eyes. Alone and falling, the Marquis held his hand up before his face and stretched the fingers fastidiously. No click of claws sliding out.

Of course.

His hand was shaking, all the same. Just when you had your life going the way you wanted it to, some embarrassing old relative always had to show up ....

Family. You couldn't live with them, couldn't creep into their rooms at dead of night and kill them for good and all.

The Marquis grabbed the edge of the open panel in the ceiling, pulling himself up on top of the elevator.

"I intend to stay alive," he said aloud, musingly. He crouched, and jumped.

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