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shihalyfie · 3 years ago

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Neverland, the role of “nostalgia” in Kiuzna’s narrative, and the 02 quartet’s unusual immunity to it

In general, the 02 quartet (my shorthand for the four human characters introduced in 02 who weren’t in Adventure, namely Daisuke, Ken, Miyako, and Iori) have a position in Kizuna that you can call “shockingly favorable” in that they’re kept safely out of the most dangerous parts of the plot in ways the others aren’t. This especially sticks out when we get to the Eosmon incident reaching its climax, when Takeru and Hikari are placed in the same situation as their Adventure seniors, despite the movie and its surrounding media generally portraying them closer in line with the others in the 02 group than the Adventure group.

To be a bit blunt about it, the obvious main reason the story is set up this way is meta -- a lot of the climax’s effectiveness depends on the audience getting sensory impact via recognizing things from the original series (including 02 as well; how convenient it is that all of the international Chosen are in the positions 02 fans would recognize!), and so it’s obvious that said climax would evoke imagery related to the series that was Digimon Adventure, while the 02 quartet would be treated extra-kindly by the narrative due to the need to give them compensatory action screentime given certain real-life events. But just because the originating reason is meta doesn’t mean there isn’t also a story reason for it, especially considering the relevance of 02′s themes in Kizuna’s narrative, and the surrounding circumstances regarding both series.

Before we get into anything else, the first thing that needs to be established is that Menoa and Eosmon’s lure is pretty obviously depicted as working on a subconscious level. This is why everyone else in the narrative agrees that what they did is “kidnapping”, despite her insistence that she’s just doing what they wanted. While they can’t not admit to having moments of weakness, nevertheless, it’s likely that most if not all of the people Menoa kidnapped consciously knew better and had learned better lessons than this a long time ago; if Menoa had consciously offered Neverland to her victims, most of them would have probably said no! But as Daisuke said back in 02 episode 49 -- when he witnessed his own friends being subjected to something similar at the hands of BelialVamdemon -- there’s no sin in having feelings of worries or troubles (and, by extension, irrational feelings in general), and Eosmon’s abilities and Neverland happen to be able to directly target them. In fact, we ourselves got to witness this internal conflict when Menoa made her direct offer to Taichi and Yamato to join Neverland; they briefly considered it because of the circumstances, but were snapped out of it quickly with Agumon and Gabumon’s intervention, and were really, really mad at themselves for considering it shortly after.

We saw the process of how Ayaka became one of the kidnapping victims at the beginning of the movie -- it happened right after she complained that she wasn’t fond of the idea of becoming an adult at this point. So it does lend some truth to the idea that Menoa’s working off something with these cases, and that Eosmon did specifically target people who had those wishes to some degree. Moreover, note carefully how this kidnapping (and some others in the movie) is portrayed; Eosmon doesn’t actually emerge from the device in question (it’s obvious that nobody notices the giant butterfly monster), and the victim’s consciousness and partner are whisked away thanks to being caught by the device camera. In Ayaka’s case, because her phone was sitting on the table, pointed at her. The fact that this is not how the kidnappings are portrayed all the way to the end of the movie is a very significant point.

So let’s talk about Neverland and its construction. The whole thing is based on Menoa’s own very, very warped view of what “happiness” is. This means that Neverland is only an “ideal world” or “utopia” in a way that makes sense to her -- and once you learn the full extent of her backstory, it becomes apparent how she came to the mentality she did, and, more pertinently, how she ended up projecting that on everyone else. Hence, how she came to decide that she knew better and should decide for everyone, because she thinks she gets the right to decide on everyone’s happiness based on her own experiences. (She doesn’t.)

The way Neverland is constructed is that everyone has “their own places” -- their own individual islands that recreate “memories” of everyone being able to be together with their partner, forever. So in other words, it’s not just that everyone’s being turned into children; it’s that they’re being kept in an eternal loop of their best memory and unable to “move forward”.

Here are three very significant parts about this, which will be important to keep in mind as we go deeper into this analysis:

Menoa’s view of this utopia requires people to be separated -- for all she claims this is a utopia where people can play together, she discourages fraternizing and encourages everyone to stay only with their own partners. This is, presumably, to lessen complications with said memories, because what might be one person’s best memory might not be for another, and also because she thinks one person being alone with their partner is happiness enough in itself. As we’ll be seeing later, this is very much not the case for everyone.

A lot of these memories in Neverland -- and Menoa’s own mentality, as we eventually find out -- are heavily dependent on the concept of rose-colored nostalgia, or, that is to say, conveniently omitting or forgetting about all of the bad things about one’s past in order to portray it as such a wonderful thing that nobody should ever move on from. And in the end, that probably applies to real-life childhood in general, too; as much as it’s so often put on a pedestal for being a time when “everything was simpler”, you can also easily argue that it wasn’t actually all sunshine and roses, it’s just that the process of forgetting things or the grass-is-greener phenomenon makes you conveniently forget all of the bad things and frustration that came with it too.

Because the concept of needing to stay in the past forever is based on the idea that it’s preferable to growing up, these memories thus have a strong premise of “things you cannot do anymore” -- something that, bar going back to the past and never moving from it, you will never get back or be able to sufficiently recreate. It’s unlikely the islands themselves are one-to-one recreating their specific memories in the way they happened, but rather seemingly presenting them the opportunity to “constantly do over” things they want to recreate or do again, as long as those things are associated with a happy thing that isn’t as easily accessible anymore.

In the case of the five Adventure group members who were brought into Neverland, these “memories” that they’re seen trapped in are, of course, from Digimon Adventure.

It is of course foolhardy to pretend that the main reason for this wasn’t meta, since, of course, there’s a huge point to be made here about the relationship between Adventure and nostalgia, plus the simple fact that this is what we’re most likely to recognize and be nostalgic for, but it also makes sense within the context of the narrative; Menoa has an extreme bias towards the happiness of her childhood revolving almost entirely around her partner, and, of course, Adventure was when these kids first had their most formative meetings with said partners. (This is also probably the in-story explanation for why the other international Chosen from 02 appear at or close to their 02 selves; beyond the meta reason of it being a way to make them recognizable when we only knew them for such a short time, it also approximates when they met their own partners.)

On top of that, Adventure was not all sunshine and roses for its cast! After all, there was a ton of drama and emotional trauma and stress from running away from enemies trying to kill them, or trying to save the universe, and glossing over that is also foolhardy -- but this is also where our concept of “rose-colored” comes in. Menoa’s not offering the kids the entire adventure; she’s offering them a small slice of the moments when they were able to be happy, the moments that made them want to stay in the Digital World for a whole 110 years’ worth of time at the end of Adventure -- she’s basically offering them that very thing they wanted and had ripped away from them at the end of Adventure when the time dilation phenomenon stopped. Take out all of the bad stuff, and suddenly, the events of Adventure seem outright romantic -- it’s the whole school of thought that fueled Adventure’s inspirations of Two Years’ Vacation and Stand By Me, in which a lot of stressful stuff happened and yet you still can’t help but think there was something magical and romantic about it. (I cannot emphasize enough how much of a cultural impact Stand By Me in particular had in Japan, to the point where it’s considered the epitome example of a “coming of age story” and “summer adventure”.)

Let’s take a closer look at what’s on each of the Adventure kids’ personal islands:

Hikari is probably the one in the most unusual position among this group, since she didn’t join until over the halfway point, and the first arc she got involved in revolved around everyone wanting her and Tailmon dead. Thus, the memory we get to see her involved in is the Numemon factory in Adventure episode 49. Although this was in the middle of the Dark Masters arc (and, uniquely, very close to the end of the series where a lot of stress was involved), due to the limited amount of time she got to be in the Digital World, this was the one time she got to do something really cool and awesome and impressive for herself that had nothing to do with the others (again: see how the requirements for these islands require not fraternizing with friends and being isolated).

One thing that the Adventure kids got to do that wasn’t in play in 02 was that there were a lot of “romantic experiences”, involving strange adventures and things like phone boxes on the beach, and, very significantly, “Digimon friends” -- ones that the kids made a huge note of bonding with over the course of the series. This contributes to a certain sense of whimsy that was involved in this adventure that the 02 quartet ultimately never ended up getting to foster, because the lack of the time dilation phenomenon meant that they spent much less time in the Digital World overall (more on this in a bit), and once the time dilation stopped, it meant that these kinds of “whimsical” experiences were ones the Adventure group was permanently torn away from once that adventure ended. That dropping of the time dilation phenomenon not only cut that initial adventure short, it also prevented any future ones like it from ever happening again.

And, of course, this is an extremely rose-colored memory, because shortly afterwards, the Numemon ended up all sacrificing themselves for Hikari. But hey, when you’re in a space that can eternally loop good memories forever, everything’s fine as long as we conveniently never get to that part, right?

From this point on, you’ll notice that all of the memories that show up on these islands are from before the halfway point of the series, because after that, things started getting increasingly pear-shaped and much more difficult to disentangle the stress, mental breakdowns, and witnessing of deaths from. (Hikari’s probably wouldn’t have come from such a late incident if she hadn’t joined the party so late.) Although there still were looming threats around the horizon in the beginning of Adventure, they weren’t always immediately apparent to the kids at every turn, and in fact, the beginning of the series involved more of a “well, we’re in this situation and probably need to get home somehow” aura than it did a “the world is in danger and all of us might die” aura. (It’s also in direct contrast to the 02 group, who were given the details of the crisis and what they needed to do roughly from the get-go.) So in other words, if you want to have some rose-colored nostalgia about the romanticism of this adventure, these are some of the best episodes to pull from.

Takeru’s is obviously from the Village of Beginnings, corresponding to Adventure episode 12, when he and Patamon got to have a fun romp through the village, play together, meet Elecmon, and learn about how Digimon are born. It’s also very much something he did without the others, only with Patamon, and had a lot of “fun and happiness” associated with (later solo episodes with Takeru had a lot more upsetting events more intrinsically tied with it), and, again, it’s extremely rose-colored -- it wasn’t even a day later when Angemon died in front of Takeru’s eyes. But hey, that’s even more reason to pick a moment from before then to stay in forever! Can’t have trauma if that trauma never happens, right?

Also, note that Takeru is one of the few here who’s confirmed to be aware of the partnership dissolution issue at this point, and, unlike Koushirou, isn’t confirmed to have accepted a forward-thinking mentality about it yet -- this is a very, very prime time for his fears of being separated from Patamon again to have a nasty relapse.

Mimi’s is the closest to the midpoint of the series, from the affair with the Geckomon and Otamamon castle (from Adventure episode 25; the metal railings here resemble the stage railings from that episode). It’s from the period of time that was a “lull” -- when nobody actually knew about the encroaching threat of Vamdemon quite yet, and for all it was worth, there was no longer any danger. So Mimi got to live happily in the comfort of the castle and play around with the Geckomon and Otamamon...which, of course, also conveniently excludes the affair where she went on a power trip, made everyone miserable due to her selfishness, and immediately felt guilt over it.

Mimi’s associations with this incident are not entirely negative; she was clearly still having fun singing for them in the end (note how her clothing during that scene involved her regular outfit, which she has on here), and she still had a positive impression of her relationship with the Geckomon and Otamamon as per Adventure episode 47 and 02 episode 6 (and as per 02 episode 15, even though everyone’s initial encounter with TonosamaGeckomon ended badly, nobody actually has any lingering grudge against him). So if you filter out that whole affair with the power trip and the resulting embarrassment, it was a meeting with a bunch of fun Digimon friends, a romantic little castle, and a fun stage session where Mimi got to sing.

Jou’s refers to the Infinity Mountain incident in Adventure episode 7, and even from the get-go you can already see the level of rose-coloredness in Jou’s gesture -- in the actual incident depicted, Jou went to the mountain out of a sense of obligation and stress, and the initial climbing involved him having a bit of a bickering moment with Gomamon. But once they did get up there, it was actually their first time the two of them got to really “bond” -- and not only that, their encounter with Unimon had Jou even look on it with fascination, before the Dark Gear had ever come into play.

So in the end, Jou really would have found the incident enjoyable and worthwhile if not for that, and from there you can understand why it would be appealing for him to revisit that setting and finally get to have a bit of calm fun with Gomamon there -- especially since, again, the Neverland islands have a very strong preference for isolating the kids from others, and this was one of the few times Jou got to have a major moment of calm like this alone with Gomamon, with a slight reprieve from the constant feeling of stress and duty.

Koushirou’s most prominently resembles the “sealed room” in the factory in Adventure episode 5, and while Koushirou certainly continued to make a large number of exciting discoveries after that, this was the situation where Koushirou, with no one else but Tentomon to worry about in the immediate vicinity, got to have the largest sensation of “novelty” -- where he first came upon the fascinating discovery of data manipulating reality around him, and he actually got to see the world change around him by wiping things off a wall.

And, of course, there were other things going on like Tentomon confronting him with his first existential crisis, and how things quickly went south with Andromon...but we don’t have to remember that part for now, right?

An interesting thing about Koushirou: the circumstances of how he was “kidnapped” in the first place are actually somewhat obscured compared to the other four in this scene, since Menoa presumably needed him conscious in order to get his list out of him, resulting in his kidnapping scene also involving an emerging Eosmon and not having him be instantly taken the way we see Takeru and Hikari (more on this in the section below). It’s thus unclear whether he’d be in their boat had his position in Menoa’s plan not been unusual -- said memories in Neverland involved “gathering information and learning more”, something he still actively involved himself with even after the events of Adventure, and he’s also the first one to reach a forward-thinking mentality about the partnership dissolution phenomenon. Either way, once he was already dragged into Neverland, it’s natural that the place could find a good memory for him in the same way it did for the other kids who were “manually” dragged in, but the actual method of entry and whether Koushirou's post-Adventure life put him in a mindset similar to that of the 02 quartet (again, see below) is a bit ambiguous.

So here’s an interesting part about how the 02 quartet gets involved in this story: their own encounters with Eosmon happen during a part where the method of kidnapping has abruptly changed. As many have pointed out, this is also when the degree of the targets Menoa wanted had also suddenly escalated, because while her previous claims had involved the idea of kidnapping like-minded adults (who, indeed, were entertaining thoughts of nostalgia to even some degree), she was now kidnapping actual children, ones who weren’t even nearly at the point of the supposed drudgery of adulthood that Menoa claimed they would eventually have, and with her arrogantly deciding she knew better for all of them. The part that becomes particularly intriguing about this is that the exact same thing happens with Miyako -- she is explicitly stated to have connected her laptop to the Internet, resulting in an Eosmon physically emerging and chasing her instead of instantaneously snatching away her consciousness through a camera like her own fellow 02 group members Takeru and Hikari.

So in other words, the 02 quartet’s favorable position in this incident doesn’t just have to do with being lucky enough to have gotten Koushirou’s warning about the Eosmon early; they (or at least Miyako) also seem to have a certain degree of outright immunity to it, much like the young children who aren’t old enough to have nostalgia yet. (Also, keep in mind that Takeru was caught thanks to a security camera; “excess caution with electronic devices” alone wouldn’t necessarily have guaranteed their safety.)

Recalling that, for the most part, Takeru and Hikari are usually treated more like 02 group members in the context of this narrative yet are, in this one case, treated as being potentially nostalgia-prone, it stands to reason that the main difference between the two of them and their fellow members in the 02 group is the fact that Takeru and Hikari went on the adventure in 1999, and the quartet did not. So in other words, the reason the 02 quartet isn’t as prone to this is not so much that they’re fundamentally different-minded people, as much as they have a distinct lack of an experience they can be attached to the way the Adventure group is to their own 1999 adventure. (Remember that Menoa’s kidnappings work heavily on subconscious feelings; you can’t blame anyone for having these kinds of feelings no matter how much they’ve consciously learned.)

As I said earlier, it’s foolhardy to pretend that Adventure was all sunshine and roses, and, likewise, it’s also foolhardy to pretend that 02 was nothing but suffering for everyone involved. Both series involved a lot of balancing of funny, silly moments to be treasured as much as they involved stress (which is why people are so attached to both, after all). So the question is not so much how happy they were in their childhoods as much as the nature of what that happiness came from, and what relation it has to their current lives. And when you look at what experiences the 02 quartet had back in 02, you might notice a thread of the fact that it is significantly harder to romanticize the events of 02 than it is Adventure.

Let’s put it this way: Let’s say that the 02 quartet was kidnapped into Neverland and placed onto islands that fit Menoa’s view of happiness. What, exactly, would you pick from 02 itself that would work? What kind of “happiness” did they have back then that’s so romantic, so impossible to replicate now, that they’d want to go back to because it’s better than their lives now once you disentangle all of the bad stuff?

...Not much. Not much at all, actually. Hanging out in the computer room together? Doesn’t seem like they cared that much about the computer room part as much as the fact the others were there bantering with them (which would put a huge nail in Menoa’s islands mandating isolationism). Going out on a picnic together? No reason they can’t just go on another picnic again (and if the BD box is to be believed, that’s exactly what they did, and they even added Ken to it while they were at it). Hanging out with their Digimon in real life and doing silly hijinks? They’re...probably still doing that now, actually. Getting to find true happiness at a Christmas party? That’s a party from the real world (again, something they most certainly continued to do thereafter), one where the happiness came not from the romanticism of anything that happened to do with some adventure, but just the happiness of being surrounded by true friends, which, again, Ken is still clearly getting to do by the time of Kizuna.

Once you look at the circumstances of what the “adventure” of 02 was to the 02 group, you may realize that it doesn’t really resemble the traditional romantic image of an “adventure” much at all. Sure, they were blessed with being able to regularly go back and forth between the Digital World from the get-go, but it meant that -- especially without the time dilation in play -- the Digital World became much less of a picturesque area associated with a one-time memorable adventure as much as something they had to squeeze in their after-hours while juggling it with their school. The circumstances they encountered their Digimon and the Digital World in were at a point where it had a certain level of “mundane” to them, compared to their seniors; it wasn’t a “fantasy adventure in the Digital World” when so much of the story also revolved around real-world events as well, and you can’t really find many “mysterious fantasy” events in 02 that resemble much of those in Adventure. The closest might be...Daisuke seeing Numemon pile out of a vending machine in 02 episode 1? (Not very romantic.) Daisuke getting chased around by a Tortomon in 02 episode 22? (Really not very romantic.) Iori getting to tour the ocean with Submarimon? (Implied to more about relief from how much he was holding himself back than the uniqueness of the experience in itself.) Ken’s long-time-ago flashback from 02 episode 23 about meeting Wormmon for the first time? (Defeating a Gazimon is hardly that impressive; the important part was him bonding with Wormmon, which he’s...uh...still doing now?)

There weren’t any lasting relationships with Digimon friends like the ones in Adventure, maybe encountering some civilians once and not seeing them much again after that, especially since the lack of time dilation meant not getting to spend as much time visiting them much at all (think about all of the really fun experiences that the Adventure group probably had that weren’t shown in the actual Adventure TV series, just because it probably didn’t have enough drama that would make a good TV episode plot). This means that there’s very little, if at all, of 02 that represents something this group would want so badly to recreate that they can’t already do now; everything from back then was either something comparatively mundane, or something they actually would not want back. Unlike with Adventure, where a lot of the kids had irreplaceable moments that only happened to be spoiled a bit later, a lot of the “really awesome accomplishments” from the first half of 02 were explicitly against Ken, someone whom they’d probably rather not dwell on fighting again because of how much they love him now; many of those good memories are “retroactively poisoned” because of that, and it’s much, much more difficult to make a rose-colored version of those memories disentangled from the bad, because of how fundamentally intrinsic that retroactive poisoning becomes.

And, when you think about it, the mandate of “you have to be alone on your own island” would pretty much break these four in particular, especially since the 02 group is portrayed as the type to need mutual support more than anything else, and so many of the events that represent “happiness” specifically involved the happiness of each other being present. It’s not to say that the 02 quartet had no moments of happiness when alone with their partners, but, rather, being with each other provided so much more fulfillment to them that Menoa’s offer of a memory of their past that requires them to be alone probably pales in comparison to anything they could do now in each other’s presence. Maybe, like with the other kids depicted in these scenes, they could be buttered up with something nice if you successfully got them into Neverland, but it’s not like they have any real wistfulness about anything from back then to the point that they’d be subconsciously drawn towards it instead of having to be dragged in kicking and screaming -- and especially in the case of Miyako, the same one who managed to evade an Eosmon here, who was offered a similar “chance to be alone” back in 02 episode 49 and didn’t take very long to decide she hated it because of how much of her happiness comes from getting to be with others.

By the time of the end of Adventure, the Adventure kids’ ideal situation was to have a romantic and fun 110-year adventure with the sights and fun of the Digital World, with all of the weird fantasy surrealism and less of the world-saving, and that’s something they never got to have (and that Menoa was inherently offering them). By the time of the end of 02, the 02 quartet’s ideal situation was...to find a way to get back to normal life and hope their friend feels a little better, and that “ideal situation” is still persisting even into the time of Kizuna, so it’s hard to imagine they really want more than that.

And, again, when you extrapolate this into what Kizuna’s trying to say about real life, adulthood, and nostalgia: it is true that Menoa’s projecting a belief that absolutely does not apply to everyone. While it’s true that many people feel that childhood had a certain kind of magic that you can’t get back in adulthood, there are possibly just as many people who aren’t really all that nostalgic to begin with, either due to trauma or something about their childhoods being miserable, or, even in the lack of such miserable events, simply enjoying the added freedom and expanded range of ability that comes with adulthood to the point they consider it to be more than worth the tradeoff. The 02 group basically represents this crowd -- Ken’s life right now beats out his past in pretty much nearly every respect, and while there are certain concerns about not being able to meet up as often, they’re finding the same ways to do the same kinds of over-the-top hijinks they did back in 02, with arguably even more range now that they get to exploit Digital Gates to do world travel and act without worrying about their parents. They’re basically like the adults who see Menoa’s creed of “childhood is better because adulthood sucks” and go “sorry, can’t relate.”

That said, remember: this isn’t because the 02 quartet is somehow mentally stronger or anything, but rather just a byproduct of what experiences they've had and haven’t had. Takeru and Hikari’s position is unique here -- for all intents and purposes their mentalities are portrayed as closer to the 02 group’s, but they did still have the experience their seniors had and are thus still capable of being close to their position in this one regard. In the end, everyone is different, it’s no sin to have feelings based on those differences, and “being able to relate” to one’s position is also an important key here; because the 02 group’s position is so alien to Menoa’s, it’s unlikely they could have tackled her problems nearly as intimately as their seniors could.

What we learn about Menoa’s backstory establishes that she forced her vision of nostalgic happiness on everyone based on her own perception of her past in such a warped, rose-colored manner. She conveniently omitted or forgot about details such as the fact that her life as a “child” involved feeling ostracized from everyone and that she herself was guilty of neglecting Morphomon. Not only that, she herself claims that she’s the only one who knows what this feels like -- that nobody relates to her -- and thus, you can see that she came to her conclusion that her experiences are universal by the power of sheer extrapolation, hence why she thinks everyone inevitably loses their partner upon reaching adulthood despite pretty significant amounts of evidence to the contrary. (For all it’s worth, the fact that she still considers herself as having “become an adult” at 14 just because she got into university at that time is pretty conceited.)

Menoa’s existence as being so starkly in contrast to the 02 quartet’s is very likely because her entire character was built up from the ground that way -- her entire backstory of skipping grades into university is heavily based on 02′s initial development premise and Ken’s own backstory, meaning she explicitly represents the path that Ken and the other 02 kids chose not to take, and the timing of certain events in her backstory seems almost deliberately engineered to prevent her from witnessing some of 02′s important answers to Kizuna’s conflict, most notably her inability to witness the final battle and the important lessons everyone present learned about following one’s dreams without restraint, and how that relates to one’s partner. Menoa’s mindset is basically that level of incompatible with 02′s themes of “moving on from the past” and “not caving to arbitrary societal expectations”, to the point her character could only get to this point by going out of the way to exclude her from 02′s story and events, because she’s fundamentally built as a character who started off on a very similar path as them (getting to integrate her Digimon partner into normal life, having a similar backstory to Ken) before veering off on a very different one.

Moreover, about that backstory, and the reason why 02 was conceived as such a criticism of the concept of “skipping grades into university”: the concern that someone in this position will be kept from making any friends their age. Menoa puts the moment of “being with one’s partner” on such a pedestal and considers herself to be “the only one who knows what this feels like” partially because she has a fundamentally warped view of friendship itself. Even the Adventure group, which may not have had quite the absurdly tight level of bonding the 02 group had, still broke out of the illusion via Taichi and Yamato reaching out to them, and Taichi and Yamato giving each other mutual support helped them make the decisions they did in the movie. The movie is titled “bonds”, and “bonds” doesn’t just refer to those between human and Digimon partner, but also bonds between each other; Taichi, Yamato, and Sora slowly drifting away from the others at the start of the movie has very strong relevance to their respective existential crises, and the role that Taichi and Yamato play in supporting each other, and Mimi’s in supporting Sora in To Sora and even beyond that, say a lot as to how they’re already expected to be much better off than Menoa was.

It’s not that adulthood is inherent drudgery; it’s that Menoa’s own circumstances really are that warped to the point where she sees her very unusual experiences as fundamentally synonymous with how life is supposed to work in general. She was so obsessed with “being independent”, “being useful to the world”, and “being on her own” that she had no mentality of making friends or connecting to others besides her own partner, and once her partner disappeared, she seemed to make no attempt to rectify that. So of course her life in university following that ended up being not nearly as fulfilling as she’d hoped, since she was getting no real emotional support from anywhere, and, as 02 itself also drove home, apparent “approval from society” only ever makes you as “happy” as a Dark Seed-implanted child if you’re not also being supported by your loved ones in the process. Her adulthood sucked, and she decided that everything about her rose-colored childhood meant that childhood is fundamentally superior in every way, and thus decided that keeping everyone else in it would be “saving” them from the terror it involves -- even though (even if they’re not aware of the specifics of everything) the 02 quartet is not the kind to be able to relate to this at all, and, eventually, Taichi and Yamato, who do understand her position a bit better due to their own experiences, are able to get her to reconsider a little.

#digimon #digimon adventure #digimon adventure 02 #digimon adventure last evolution kizuna #kizuna spoilers #shihameta

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sir-gwaine-my-man · 4 years ago

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A rewrite of the ending for The Letter for the King

If we're being honest, did the ending live up to anyone's expectations? Certainly not to mine. My babies deserved better and I hope my attempt at writing can help to rectify that for anyone else looking for a happier - and hopefully better - ending. At some point, I'll probably write a fic for the entire series, possibly with an OC (maybe a younger sibling of one of the knights because I want more interactions with Piak). Feedback would be greatly appreciated! I'm always looking to improve. I struggle with accurate characterisation in fanfics when writing non-canon dialogue/scenes so if anyone has any tips then please send them my way.

I know there's maybe 12 people in the fandom (this had better become a running joke, so help me) but hopefully I will please those 12 of you. This will take place from when they exit the sewers. Without further ado, let us proceed.

5000+ words

~~~~~~~~~~

The thick, rancid scent of the sewers still lingered in the air as the novices clung to the ladder several metres up. Damp metal frigid to the touch, covered in something that they wouldn't dare to ask the origin of. Even Tiuri - who had made his way to the top of the ladder - could still smell the murky water (or, at least, what they thought to be water) below.

He swung the grate at the top open, gritting his teeth as he hoisted himself up and out of the entrance to the sewer. The fresher air was a welcome comfort in the dimly lit room, candles flickering gently in the little draughts that filtered in, and he was thankful to take in a deep breath of fresher air.

Pushing himself over the edge with a grunt of effort, he turned around to help Piak climb out, safely pulling him up. It was certainly far more graceful than Tiuri's attempt to get himself out.

"You're pushing me again," Jussipo snapped, looking down and glaring before pulling himself out as well, a look of clear disgust etched upon his face.

"Because you're going even slower than you were before," Arman retorted, evidently still frustrated at having to go through the sewers.

"It's-it's in my hair! It's in my hair." Jussipo's face contorted as he tried to hide the extent of his revulsion as he essentially jumped out of the exit.

Arman came out soon after Jussipo, quickly pushing himself out, glad to be away from the dreadful place, and was quickly followed by Foldo. "It's definitely not water," Foldo choked out through the stench, his face paling as he resisted the nauseating temptation to throw up any food still left in his stomach.

"See?" Tiuri started, trying to reintroduce some positivity into their quest that seemed to lack a favourable outcome for the foreseeable future. "I told you. Easy."

The others stared at him as though he were insane, many still looking disgusted from their time in the sewer. Foldo looked greener by the second. No one particularly wanted to know what was in the sewer now that they knew it wasn't water from his expression. They also didn't want to know how Foldo found out.

The group rushed out of the room, breaking out into a run as they hurried to get to the throne room. They had hardly made it down a single corridor before turning into a hall and running straight into a line of servants.

Attempts at acting natural were made. Bowed heads, feigned interest in the exquisitely crafted banners and candleholders - although, they had to admit, they were beautiful. But, of course, despite the dirt on their clothes, they still reeked of nobility and they neither looked nor acted like the staff of the castle, not to mention the swords hanging from their belts. Still, the servants had far more important matters to attend to other than herding some wandering nobleman's children back to the feast.

As soon as they were alone, they all raced through the open doorway, speeding down more passageways, thankful not to encounter anyone else.

"That was close!" Piak exclaimed with a smile, jogging next to Jussipo, clearly enjoying the excitement.

"Be quiet," hissed Arman sharply, turning back to the boy. "You don't know who could be lurking in the shadows, listening to our every word."

"Don't talk to him like that," Jussipo replied, moving threateningly closer, attempting to turn any anxiety brewing within him to confidence.

"I'd appreciate it if you directed your aggressive energy towards the task at hand, please," Tiuri sighed. "Besides, I think we're safe for now."

"Perhaps we should be a bit quieter, it couldn't hurt," Foldo suggested gently.

They continued their way through the castle, footsteps echoing far louder than they would've liked through the stone hallways. Cautious glances were frequently casted towards the windows, the steadily rising blood moon harsh and bold against the dark sky, glaringly bright as it outshone the gentle twinkling of the stars.

"Do you even know where we're going?" Arman asked as Tiuri led them down yet another tortuous corridor. "We're running out of time. You could be getting us lost for all we know."

"Of course I know where we're going," Tiuri insisted, vaguely remembering visiting the castle once as a child. If he was being honest, he was mostly guessing the path to the feast. "It's around this corner."

The door creaked as he pulled it open, but they paid it little mind as they hurried down a set of steps and into yet another corridor. It would be a miracle if anyone knew their way around the entire castle.

"Come on," he whispered as they ducked around a wall, praying that the area would be empty.

It was, in fact, not. "Where do you think you're going?" a heavily armoured guard asked as the five of them came to a shuddering halt in front of him.

Jussipo was just about to come forward - casting worried glances towards Foldo and Piak - with a story about how they were the sons of some visiting nobles and had gotten lost when the guard keeled over following a sharp blow to the head from the pommel of a dagger. The knights-to-be watched in confused shock as he fell over to reveal Iona behind him.

"Surprise," she said, tears evidently brimming in her eyes as she looked at the people she could almost call friends before she turned them in.

Arman rushed towards her in a fit of rage, his fist raised as he prepared to strike. He was followed by the rest of the novices, ready to jump to his defence if needed, but Arman was brought to a quick halt by the blade millimetres from his throat, glinting menacingly in the candlelight. Iona urged him back in what seemed to be reluctance.

"You have every right to hate me," she began, the dagger still held out in front of her.

"Well, we do hate you," Arman claimed, jumping forward again as Tiuri held out an arm to stop him from doing anything stupid.

"I hate me too. What I did... what I've done." She finally held the dagger back by her waist, a choked laugh escaping her as she blinked back tears that threatened to spill. "I'm sorry," Iona admitted, the tears that she had attempted to withhold streaking down her cheeks despite the wary glances the group gave each other, "for all of it. I'm sorrier than you'll ever know. But I just... I wanted you to know that."

With a determined look, she furiously wiped away the tears, seemingly angry at herself for showing such emotion. Iona turned away, ready to never see any of them again.

"Iona?" Tiuri called out.

Iona stopped, turning around as hope glittered in her eyes. Tiuri approached her, wrapping his arms around her in a comforting embrace as if to say that he forgave her, it was alright now, she was forgiven. She returned the hug with one arm, seeming to relax for a single moment.

And then the moment broke, shattering into hundreds of pieces of betrayal and hurt as she snatched the letter with her free hand.

"Every time you think you've got her pegged," Jaro chuckled as he entered the hall with two knights following, a sinister edge to his laugh, "she turns around and she surprises you all over again." Tiuri backed up to the safety of the group, fear and pain smothering his features as Iona hesitantly handed over the letter, a frown upon her face. Was this really the right thing to do? Yes, of course, Tiuri had dashed her hopes of becoming a knight, this was her only way forward. Jaro took the letter with a sickening smile, pocketing it. The group's hands reached for the hilts of their swords, prepared for a final display of courage. "Looks like the letter's not going to the king after all. Now, do you want to walk away and live or make a futile gesture of defiance and die?" Each of the boys drew their swords with little hesitation, willing to put their lives on the line to save the world they knew. "A futile gesture it is." The three Red Riders and Iona drew their swords as well, a determined grimace etched upon everyone's faces.

Jussipo turned to Piak, the brother that he had sworn to himself that he would protect at all costs. He couldn't risk Piak’s safety, not for anything, not for the world. "Stay there," he whispered, gently pushing him back.

With a fierce cry, Jaro charged towards them, the novices racing into the fight. This included Piak who had decided to ignore his brother's instructions and fight anyway with little regard for his own life and lack of training, using his lack of size to dodge any incoming attacks.

Sword clashed against sword, metal ringing out in the brutal melodies of battle. Deafening clangs that brought the children's hearts to their throats for, after all, despite all that they had been through, they were still children. Adrenaline surged through each person, the fight blurring time and reality as they solely focused on the simple motion of swinging their swords. Back and forth. Blows and parries. Attacks and counters.

Piak stayed close to Jussipo, ready to jump to his aid at a moment's notice. That was until Jaro had forced Tirui to the floor. The tip of his sword inched closer to Tiuri's throat, slowly threatening to slice through skin. Piak took the distraction as an excuse to nick the letter from Jaro's belt, instantly jumping to action.

"I've got it!" Piak called out at the same time Jussipo yelled out his name more out of fear than anger. Piak passed the letter to him as Jussipo looked towards him in a mix of frustration and admiration.

"What did I tell you?" he asked in breathless exasperation as he deflected another attack. "Tiuri!" he yelled as he flung the letter through the air, Tiuri deftly catching it. "What are you waiting for?"

"Go!" Arman and Piak insisted in sync as Tiuri rushed out of sight, quickly chased by Iona and Jaro.

In that brief moment of distraction, in those few seconds in which the group thought they could recover, one of the Red Riders lunged towards Piak, the most defenceless of them all. In that split second before the sword hit him, Jussipo saw what was happening. Not Piak, anyone but him. He wasn't even supposed to be here, he was too adventurous for his own good.

In that split second, Jussipo remembered everything he could about Piak. The way he would leap around as he practiced fighting with a wooden sword. The way he could talk about anything and everything for hours. How he would sneak him extra food from the kitchens after a particularly tough training session. How he was so carefree despite all the troubles in the world.

In that split second, Jussipo made a decision. Whatever it takes, he thought, whatever it takes to save my brother.

With a breathless but purpose filled shout of, “No!” he leapt in front of Piak. Jussipo tried to deflect the incoming sword but he knew there was little point in even attempting to raise his weapon before the sword plunged into his chest.

Everything seemed to slow down at that point. He felt as though he should cry out in pain, the agony coursing through him immeasurable. He could hear his heart beating inside his skull, strong and steady and pounding and loud, far too loud. Why was it so loud? It was becoming difficult to breathe, ragged gasps attempting to escape his lungs. Why couldn’t he breathe? Why was it so hard? The panic mixed with the agony in a violent surge, every ounce of his being fighting against the sickeningly cool metal inside him. And everything was becoming blurry and hazy and he wanted to just let go, to not be tethered to this world in which he felt so much pain. Why wouldn’t it stop hurting?

Was he dying?

And all he could do was blankly stare forward, hoping that the pain would simply vanish.

As he crumpled to the floor in a dazed heap, the faintest flicker of a smile swept across his face in the knowledge that Piak was safe, he had saved him. He hoped that Foldo would be alright. Sure, they had been friends for years, but it felt wrong to leave him after the two had just confessed their love for each other, but he would be fine, he had to be.

Piak stood behind his injured brother as the only emotion he could feel was pure shock. This was the person he had looked up to his entire life - Jussipo couldn’t die, the very thought was inconceivable. But he had to believe it, that sword should be inside him, but Jussipo had willingly sacrificed himself to save Piak. He crouched down next to his brother, attempting to support his limp body with shaking hands.

Foldo was the first to snap out of the trance. “JUSSIPO!” he screamed, his voice cracking, his world crumbling as the boy he loved threatened to slip through his fingers.

With a cry of despairing, rage fueled pain that no one his age should ever have to experience, Foldo swung his sword in a wide arc, forcing the knights backwards. Within seconds he was behind Jussipo, gently pulling him to his feet as he pushed Piak to safety behind him. Foldo helped Jussipo up the stairs, Arman close behind, knocking the Red Riders down the steps with a powerful blow.

The only thought running through Foldo’s head as he half dragged, half carried the stumbling Jussipo was how to save him. He was still alive, still fighting, there was still time. He would not let Jussipo die, he couldn’t, he wouldn’t forgive himself.

They rounded a corner into another deserted corridor, certain that they had lost the knights. Foldo laid Jussipo against a wall as carefully as he could, his heart clenching as Jussipo groaned in pain. Piak looked on in shock, unable to comprehend what was happening.

The world seemed to twist and turn and spin and blur as Jussipo tried to remain as still as possible, dizzying waves of nausea washing over him as darkness encroached his vision. Blood had already soaked through his tunic, slowly dripping onto the floor; a dark, thick substance that stained the ground and the novices’ moods. Foldo tried to press his hands against the wound, attempting to stop the flow of blood, but his hands shook and trembled, hot tears threatening to spill down his cheeks.

“It’s alright,” Arman murmured, “I’ll do it.” Foldo gave him a nod of appreciation, withdrawing his blood soaked hands.

“I should get help,” Foldo said, beginning to stand despite his very soul shattering before Jussipo loosely grabbed his hand, pulling him back down. Jussipo could hold on until Tiuri came back, he had to hold on.

“No, stay, please,” begged Jussipo.

“It’s alright, I’m not going anywhere. I’m right here.” Gently, he brushed dark locks of hair from Jussipo’s face, terrified to hurt him any further.

Jussipo looked to him in dazed confusion, attempting to ignore the searing pain that shot through him with each movement. “Am I going to die, Foldo?” he asked, sounding so innocent and quiet that Foldo had to resist the urge to let out a choked sob.

“No, no. You’re going to be fine, I won’t let you die,” he said with as much confidence as he could muster.

“That’s nice, I believe you. There’s a lot of blood, though.”

“Don’t look at it, just look at me.” Foldo grabbed his hand, not daring to glance away from his eyes for a moment as he offered a weak smile. “Just try to stay awake. Everything’s going to be alright, I promise.”

~~~~~~~~~~

Meanwhile, completely unaware of the tragedy that had befallen his friends, Tiuri ran despite the burning in his legs, despite feeling as though his lungs would tear. He was close, so close, the dining hall was only metres away. The pounding footsteps of Iona and Jaro thundered behind him but he didn’t dare to look back, he couldn’t risk slowing down.

The room fell into a stunned silence as he sprinted in, nobility providing him with questioning looks. It wasn’t every day that an Eviellan boy charged in dressed in fine clothing. Jaro and Iona came to a hasty standstill, quickly realising that they had failed. With an awkward glance at each other, they subtly backed away, hoping that they could still escape with their lives.

Slowly, Tiuri took several careful steps forward, panting slightly as his eyes darted around the room, flicking to Viridian who simply stared at him, apparently not worried about the implications the delivery of the letter could bring. One look sent chills down Tiuri’s spine as haunting eyes met his own. The guests studied him, looking down at him, judging him for his clearly Eviellan descent despite his obvious nobility. As Tiuri approached King Favian, two guards blocked his path.

“I have a letter,” he started, his voice wavering as he stood before the most powerful man in the three kingdoms, “for the king.”

“What?” the king queried.

“What letter?” Prince Iridian asked, oozing power.

“Who cares ‘what letter’?” Fantumar demanded as he stood up, trying to play his part in stopping the letter from reaching its destination. “Does the royal court now allow mere children to enter the presence of the king?”

“My father died for this!” Tiuri cried before turning to the king. “The Black Knight with the White Shield died too.”

“The Black Knight?” the king asked, his interest piqued at the mention of such a well respected knight.

“I have his ring as proof.” He removed it from his pocket, the precious silver almost glowing in the light of the room. Favian continued to listen in concern. “He was slaughtered by Prince Viridian’s Red Riders.” Gasps echoed around the room whilst Viridian remained stoic. “I saw it with my own eyes.”

“Who is this boy?”

“He is nobody,” Fantumar insisted, sounding remarkably suspicious considering Tiuri’s claim.

“I am Tiuri, son of Sir Tiuri the Valiant. Born of Eviellan, raised in Dagonaut. And we are all in danger if you do not read this letter.”

The king looked to Prince Iridian. With a nod, he said, “Let him through.”

Hesitantly, Tiuri approached the king, flicking a fearful glance towards Viridian. He bowed, holding the letter out in front of him as King Favian stood up to take it. And there, written out in an elegant script, sat the words that confirmed Viridian’s betrayal. Twenty families he had chosen to die, a member of one of those families slowly dying in the arms of a boy of another of those families within the very castle that Viridian resided.

The king studied it, hardly daring to believe what was in front of him. His own son desired to betray him? To kill his allies? No, it seemed impossible. Reluctantly, he turned to his youngest son. “What is this?” he questioned, not even sure if he wanted to know the answer. Viridian returned a blank stare in response. “Treachery? You take my crown? Kill my friends and allies?” He paused, still reeling from the news. “Answer me!” he yelled, fury lacing every word.

“You dare ignore your king?” Iridian asked, almost as furious as his father - despite sensing the betrayal all along - but twice as vicious. “Bow your head to your father!” Short, sharp paces clicked across the stone as he advanced towards his brother. “I will not tell you again. Bow your head. Beg for your king’s mercy.”

“If the world is to be healed,” Viridian began ominously, looking through the window to see the blood moon reaching its peak, a fierce glow shining into the hall, “then the power he has, the power you want to be yours, has to be mine. The decisions you take-” He stood up, walking up to his brother. “-the decisions the people on that list take will now be taken by me.”

“What is this?”

“Lives you’ve all led, lives of comfort and luxury, lives built on the bodies of soldiers like me and my enemies, are now over.” If it wasn’t for the cruelty dripping off of Viridian’s words, he would seem to be the most reasonable one in the room. “And yes, freedom is over too. And the world will have peace at last. A peace that will last forever.”

“He’s mad,” was all the king could offer to Iridian.

Iridian looked to a knight standing close by, handing him the letter. “Sir Tristan, gather your knights and send them to these families, they may need protection.” Sir Tristant gave a sharp nod, quickly leaving the hall.

“It has been foretold,” Viridian stated with an almost giddy smile. “And there’s nothing any of us can do to stop it.” He looked to Tiuri with a sneer. “Even you.”

“Brother,” Iridian hissed, drawing his sword, “I beg to differ.”

Viridian drew his own sword with a snarl. Brother pitted against brother, familial love forgotten as the two faced each other as enemies. The swords clashed together in a blur of experience and anger. Viridian was the first to give in, lowering his weapon slightly and subjecting himself to his brother’s will. Iridian took the opportunity to sink the sword into his own brother’s chest, killing him almost instantly. Horrified gasps escaped the gathered crowd as the prince that had attempted to betray them was murdered before their eyes, Favian the most mortified of them all.

With one last look at the fully risen moon, Viridian keeled over. Dead.

But then came the darkness. From where Viridian’s body lay came a dread filled rumbling, shaking the entire room. Dark droplets of blood rose from his body, hovering in the air as they shimmered with magic and evil. They popped and fizzled in grey wisps of smoke, gathering and collecting as Viridian’s corpse was pulled from the ground by some sort of invisible force.

A rolling cloud of grey smog seemed to engulf Viridian, coalescing around him in a violent storm of malevolent darkness. Everyone in the room rushed away as the blackening cloud stretched out, absorbing every speck of light.

But Tiuri stood his ground. He may not have the magic he thought he did coursing through his veins but the idea of backing away, of faltering, never crossed his mind. He had faith.

From the dark emerged Viridian’s face surrounded by swirling wisps of the smoke, glaring out at the world he had sought to right. “NO!” he screamed. “I was to be the light that corrected this world! And you, boy, were to be the darkness! It was foretold, this cannot be!”

As his rage seemed to grow with every second, so did the size of the smoke. Churning and surging together in violent clashes.

“But that’s where you’re wrong, I wasn’t supposed to be anything,” Tiuri replied simply, looking back into the crowd.

With shaky steps, Lavinia pushed her way through the throng of onlooking nobles. Her heart thundered in her chest, threatening to jump out at any moment. Any sense of logic had deserted her. Surely she couldn’t defeat whatever this was. The magic inside her, however, strongly disagreed. Its warmth spread throughout her body, tingling and gentle as it guided her to where she was supposed to be.

Her eyes were wide as she approached, fearing that she couldn’t do what was expected of her, couldn’t save everyone. “I’m scared,” she whispered, her breath escaping her as everything went cold the closer she got to the cloud of darkness.

“I know.” And he took her hand, guiding her into the darkness she was destined to defeat until it swallowed her whole as Viridian seethed, the smoke boiling in anticipation.

With gritted teeth, Lavinia allowed the magic inside her to spread out in a fierce glow so bright Tiuri had to look away. Viridian squinted at it, the light seemed to burn him away into wisps of dust.

“Foolish girl,” Viridian uttered with a maniacal smirk. He turned to Tiuri, the black smoke curling around him until he was obscured from view, ostensibly whisked away from the light. “You cannot defeat me, I am too powerful for you alone.” Lavinia’s eyes darted around in a panic as the cloud began to engulf her, the light shining out of her dimming.

“But that’s where you’re wrong,” Tiuri claimed, coming back into view with a dull glow, “she’s not alone.”

Tiuri and Lavinia’s intertwined hands shone with the brightest light the world had ever seen. An intense flash of white that had saved Tiuri, passing the tiniest amounts of Lavinia’s magic into him and igniting the beginnings of a power within him so great that it would be decades before it was fully understood. For now, they pushed every ounce of energy they had into sending the flow of magic into Viridian. Grunting cries of strain escaped them as all of their strength was forced into defeating Viridian.

“Stop!” Viridian yelled as parts of his magic induced body disintegrated.

“Never,” Lavinia hissed.

With a great cacophony of sound and an explosion of light that illuminated the night for miles, Viridian was blown out of existence. The darkness had been vanquished.

The two children breathed heavy sighs of relief, panting from the exertion. “You did it.” Tiuri beamed.

“We did it,” corrected Lavinia with a weak smile. “Guess you had some magic in you after all.”

“I’m not sure what it was, to be honest.” He studied his hands in confusion before looking up at Lavinia. “Are you okay?”

“Never been better.” And then she collapsed to the floor, Tiuri rushing to catch her, proving that she was, in fact, not okay.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got you.”

She gave a weak laugh. “Would now be a good time to get that reward?”

~~~~~~~~~~

The corridor that the novices had taken cover in glowed with a fierce light as Lavinia’s magic spread throughout the castle. “They did it, they must’ve done,” Arman said hopefully. “Lavinia must’ve come back.”

“They’ll be here soon, just hold on a little longer, please,” Foldo told Jussipo who, even now, was still clinging to life, refusing to let death take him.

Arman’s hands had done very little to stop the insistent flow of blood, the red liquid staining his fingers. Despite his efforts, Jussipo had lost far too much blood for their likings. All colour had been drained from his face, ghostly white in the flickering candlelight. Shallow breaths occasionally made their way past his lips but they were often ragged and forced. His eyes were strained from the pain and it was evident that it was a struggle just to keep them open.

“Y’know, they had better knight me after all this,” Jussipo said with a weak smile, coughing slightly.

“It’ll be a grand celebration,” Piak stated, speaking up for the first time since the fight. “There’ll be a feast and tournaments and everyone can sing songs about you.”

“That would be nice. Their songs can’t beat mine, though, can they, Fol?”

“No, you’ve always had the best songs,” Foldo replied, a soft laugh escaping him.

It was only moments later when Tiuri and Lavinia stumbled into the corridor. Whilst she had regained some of her strength, she was still using Tiuri as support, his arm securely wrapped around her waist as she leaned on him.

The pair stopped short when they saw what had happened, the novices crowded around Jussipo’s weak, dying body. Tiuri and Lavinia hurried over as quickly as they could despite Lavinia’s fragile state, kneeling beside him. Jussipo tried to sit up upon seeing them, gritting his teeth and wincing in pain.

“Easy, easy,” Foldo repeated as he gently pushed him back down with Piak’s help, pushing back Jussipo’s hair again, “easy.”

“Did we do it? Did we stop him?” Jussipo asked, terrified that everything they had done would be in vain.

Tiuri smiled. “How could we not stop him?”

Everyone let out a sigh of relief. Jussipo smiled. Even if he died he could go knowing that he had helped save the world. But the feeling of relief and celebration was brief as they focused once again on the tragedy.

“Has he messed up my hair with all his… all his fussing?” Jussipo joked, the faintest flicker of a smile upon his face despite the stabbing pain throughout his abdomen.

“Your hair looks good.”

“Better than good,” Arman added. “It looks great.”

“I’ve always had great hair,” Jussipo claimed, looking to the boy that had quickly become his entire world, “Ain’t that right, Fol?”

Foldo chuckled softly despite the tears brimming in his eyes and the clenching of his heart, placing a hand on Jussipo’s shoulder. He couldn’t let him go, there had to be something he could do.

With a peaceful release of breath, Jussipo closed his eyes, finally free of pain.

“He will be alright, won’t he?” Piak asked, his voice threatening to break as his confidence faltered, tears glimmering in his own eyes.

Shakily, Foldo placed two fingers against Jussipo’s neck, desperate for any sign of life. He was met with a weak but persistent pulse. “He’s still with us, just,” he sighed gratefully.

Lavinia’s hand hovered over Jussipo’s wound as she snapped out of her fatigued daze, a shimmering aura glowing around it, but it was fractured, flickering, faltering. “No,” Tiuri hissed, grabbing her arm. No one commented on how the magic looked stronger the closer Tiuri was to it. “You’re too weak, you’ve just defeated Viridian.”

“If I healed you then maybe I can save Jussipo,” Lavinia countered, attempting not to sound as exhausted as she felt.

“This injury is far worse. You could die, Lavinia.”

“If I don’t then he will die.” Lavinia turned back to Jussipo with a fierce determination, Tiuri’s hand falling back to her shoulder.

The last remnants of magic and energy still residing in her soul were dragged out. Forced through her veins, scraping and burning as it clawed its way out. The magic seemed gentle and warm in comparison as it floated above the wound, an incandescent glow that seemed to twist and swirl. Blood stopped leaking out, vanishing altogether as the skin stitched itself back together. Lavinia collapsed back into Tiuri’s waiting arms, welcoming the comfort of sleep.

And then it was over, a scar being the only reminder. Jussipo blinked rapidly as he awoke, confused and mystified as the agonising tear in his chest dulled to a mild ache. Hesitantly, he placed a hand where he was sure the wound had been, amazed to find no blood. And everyone was smiling, they were all alright, they had won.

“You’re alright, you’re alive,” Foldo cried, tears freely falling down his cheeks as he grinned.

“I should hope so, you’d be lost without me,” Jussipo chuckled, looking up at him, the world brightening as the darkness of death left him. “You couldn’t have found a nicer corridor for me to die in?” He looked around the dusty, deserted hall.

“We didn’t have much time, the Red Riders were-”

“Shut up.” And Jussipo pushed himself to meet Foldo’s lips in a kiss of relief and passion and ecstasy, gently cupping his face in his hands. They felt invulnerable, immune to the dangers life threw at them.

“Eww,” Piak groaned despite his smile.

The pair broke apart with breathless smiles, their hearts pounding with love. There was no way they weren’t alive. Jussipo looked to his brother who threw his arms around Jussipo in a tight embrace, almost scared to let go. “You can’t get rid of me that easily, I’m not going anywhere.”

And they were happy.

44 notes · View notes

xx-thedarklord-xx · 5 years ago

Text

Right Question

“Mister Potter! Over here! Can I get—”

“No.”

“I’m from Witch Weekly, can you—”

“No.”

“Mister Potter, I’ve heard you finished the Marauders’ Mischief. Unique name for a Youth Centre, don’t you think? Can you tell us the story behind—”

“No.”

“Do you think—”

“No.”

When the reporters quit trying, Harry smiled less polite and more smug before clearing his throat. “Lovely press conference, same time next month?”

————

“Never met someone so bloody difficult in my life.”

“You’d think from the stories that Potter would be nice, but he’s a right tool if you ask me.”

“I heard he made one of the Daily Prophet’s interns cry.”

“Ours too! Witch Weekly won’t even hire interns anymore because of it.”

“I could take him refusing to talk. I could even take his one-word answers, but it’s the damn smirk and passive-aggressive attitude that drives me mental.”

“I’m flooing in sick the next time my editor hands me another Potter assignment. Rather spend the night with Devil’s Snare than interview him.”

“Yeah, but don’t you like bondage, Pansy?”

“Shut up.”

—————

“Smith, you’re on the obituaries this week,” Glenn Bitterwood, chief editor for the Daily Prophet said.

“I was late one time! This is an unfair punishment.”

Bitterwood ignored him completely. “Ryland, you’re handling the sports section.”

“Oi! That’s my specialty.”

“Yeah, well next time don’t write about Gobstones. No one cares about Gobstones. So you get politics this week.”

“Parkinson, you get the gossip column again. Keep up the good work. Reader interest was high last week.”

Parkinson preened among the glares and Bitterwood had to wonder if she thrived on hostility.

“The rest of you still have work for tonight’s paper, so get to it.”

The way they scrambled would never not be amusing. “Hold up. I almost forgot. I need someone to interview Potter.”

The silence that followed was uncomfortable and no one would meet his eyes.

“I suddenly remembered I have to take my kids to—well to something.”

“Parkinson, you don’t have kids.”

“I’m sick.” A cough and a fake sneeze followed before several people shouted that they too were sick.

“Look, I know he’s difficult—”

“That’s an understatement.”

“Keep interrupting me Smith and you’ll be on obituaries for a month,” Bitterwood threatened. “Potter isn’t the…friendliest but his name sells. His open house for the Youth Centre is in a few days and if we don’t get the scoop then someone else will.”

“Sir, with all due respect, we’ve never gotten the scoop when it comes to Potter.”

“If you like your job, one of you will volunteer and just maybe we can turn our luck around.”

“I’ll do it.”

Bitterwood’s head snapped up and he winced when he realized it was the new intern.

“Dots, that’s nice of you but I really can’t afford to look for a replacement should you quit.”

“I finished my assignment,” Dots said and her eyes were so earnest. That wouldn’t last long in this line of work. “I’ve always looked up to Harry Potter.”

“I don’t know why,” Smith sneered. “Man’s a fucking prick.”

“Don’t ever meet your heroes, kid,” Parkinson winked.

Against his better judgment, Bitterwood said, “Alright, you can do it, but don’t quit if he makes you cry. No one has applied in months, there’s no one to take your place.”

He just hoped she’d come back in one piece.

—————

“Mister Potter, my name is Sierra Dots and I’m with—”

“No.”

Sierra frowned when Potter wouldn’t look up from his blueprints.

“I wanted to ask you about—”

“No.”

How could she get anything if all he could say was, ‘no’? Maybe she shouldn’t have taken the assignment after all.

“I don’t mean to bother you—”

“Well you are,” Potter huffed, eyes narrowing on a section of the blueprint. “I’m very busy and giving my time to vultures that twist my words is not my idea of fun.”

“I—this is my first interview and I’ve always wanted to meet you.” Potter’s eyes closed before a hand rubbed across his face, ring on his finger glinting in the sunlight from the window. “If I could just ask you some questions that would—”

“One question,” Potter interrupted, finally looking at her. His eyes were greener than the media depicted but definitely not friendly. “You can ask me one question. If I think it’s a good one, I’ll answer it. If it’s not, well you know where the door is.”

Oh Merlin, the pressure. Sierra bit her lip as her mind blanked. Training, she had that, right? What was she supposed to say in a situation like this? When Potter’s brows arched, Sierra knew she’d have to say something.”

“I’m waiting.” Potter’s arms crossed and the movement drew her attention to his hand.

Before she could stop herself, she blurted. “How is your husband?”

“My husband?” Potter regarded her intently. “Draco is fine.”

“I heard he won a Merit Award for his discovery of the 13th use in Dragon’s Blood.” Nerves, that’s all she could blame her mouth on. Potter was way more intimidating than she thought.

When Potter’s arms fell to his side and his eyes softened, Sierra had to do a double-take.

“He did,” Potter mumbled, a smile lifting the corner of his lips. “He does things with Potions that I can’t even fathom. I was never good at the subject, to be honest, but I could watch him brew all day.”

“Your husband is good,” Sierra said, hands twiddling with the edge of her robes. “In my potion’s class at Magi-University, they had us use his potion’s manual.”

Potter put down his blueprint and leaned against the table. There was a friendliness to him that hadn’t been there before.

“He worked on that for years,” Potter whispered and there was a faraway look in his eyes. “Can’t tell you the number of times Draco almost gave up. I’ve always been proud of him but seeing him be proud of himself is something else entirely.”

When Potter twisted his wedding ring, Sierra couldn’t help but smile. This was who she thought she’d be meeting. This was the hero of her youth.

“My mum wanted me to be a Potion Master,” Sierra said, relief coursing through her when he actually seemed interested. “I was good at it, but I didn’t have the passion for it.”

“I know all about that,” Potter shook his head with a small chuckle. “I was good at Quidditch, great even, but I didn’t have the passion for it. Got 7 different offers for team placement, and I could’ve made a career out of it but it wasn’t for me. I wanted to do something else with my life.”

“Like your buildings? Architecture was it for you?” She pulled out her quill and notebook.

“Yeah,” Potter smiled. “I wanted to help people, but I also wanted to create things. I’m not interested in building just for the sake of it, or to compete in who can build the tallest structure. I want my buildings to be used for something good. I want them to mean something.”

“Like the Youth Centre?” Sierra prompted. “Can I ask you some questions about that?”

Potter looked to the blueprint and then back at her before he sighed and summoned a chair.

“Alright. I’ve got some time before I meet Draco for lunch. Ask away.”

—————

When Sierra made it back to the office, she could hardly contain her excitement.

“Oh, you’re back later than we thought,” Bitterwood said as he looked over Ryland’s work. “Did you need time to compose yourself? No shame in crying, I always say.”

“No.” She tried not to snort. Potter might not be that pleasant or kind, and he definitely was a bit too curt for her tastes, but it was obvious how much he loved his husband. The dichotomy to him was fascinating.

“I got the interview.”

Parkinson dropped the book she had been holding on Smith’s head in shock.

“Ow, you fucking b—”

“What?” Bitterwood demanded, hand extended and fingers impatiently wiggling.

“He’s really nice,” she half-lied as the interview was passed to Bitterwood.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Bitterwood whistled, eyes moving quickly across the page and his tone was awed. “You actually did it.”

Pride filled her when she realized everyone else was just as awed. Potions might have been a safe option but this, this was what she wanted. Journalism was her passion and all she wanted was the chance to prove herself.

“How?” Parkinson whispered as she tried to stand on her tippy toes to see over Bitterwood’s shoulder. “How did you do it?”

Sierra might be naive and sometimes too kind for a reporter, but she wasn’t stupid. No way was she going to tell them that all you had to do to get Potter to talk was to ask about his husband.

“I just asked the right question.”

-Fin-

------

I want to thank @pomponia for looking this over for me, much appreciated. And @rieraclaelin for listening to the idea and liking it 🥺

#Drarry #Draco Malfoy #Harry Potter #XxTheDarkLordxX Writes #Fluff #Reporters #Harry is a bit gruff #and um #well #shksks

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power106hq · 4 years ago

Photo

𝚀𝚄𝙴𝙴𝙽𝚂 𝙲𝙾𝚄𝚁𝚃 𝙴𝙿𝙸𝚂𝙾𝙳𝙴 𝙾𝙽𝙴: 𝚂𝙾𝙲𝙲𝙴𝚁 𝙼𝙾𝙼𝚂, 𝙲𝙰𝚁 𝚁𝙴𝙿𝙾𝚂, 𝙰𝙽𝙳 𝚃𝚁𝙸𝙲𝙺𝚂.

QUEENS COURT is now LIVE! Powered by Power 106 FM in partnership with TS MADISON and KHIA. The podcast will go live at 9 PM (yes we late) every SUNDAY. Starting off with a recap of the week, KHIA will share her opinions on the biggest news stories and rumors of the past seven days. The court will then be accepting callers (anons) to send in their own thoughts about the past week. To close the show, KHIA and TS will issue out presents to the celebrities discussed in the recap. Click below to stream the full episode!

TS MADISON: We are live baby! Welcome viewers and callers to Queens Court starring myself and the legendary Ms.Khia Thug Misses! We are going to get right into the gig tonight and waste no time. Now remember that everything said is alleged unless we say otherwise. We don’t need any of these rich folk trynna get us shut down or give us gag orders. Starting off this episode we are going to be having a segment of DIVORCE COURT. Now Miss.Khia how do we feel about some alleged trouble in paradise for the West family?

KHIA: Yes, allegedly Meat Lofi and Yeezus the Goddess marriage is on the rocks due to Meatys lack of housewife abilities. Allegedly Mr. Yeezus is sick and tired of his wife not being able to be his rock when he needs her to be. The people are saying Yeezus asks his wife multiple times during the day for his meds and a crustless ham and cheese and she reportedly can’t even handle that task. Allegedly he also is criticizing her ability as a mother. Reports are saying that the two’s eldest child has been playing tee-ball for about three months now, and Meaty hasn’t showed up to one game. As a mother and wife, your job is to be there for your kids. Bitch, your baby is out there playing her heart out in the dirt the least you could do is push that van to the park and give some orange peels out to the kids. Meat Lofi, I don’t really know what else to say about these allegations. I hope that they aren’t true and you’re actually out there with the other moms on game day. What else could you possibly be doing? I’m on team Yeezus with this situation, a real woman takes care of her tribe! I’m gon’ sentence this dizzy ass bitch to a year of Home Economics classes. Hopefully carrying around them plastic babies will help you take of your own! NEXT CASE!!!

TS: Wow, okay. Moving on to CIVIL COURT we have reports of rapper Saint being involved in an altercation with the members of DVSN, who as you all should know are signed to his management label. We were actually able to get some insiders tea on what that was about. Now Miss. Khia how do we feel about what took place earlier this week between the OVO family?

KHIA: Yes, apparently the stars were out for somebody’s event last week and Saint was one the bigger names mentioned, but for a completely different reason. Now, allegedly Paint

TS: Wait Miss.Khia, who’s Paint?

KHIA: Oh, that’s what the ‘girls’ call him ‘round there on the Ave. ‘Paint Leave-A-Nigga-Shitty Arazi’ has not been paying his artist at all! Allegedly he’s been in debt for a while now due to him receiving costly services from the girls with ‘no no spots’ down there at the piers. Now the people are saying he’s been taking care of a woman by name of Dashiki but we gon get into that tea on a later date. But apparently this is the reason why his artist aren’t getting paid. This led to an altercation at the event last week where Paint got jumped by the struggling artists. I’m 100% sure this isn’t the first time Paint has been chucked around like this. Allegedly he’s been the host of annual “Arazi Bukkake” parties every first Sunday of Pride Month, so I’m sure this was familiar territory for him at first. But when them niggas started really lettin’ lose on him it became a bit too much. I’m gonna sentence Paint to three years of self defense classes and two years of personal finance classes. NEXT CASEEEE!!!

TS:

KHIA: Speaking of personal finances and leaving niggas shitty, next on the docket is Miss. Xymira Futon in BANKRUPTCY COURT. Now I’m not really gon’ spend much time on this one because I don’t believe this is her fault entirely. We the people allege that Ms. Futon has been getting played her entire career by our previous defendant Mr. Yahweh “Crazy Steve” West. It’s being alleged that Crazy Steve hasn’t been paying Cosmo and this resulted in the parking boot being clamped on her beat up ass G-Wagon. I’m Team Cosmo on this one how you feel about this shit sis?

TS: Girl, I-.

KHIA: You don’t wanna talk about this? Well I’ma leave it alone but like I been telling y’all hoes: Don’t trust no nigga, don’t trust no Christian, don’t trust no sissy?! Don’t trust Crazy Steve either. I’m sentencing Ms.Futon to remedial reading classes. Bitch ain’t no way in hell you read yo contract the way Crazy Steve swallowing up all yo’ coins. Go learn how to read and find a way to get out the asylum bitch. NEXT CASEEE!!!

TS: Okay, well. We are moving on to the COURT OF APPEALS. Now Miss. Thugga has been spotted around the beautiful city of Los Angeles for the first time in months since Señora Sabrina went on that lady’s show and told everyone that he was violent towards her. Now, Sabrina did have a lot of women and movements behind her that shamed the man but Miss. Thugga also has his believers who don’t believe the entire truth was told in the interview. Miss.Khia do we think the people should appeal Miss. Thugga’s sentence of cancellation?

KHIA: Yes, well just to recap apparently Sabrina is alleging that Thugga had been abusing her while and when they were together. She didn’t speak up about it while it was going on and we the people wanna know why? Why now out of all times would you tell us ‘bout how this man been knockin’ you in yo shit for the better half of y’alls relationship? I don’t know bout this one y’all, I’m team Thugga on this. I think Sabrina’s ultimate plan was to trap him with a baby but since she’s not able to really produce children like that, ALLEGEDLY, the plans fell through. Also the people have been saying that Thugga had already moved on to another women around the time she went to cryin’ on that old lady show. Now it all makes sense. Bitch you mean to tell me that this man been kickin’ off in yo ass for that long and you ain’t hit a Tina Turner and dart yo skinny ass across the street where grass is a lil bit greener? I just don’t believe this at all! Now that another bitch gathering up all of Thugga’s coins you wanna go to hollering bout how he been kickin’ off in yo ass? Well I’ll tell you this, for that amount of money a month bitch you should’ve continued to get knocked upside yo muthafuckin’ head! The court will appeal Thugga’s sentence and also sentence this lying ass bitch to a lie detector test so we can really see what’s going on here. Next case, I’m tired of talkin ‘bout this bitch.

TS: Oh Lord in Heaven, now we gon’ do our last segment before we start taking some callers. JUVENILE COURT also known as YOUNG DUMB AND FULL OF CUM! is now in session. Now allegedly some people spotted Miss. Chloe Love getting frisky with some D-Listers at an event earlier this week. Miss.Khia how do we feel about this?

KHIA: Well apparently Chloe “Slim Thug” Jones was seen at the drive-in party with one leg on the dashboard and the other hooked in the door handle, chile. Witnesses are alleging that Ms. Jones was sitting on the center console with her legs open wide as all outside while two other men were playing tether ball with her bean. We the people are alleging that these two men were rappers Blueface Bleedem and PontiacMadeDDG. I really don’t have a whole lot to say about this freaky ass lil bitch. I just want to ask, bitch how dumb could you possibly be to let these two melon munchers spread you open like that in the middle of a parking lot? The girls of the girls were supposedly out there trying to watch Precious in peace, but yo trifling ass wouldn’t allow them to do that? I’m sentencing yo pussy to the gas chambers bitch. CASE CLOSED!

TS: Okay that is all the time we have for cases today. The lines are open for callers if the people want to chime in and tell us how they feel about this past week. We’ll be spending the next hour talking to the callers before we get into the gift giving segment of the show.

#[ * 𝑸𝑼𝑬𝑬𝑵𝑺 𝑪𝑶𝑼𝑹𝑻. ft. episodes. ]

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namjoonspiration · 4 years ago

Text

ON [3]

Pairing: Jungkook x reader

Rating: M

Word Count: 7.7k

Summary: Jungkook’s life in the Citadel after everyone escapes is revealed. Later, you have an unfortunate encounter with a Death spirit named Hoseok; however, it leads you to the right place at the right time.

Warnings/Tags: violence, imprisonment and torture (again, not too hardcore because that’s not the point of the story), pain, escape, destruction, heartbreak, trauma

Author’s Note: Sorry, I lost track of the days, but I meant to post this earlier because the last chapter was so short. Anyway, I decided to rate this chapter M because this chapter consists of depictions of torture, imprisonment and pain that is up to the viewer’s discretion whether or not to read that material. As always, enjoy!

Masterlist

Part 3

Year 3049 – 388 years after the Fall of the World

“Haul that weevil to his feet!”

Hands harshly clawed and gripped under Jungkook’s arms. He groaned in pain and was drug up to eye level with the menacing Lead Governor. Blood dripped down the man’s—no, monster’s—arms and face, painting his skin to show the truth of who he was. A murderer. How many Mages did he manage to slaughter tonight?

“You brat!” The red monster hissed, spraying spittle in Jungkook’s face. “Do you have any idea what you’ve just cost me? Cost this city?” He raised his knifepoint to the young Mage’s throat. Fresh, hot blood transferred from the sharp metal to under his chin. “You kids had it good. Fed, sheltered, clothed, unharmed, vouched for by that fucking old bag, Michael!”

“Doesn’t matter,” Jungkook replied lowly. “You took us away from our families, our home. Don’t think that because you’ve tricked yourself into thinking that you’ve provided for us, it excuses you and this entire damned city from the atrocities you committed against my people.”

“I’d hold your tongue boy. You are, after all, the last Mage in the city. You are quite outnumbered.”

“Yeah? What are you going to do about it?” Jungkook smirked fiendishly. “Lock me up and throw away the key? Make me grow plants for the rest of my life?” He began to laugh humorlessly. The fucking irony. Despite the endless heat of the outside, his blood was cold in his veins.

The Lead Governor let out his own grin, one that promised cruelty.

And there it was. Two worlds in a universe of darkness and pain, challenging each other to do their worst.

“No.” He said at last, eyes searching the Mage’s face for any sign of fear.

He would find none. Jungkook was not afraid of this sad excuse for a man of power. There were only two things to be afraid of—the darkness and Hell. When he died, he would not be going to Hell. As for the darkness… he’d stand a better chance against it then these cowards.

Get ready to start losing everything, old man. Your time is starting to run out, Jungkook’s heartless eyes told him. But deep down, he was glowing with pride. He was glad you had escaped and were probably far, far away. If he couldn’t save himself, he was happy he had saved so many and given them a second chance at life.

“I’ve got a special place reserved for you where you’ll be more of use to us. I’ve already got a few ideas… Big ideas.” the Lead Governor smiled in triumph. He may have lost all of the Citadel’s Mages, but this one. Jungkook had just proved to be a valuable asset. “Take him down to level Five. This brat needs to be taught a lesson before we move forward with reconditioning.” The black guard who’d taken him down replied in affirmation, signaling the soldiers to take Jungkook away.

Jungkook tried to tap into his magic, but he was severely weak. Whatever was on that guard’s blade had his magic writhing in pain, screeching like a wounded animal. The loss of his magic made it feel like he’s lost the ability to walk. He betted that his magic would heal soon. He’s a dead man to the Citadel without it, and they wanted him alive for whatever sick plan of theirs. Whatever it was, he wouldn’t be participating. At least not voluntarily.

They drug him back down to that cold, wet dungeon, but they passed the level that he’d been living on for the past 10 years of his life. He was taken to a much darker part of the seemingly endless levels down, down, down stone steps upon steps to where the light of day does not touch. Metal hinges creaked, and the black guards unceremoniously tossed him into a cell. Jungkook slid across the slimy dungeon floor littered with straw. They yanked harshly on his arms, ripping his shirt off and clamping too tight manacles around his wrists that immediately dug and rubbed his skin raw. Suddenly, he was lifted up by those manacles, chains—black like oil—attached to them and to a flywheel the guards turned until his toes were left touching the ground. His shoulders barked in pain, but he gritted his teeth, refusing to scream in front of these monsters.

He finally got a good look at those black guard. Humans, definitely. Dressed in all black from the top of their head to their toes. He could barely make out a thick meshy material where their eyes, nose and mouth would be. They looked like cloned shadows.

One of them approached him—the same one that took him down. The guard held the knife covered in Jungkook’s blood and poked it sternly against his chest threateningly. Jungkook’s magic shook in his veins at the feel of whatever it was that coated that blade. His magic may be afraid, but he wasn’t.

“You won’t break me,” Jungkook hissed. “One day, I will walk out of this Citadel with it burning to the ground behind me. That’s a promise, and I always keep my promises.” His breathing picked up, chest puffing out with the increased ventilation. His body was preparing for whatever torture his jabs were about to bring him.

The guard snorted and reeled his bladed hand back. The metal sliced cleanly in an arch from the Mage’s right collarbone to left hip.

His magic began screeching inside of him again, shying as far away as it can from the armed man. Jungkook’s body went limp at the pain, too exhausted to let out any cry. Sweat dripped down his face, mixing with the dried blood that remained there from his head wound. He looked brutal—like he’s already been through several beatings, but no one has managed to break him yet.

Distantly, he heard himself letting out breathless laughter. His soul was moving farther and farther inside himself until he didn’t even know what was happening to him; what he was doing what day it was; how old he was.

He thought it went on for years. He was beaten too many times to count. They kept him chained up at all times and subdued his magic regularly with those poisoned blades. However, even though his magic refused to express itself whenever he was conscious enough to will it for simple levitation practice—to see if his magic would want to come out at all—it grew and grew like a ball of fire. Every year that he could older, his magic got stronger and more powerful. He had to release his magic, or it would burn him alive.

When he couldn’t coax it to express itself, he would wait and wait and wait. His magic started with simple hiccups, and then turned blasts of energy hitting the guards and walls around him, for which earned him more beatings and days without sunlight. Until the Lead Governor heard about these outbursts.

He realized then that he could brandish Jungkook into a weapon. Not just one against the darkness outside, but against neighboring civilizations that proved to be a nuisance to him and the Governing Circle. To test the Mage’s abilities, he would send haggard-looking people down into the dungeons for execution by the Mage’s fire.

Jungkook vehemently refused. He would not kill innocent people. The Lead Governor tried to convince that these people were criminals who plotted against the well-being of the Citadel. Jungkook didn’t give a shit even if it were true and continued to refuse the Governor’s orders. However, it did not stop him from getting what he wanted. He knew Jungkook’s magic was a ticking time bomb. Even if Jungkook refused to burn those people himself, his magic would do it at some point. And despite Jungkook’s efforts to suppress his magic, it did exactly what the Governor wanted. Even so, they dumped Jungkook outside in the harsh sun for endless hours afterwards as punishment for his insolence.

He never knew where he was in the Citadel. It was seemed like a different place every time. He could never get his vision to focus on his surroundings due to the glare of the light against his eyes, which were starved of any kind of light for weeks—months? So, he’d lay in the sunlight and try to pretend he was somewhere else beyond the Citadel. The white of the light allowed him to imagine a greener place with blue waters and chirping birds. And you were there too, smiling at him, waiting for him to join you in that peaceful place. Before he could join you, he was dragged back to his small hell deep below the earth, where the darkest parts of his mind would take over his heart.

He thought to himself, I’m merely a tool, useless without a wielder. After about the second or third round of these executions, Jungkook was convinced he lost control of his magic. If he couldn’t keep it from burning people alive, what could he possibly do? The Lead Governor now controlled his magic. It performed those executions. It was the thing the Lead Governor treasured above you. Jungkook was merely a vessel—one that took the magic wherever the Lead Governor willed it.

Nonetheless, his magic became more and more volatile. Jungkook couldn’t control the bursts of power that now escaped from him several times in a single day. At first it made him sneeze, like he had a cold, but it quickly morphed into the kind of power that cracked stone walls. Several of the guards posted outside his cell had been roasted to a crisp one particularly bad evening. Even the Lead Governor began to receive a healthy dose of fear at the news. However, it meant the worse for Jungkook.

The Lead Governor entered his cell one day—he wasn’t sure of the date—with a “present” for him.

New shackles.

Except those weren’t any ordinary shackles. These were made of twisted wood covered in inch long black, metal thorns. When they exchanged the shackles on his wrists, Jungkook’s spirit lifted for mere seconds the metal chains he’d had on his wrist for so long clanged to the ground. But that sweet taste of freedom was short-lived and replaced with a new layer of hell that he could not hide from.

The tips of the thorns were bathed in a fluid of the same family as the poison that liked to use to make his magic tremble and whimper in his blood. The barbs pierced his skin constantly, drawing out a steady stream of blood that pooled on the cracked stone floor beneath him. The Governing Circle had hoped that by draining his blood it would release his magic steadily, like a running faucet, in hopes that it would control the outbursts.

They couldn’t have been more wrong. Jungkook knew it wouldn’t help. They could drain him of his blood, but it could not drain him of the anger and fire in his veins. Every day, his mind screamed vengeance. One of these days, those motherfuckers would pay for taking everything away from him and locking him up like a dog.

And when that day came, it sounded with a piercing chorus of hundreds of screams.

Year 3061 – 400 years after the Fall of the World

A ravaging sickness overtook the Citadel. It started as a simple flu, but it mutated into a paralyzing virus that started at the limbs and made its way to the heart and lungs, where it eventually froze the ventilatory muscles and cardiac muscles that kept one alive. No one knew the cause—the contagion.

It drove the citizens into a complete frenzy, praying to whatever god might still be listening. Sacrificing goats and chickens and spilling their blood into the ground in an effort to appease the dark forces that are on the horizon. They blamed the sickness on the approaching darkness. The Governing Circle assured the people they had a plan to drive the darkness back; however, many people wanted to migrate East, but they simply couldn’t pack up the city and leave. They grew impatient with the Governors and decided to take matters into their own hands, protesting outside the Governors’ Assembly Hall, even being driven towards pillaging it.

Somehow, one individual had discovered the dungeons that had molded with age, but still held one last Mage deep, deep down within its walls. He was drug from his cell—still half asleep from the drug-induced haze from the poison.

“Get up! Get up! You must go!” Jungkook heard the cracked voice of an old man. “Wake up!” Cold water suddenly doused Jungkook, and it broke him out of his haze. It was Michael. “Now is your chance to go!” Michael hauled the Mage to his feet and up the dungeon stairs.

“Why?” Jungkook’s voice came out in a weak breath.

“I’ve done a lot of wrong in my life. I won’t atone for it all, but I won’t let a victim of my sins die a meaningless death after living a enslaved existence.” The old man explained as he used every last bit of his strength to get Jungkook up the stairs.

Sunlight slowly crawled into his vision, willing the muscles in his legs to stand him up on his own legs. His body propelled him forward towards that light, feet pounding up the stairs and hallways.

Fresh air filled his lungs, invigorating his body and bringing his mind to the present.

He was finally outside. He was finally being freed from the grave he’d been living in for so long. People stood outside of the Governors’ Assembly Hall and along the pathway that led to the gates of the Citadel. They were shouting at the Governing Circle perched on the Hall’s balcony, cursing at them, begging them to let people leave so they had a chance to survive. Only a few noticed Michael dragging the shackled Mage towards the Gates.

“Stop! Stop!” Jungkook knew that voice, and it sent his magic skirting away from it. The Lead Governor. “You can’t let him go! He’s going to protect us!” Jungkook turned around and saw a shell of the red monster he remembered him to be. His muscles had atrophied significantly, leaving his skin hanging of his bones. His eyes were hollowed and shaky as he descended from the balcony to stand in front of the Mage.

Shit… How many years has it been since he delivered the thorned shackles to him?

“Look, look! He’s going to help us! Our weapon against the darkness,” he pleaded, stumbling forward on his weak limbs. He smiled at the Mage, “Show them what you can do,” and pointed at the pile of rotting bodies on a wagon, dead from the contagion. “Burn them,” he commanded. The Mage remained without reaction for several tense moments before gesturing to the shackles on his wrists.

“I can’t very well do that with these on.” The Mage deadpanned.

The Lead Governor’s face morphed into that of the red monster the Mage knew so well. “Trickster! Useless brat!” He spat at the Mage, kicking a hard boot into his chest. The Mage was knocked to the ground from the surprising force of it.

“Shut up!” A burly citizen yelled. “You told us you eradicated the Mages two decades ago to keep the darkness away! But you secretly hide these Mages for your own benefit, and it ends up killing all of us!”

“No, no! I was trying to help us!” He exclaimed.

“The Mages are a curse to the Earth! It’s time they paid for the treachery they’ve brought upon this city with blood!” The giant man grabbed the Mage by a fistful of hair, baring his throat to the sickle he held in his hand.

The last thing he saw was the burning flames in the Mage’s eyes before he was incinerated to ash. The Mage’s magic had burst from his veins and out through his hands—his fingertips and where the shackles pieced his skin. The Mage roared in pain as the poison tried to rip through the fire shooting from his hands. Fresh blood began to stream down his arms.

The sickle clanged to the blood and ash covered ground where the man once stood. The Citadel had fallen silent with terror at the Mage who so easily had destroyed one of their own. The Lead Governor began to laugh hysterically, “See, see, see! I told you what it could do! That magic can protect us!”

The Citadel erupted into shouts and hollering. “Protect us?! Are you insane?”

Suddenly, another citizen stepped forward with a rifle. The moment the safety clicked off; the flames erupted from the Mage’s hands once again. Except it did not stop so easily this time. The fire burned the man and his rifle into ash and liquid melt. It reached beyond to the tightly packed houses and shacks, to the clothed bodies lying on the street, and to the fiendishly cackling shell of a man.

By the time the flames ceased, the Citadel had become more like the hell Jungkook had grown used to. Sheer panic and fear as flames licked across the city at a rapid speed, engulfing everything in its raging spirit. Humans battled for the last of the weapons and resources. Blood began to stain the soil.

No one dared try to battle him. Not even as he began to sprint towards the gates. The stone giants boomed before slowly splitting apart to reveal a barren outside world. He quickened his strides to a full-on sprint. The people around him became blurs, the outside world becoming his only focus. With every step, the thorns in his restraints dug further into his skin, but he couldn’t stop now. Freedom was so close he could taste it.

20 meters.

10 meters.

5 meters.

And then he passed through the gates… and kept running.

Jungkook ran and ran and ran, looking back only once to bestow a final goodbye to his previous home and living hell.

His long-standing promise was fulfilled.

….

He didn’t know how long he ran for or how far, but he didn’t stop until the Citadel was long gone behind him. At one point, he came upon a wooded area and quickly figured there must be water there.

The poison from the shackles was starting to get to him again; the adrenaline rush from running out of that place was wearing off. Blood dripped from his hands, creating a trail behind him. He cursed at himself for not demanding removed these infernal things from his wrists.

Soon, the world began to tilt and blacken around the edges. Jungkook’s legs gave out from under him, and he toppled into the grass. His breathing slowed, body feeling the pull under until he was too exhausted to fight it anymore and passed out under the burning sun.

….

“Ya!” You snap the reigns on the horse, which took off towards the direction of the oasis to collect more herbs for Namjoon and for the trading expedition you were about to embark on at the last meet. A merchant came by the camp yesterday, swearing that he had heard the sound of the Citadel’s gates opening. It sounded like giants stomping on the Earth’s floor. You can’t miss it. It was the first news you’d heard in over a decade. There had been sporadic reports of the Citadel open and closing its doors up until two years after you escaped. After that… nothing.

You didn’t need any further proof. You would be on the road tomorrow before the sun was up, combing the routes for any word of the Governing Circle and the last Mage that remained in the city.

The silver-haired warrior’s words rung in your head constantly. That Citadel is a locked box, probably to never be opened again. No one decided to take the chance on launching another attack again. There was no simple solution how to get past those walls. You tried not to dwell on that too much, instead focusing your energy on how to possibly infiltrate the Citadel through its trade routes. You’d tried several times to track down Citadel merchants, who seemed to come out once in a blue moon, but by the time you got to the trading market or their camp, they’d disappear into thin air.

Your jaw sets in frustration.

The horse suddenly begins to step from foot to foot in anxiety, making noises of discomfort. You break out of your thoughts and hush the horse, stroking its chocolate brown coat. Coaxing it to continue forward with soft nickering, you peer beyond the trees in front of you as the horse slowly crosses over the oasis’s soft green ground.

That’s when you hear it.

High-pitched cackling and giggling—like a kid who has just won a carnival game.

Quietly, you slide down from the horse and tie it to a nearby tree. You fish through the pouch on the side of your saddle and grab a handful of what you needed before slipping through the trees to get a closer look at the jubilant being. And it was as you expected.

A death spirit.

He is dancing about a lying face-first in the grass. The death spirit is chanting a low and gibberish chant, kicking and poking the body, which remains unmoving. You suspect the person was nearly dead, judging from the spirit’s merry attitude and the fact it hadn’t started sucking the soul from the body.

You learned about these life-hungry demons from Namjoon years ago, when he warned you about their presence in these wooded areas and oases. Many people liked to come to these places to die in peace, so death spirits knew they could find their next meal here. Unfortunately, for you, it meant dealing with them somewhat regularly when you needed to get supplies for the doctor. He hated sending you out here, but you stood a better chance against them than he did. Namjoon encouraged you to get rid of them when you could.

You step out from behind the billowing trees, cautiously approaching the death spirit. “Be gone, malicious spirit,” you command, “You have no place here.”

The death spirit whips around, eyes wide in surprise, before he cracks back into laughter. “Haha! It’s my lucky day! I haven’t had two souls to eat in one day in centuries.”

“You must go demon! I’m not planning to die today.” You spare a quick glance at the body that lied several feet away from you. You see the faint rise and fall of breath. “And it appears that neither are they, so you shouldn’t be here to collect yet.”

The spirit whines and stomps his foot, annoyed that you ruined his meal. “He’s almost dead! Just a little while longer…” Its grins broadly in unadulterated excitement, but it looks more fiendish than innocent. The death spirit turns to the body, watching it like it was a ticking clock.

You take a moment to scrutinize the death spirit. It wears clothes from the Old Word that were rarely seen nowadays—a white t-shirt with basketball sneakers and matching dark jean jacket and pants. It is much younger than most of the death spirits you’ve encountered. It was probably no more than twenty-five when it sold its soul to the Devil in hopes of gaining power over the human race—a large reason why the world fell, you came to learn. The price when that power ran dry: Its soul would wander the earth forever, starving for the souls of the dead and serving anyone who called upon him.

“That’s too bad, spirit. It’s time for you to go.” By the time, it turns around, you throw a handful of ground sage at its feet. The spirit yelps, but the sage merely dusts its shoes. More of the sage lands on the body and the grass surrounding it.

The death spirit cackles. “You foolish girl! That can’t kill me.” It dustes the sage off its sneakers. “Almost dead…” he mutters again before extending a finger to poke the body again. A shield of force knocks the spirit’s hand back. It gasps in surprise before banging his hand against the air again but getting knocked back repeatedly. “Ah!” It screams in frustration. “You’re dead now!”

You didn’t expect the spirit to move with such swiftness, slamming you up against a tree and pressing his forearm against your throat. You push against him, trying to keep him from stunting the blood flow in your neck with his arm. Your mind scrambles for a plan, a solution, an idea. Then, it hits you. “Spirit, what do you want?”

Instantly, the death spirit backs away. “What do I want?” He repeats, confusion lacing his tone.

“Yeah. What do you want? If you leave me and the body alone, I’ll grant you a request.” You explain with a soothing tone.

He laughs. “What could you, human, do for an old, powerful spirit such as me? Give me a sack of potatoes? A prayer to save my soul?” He continues to laugh at you.

“I’m not a human. I’m a Mage.”

This piques his interest, eyes alighting with delivery. “A Mage,” he considers you, eyes looking you up and down. “Alright, I’ll bite. But that doesn’t excuse you from what you are to owe me. Two bodies, two requests,” he olds up two fingers on each hand for emphasis.

“How about one request, and I won’t call upon you to serve me?” You retort.

“HA! You don’t know my name! It’s still two requests, now hurry and agree or I might just get impatient and call it off. That body gets closer to death every second you waste, and I’m really hungry.”

“How do you know I don’t know your name?”

“Because I haven’t told you, of course! Don’t get smart with me, or you might end up dead before he does!” The spirit jabs a finger in the direction of the body.

“I think you should be careful with your threats,” you warn lowly.

“Oh?” He raises an eyebrow, clearly amused with your gutsiness.

Well, how about this for amusement? “You shouldn’t threaten your future master… Jung Hoseok.”

His face falls, becoming pale very quickly. “I—I didn’t even tell you my name!”

You smile with bitter sweetness. “Yes, you did Hoseok. Didn’t you say not but a few minutes ago, ‘You genius, Hoseok! This barren world has nothing on you Hoseokie—all powerful, great Jung Hoseok!’” You repeat his earlier chants back to him, and his scowl deepens. He dares a step toward you, and you raise a finger, “Uh-uh. You play by my rules now, spirit. We either make the deal on my terms or you remain tethered to me. Your pick, Hoseok.”

“Fine.” He bites out.

“You get one request of what you want, and then you leave me and that man alone. That’s the deal. Do you agree?”

“Yes.”

“Excellent.” In an afterthought to yourself, you could have used this to get him to let you both go, and he gets away with nothing. However, you didn’t plan on keeping this death spirit tied to you. It was a cruel joke, and you didn’t want some random man appearing out of nowhere during your daily life. And if you release him from servitude without so much as some benefit, he would still be sticking around for the day of your death to collect your soul. That definitely wasn’t on your list of things to do. “Alright, then. Jung Hoseok, what do you want?”

He casts his gaze downwards in thought, swiping at the grass with the bottom of his shoe. When he stills, you assume he thought of something. What you didn’t expect was the sorrow that darkens his features—a stark contrast to his earlier bubbly appearance. “I want,” he starts. “I want something that would make me happy.”

“You’re going to have to be more specific, Hoseok.”

“You didn’t say I needed to. Besides, I’m a death spirit. How would I know what would make me happy?” You groan in frustration at his response, which earns you a triumphant smile from him.

“I release you from service,” you state firmly. It is worth a shot.

“Thank you, sweet Mage. However, that didn’t make me particularly happy. Not the kind of happy that I was talking about.” Suddenly, the cackling fiend is back, and he’s clearly getting a kick out of testing your patience. “I’ll tell you what Mage… For being clever and a good sport, I’ll let you and the almost-dead man go. I still want my happy thing, and I’ll give you three summers to find it.”

Great… Another thing to be worried about. You have absolutely no idea where to start, and you didn’t get a chance to ask him questions that might clue you in before he waved goodbye and disappeared. “Just perfect,” you mutter, brushing off your clothes. You look around the area to be sure he was gone, and you are reminded of the near-dead man lying face-down in the grass.

“Shit!” You rush over to the man’s side and heave him onto his back. The first thing you notice are the horrid shackles around his wrists—thorns piercing mangled, dark pink flesh. You move to find a mechanism to remove them but touching them burns you and sends your magic scrambling far away from those infernal things. Dried blood coats his hands and forearms. His skin is ghostly pale—a sign of having one foot in the grave. But these shackles couldn’t simply be the reason he was dying. You gently touch and run your hands over his torso, searching for any mortal wound, but finding none.

You run your fingers across his scalp, looking for any head wounds like how Namjoon taught you. You found none, but that’s not what struck you. It was the hair itself—so dark, so soft, so… familiar. The feel of it sent the deepest part of your memory scrambling for a match. You turn his face skyward, wincing at the thick, deep scar that ran from his hairline down to his right cheek. A number of other scars litter his face, marring the fullness of his cheekbones, slopped nose, sharp jawline and pink lips.

All of it so handsome and familiar.

You choke on a sob, tears flooding your eyes and falling down your face. You stroke a gentle hand across the side of his face, cradling his head.

“Jungkook?” You whimper. Was it really him? Was he really here? If so, how did he get here, and why was he so close to death? You had to know if it was him, and there was only one way to check. Sniffling, you rip up his sleeve, instantly spotting the matching tattoo you had on your forearm.

Three evenly striped lines—a symbol every Mage was required to have while living in the Citadel for identification. However, your people had learned to take pride in it as it knit you all together and made you a family.

Oh my god, it was him.

“Jungkook,” you call him name, firmer and louder. “Jungkook! Jungkook, wake up!” You grasp his shoulders and pat his cheek in attempt to get him to open his eyes. “Open your eyes!” You check his pulse and to see if he’s still breathing. Weak pulse and even weaker breaths. “I’m not letting you go when I’ve just found you,” you hiss.

Doing the only thing you know might work, you lay your hand on his cloth-covered chest and take a couple deep breaths. Your magic presses up against Jungkook’s chest under your hand, searching and waiting for his to find yours. “C’mon, c’mon.” He didn’t have much time left, but you couldn’t focus on that. You had to coax magic forward.

You think of the serenity around you—the birds chirping in the early morning sun; the trees rustling and whispering to each other; the softness of the green grass under you; the trickling of the water over river rocks. You think of the time you spent together as kids in the village and as teenagers in the hidden corners of the Greenhouse to eat stolen fruits and vegetables. You think of first and last time he kissed you; the softness of his lips and touch, seeking for more but never too greedy. Always incredibly gentle.

Despite the cold shade of Jungkook’s skin, warmth begins to radiate from him under your hand. Your face lights up with hope. His magic is coming forth and responding to yours. You bite your lip in concentration, calling out his name in your mind for him to come back.

He is safe and here with you.

He is safe… with you.

Jungkook’s eyes flutter open, gazing blearily on the light blue sky above him. He draws in a deep breath, chest inflating under your palm. “Jungkook?” It takes him a few moments, but then he finally turns his head to see you.

“Y/n?” His brown eyes spark with recognition, but his voice conveys that he wasn’t really sure if you are actually here.

“Yes, it’s me. I’m here, and I’m going to help you. You’re going to be alright,” you try to reassure him to spark some life back in him. You push his short hair from his face, so he could see you better. Despite your words, he still seems so distance, like he was teetering between life and death—between one and zero.

“It hurts,” he whimpers roughly. Suddenly, his breathing becomes rapid and he begins to squirm under your touch. “Get them off. Get them off!” You track his gaze to the shackles. You begin to panic. You couldn’t touch them, but he is in so much pain, and he might go out again from it alone. Your hands dove for the wooden shackles again, but you couldn’t handle it for more than a few seconds before it sears into your skin. You cry for Jungkook as you can’t imagine how much pain he’s in, how long these damned things have been on him.

He is writhing, like a demon had just gotten possession of him. Fresh sweat dampens his skin as he keeps crying out for help. My god, you have to get him to Namjoon, he has to help. You scramble to your feet and run back for your horse. Ripping the pouch off the saddle, you dumped the contents and clamber for the little green vial.

Once you find it, you dive back to the place behind Jungkook’s head and spill the contents of the vial onto your hands. “I’ll make it stop, Jungkook, I promise,” you say, although it is drowned out by his screams. You cup the back of his neck, and his screams cease immediately. He relaxes, the oil sending him into a calm, numb state. “Don’t worry, Jungkook. I have you now. I’m going to help you.” You let out a sob, wiping your face on your shoulder.

Pull yourself together, y/n. He needs your help.

“I have to get him to Namjoon,” you say to yourself. With purpose, you rush back to your horse, untie it from the tree and bring it back to Jungkook. With the aid of your magic and all your physical strength, you pull him up onto the saddle in front of you. Mounting the horse swift, you rest Jungkook back against you before snapping the reins and riding back as fast as you could to the camp.

Namjoon. He’ll know what to do.

….

“Namjoon! Help! Come quickly!” You shout. He comes tripping out of the clinic, but thankfully doesn’t fall.

“What is it? What happened?” He shouts back.

“Help him! These shackles are killing him, and I can’t get them off! You have to get them off right now!” You grunt as Jungkook’s body falls, dead-weight, into yours when you pull him off the horse. “Help me, Namjoon, dammit!”

He breaks out of his thoughtfulness as to examine the situation and helps you haul Jungkook inside to a hospital bed with significant strength. Inside, he runs for a serrated knife and sticks the blade in the oven’s fire. Once the blade was white with heat, Namjoon grasps the wood carefully to hold it in place while he saws through them. Despite his efforts to hold the shackles still, they shift with every quick back and forth of the sawing.

Jungkook begins to stir with the activity, whimpering. Fresh sweat coats his forehead “Hurry Namjoon!”

“I’m trying. I’m halfway through.” He tries to encourage you, but it’s taking too long, and Jungkook is starting to hiss and pant. No doubt those thorns were shifting and digging even further into his skin from the movement of the blade. Any more time wasted on trying to saw it open—

It was going to kill him.

“Move, Namjoon!” He dives out of your way as you lunge for the partially split shackles. Your fingers brace against the serrated edges from the sawing, the contact already burning you. With a scream, you bring forth every bit of magic you have and break the infernal device cleanly the rest of the way through. The thorns tear themselves from Jungkook’s skin.

You lift the shackles from his wrists, fresh blood and bits of flesh drenching it, and you throw it against the stone wall with great strength. You cry from relief when the shackles finally leave you, hissing at the burns on your hands.

“Y/n!” Namjoon calls.

“What the hell is happening?” You distantly hear Taehyung yell through the ringing in your ears.

“Help, y/n,” Namjoon instructs. “She’s burned her hands.”

Taehyung grabs the topsides of your hands, not touching the burns, and uses his magic to send a cooling sensation to ease the pain. His face flickers with disbelief at his magic quivering in fear, “What is this?” You knew what he meant. Whatever was on those shackles left a residue on your hands, and Taehyung’s magic could sense it.

You look over at Jungkook to see he’s stopped moving again. “Namjoon, did he pass out?” You watch him check for a pulse. When he nods, relief sags your shoulders. “It appears so. He won’t die, don’t worry. I think he’s finally getting some rest.”

The good news breaks your heart all over, bringing your mind back to the many questions you had about those shackles. How long has he had those on? You knew the Citadel had put those on. What other place is there out there that would do this to a Mage? What other sick and twisted things did they do to him?

You begin to cry again. Taehyung frowns and moves you to rest your head on his shoulder. He rubs a hand up and down your back to soothe you.

Silently and swiftly, Namjoon disinfects and bandages Jungkook’s wrist, which were covered in pierced holes and mangled, ripped, scarred flesh. Some color had started to tone his skin again. Namjoon cut Jungkook’s shirt off to examine for more wounds.

You gasp, horrified. Your breath leaves your body in a rush at the sight of Jungkook’s torso covered in scars of all different shapes and depths. You feel your stomach turn and bile rise in your throat. Taehyung grips you harder when your knees buckle. “Get her out of here,” Namjoon directs at Taehyung. He even sounded sick. Shaking his head, willing himself to focus, Namjoon hands Taehyung a tin can. “She can’t be here for this, right now.”

Taehyung nods and pulls you up, supporting your body weight against his as he takes you out of the clinic and back to your little house.

In there, Taehyung lays you down on your bed roll in the back room. You continue to sob quietly, wincing when you try to use your hands to push yourself to sit. “Here.” Taehyung opens the tin and scoops out generous amounts of cream to slather on your burned hands. “You need to rest. I’ll stay close by if you need anything.”

He starts to leave to sit outside your house, but you stop him. “Wait. You come wake me if anything happens to him? Right?” Taehyung nods, and you let him go.

It takes a while for you to shut your eyes at all, and when you did, it is only for a few hours. It restores your magic and energy a little bi—enough to get you on your feet to go back to the clinic. Taehyung catches you outside your house, but you reassure him that you’re good now. You notice that it’s almost well into the evening, so you send him off to check on his sister and go to dinner.

Back in Namjoon’s clinic, he’s writing down notes frantically at his desk, not wanting to forget a thing. “Hey,” he greets softly. “How are your hands?”

You examine them, seeming how the skin already looks less red and irritated. “Much better. Your medicines are like magic.”

He shrugs. “I try my best. Your magic is what makes you heal much faster though. It harmonizes with the natural properties of the plants I use.”

“How is he?” You ask, watching Jungkook rest peacefully. He is curled up on his side, cheek squished into the pillow.

“His condition has improved greatly as well. Physically, he’s going to be alright. Emotionally, mentally…” He trails off. “It’s like how I explained to you when you first arrived at the camp. A person can have many internal wounds, and it will take time for that person to heal.” His words hang heavy in the air, reminding you of the reality you now have to face.

He’s not the same Jungkook that got left behind 12 years ago. He’s scarred and broken on the outside, and there was no doubt in your mind that the inside might very well look the same.

You can’t imagine what the Citadel was like for him. All alone. The last Mage.

He must have been punished severely for taking part in the escape and aiding in saving every other Mage. Saving you. The survivor’s guilt settles back in after so long. It had faded with time, but its resurfacing had returned with even more guilt for the fact she had failed to do anything to get him out of there.

Namjoon sees your face crumple as those thoughts circulate in your head. “Y/n.” Your eyes meet Namjoon’s. “Do you know him?”

You nod, gaze weighed down by sorrow and happiness all at once. “This is Jungkook.” Namjoon’s eyes widen in recognition of the name. You had told him several stories about your best friend. “It would seem he just escaped from the Citadel. Fuck,” you curse, squeezing your eyes shut before opening them. You let out a shuttering breath. “He was in there all by himself for twelve years.”

“Those shackles he had,” which where thankfully nowhere to be in sight, “I studied them with another Mage while you were gone. It appears those only affect Mages, not humans.” Which would explain why when Namjoon touched them he didn’t hurt; why those things were the perfect weapon for the Citadel. “Those thorns were coated in a poison from a herb known to be dangerous to Mages. It was rumored to be called the Witcher’s Sage. It was destroyed with the Old World, but it appears there is still some floating around out there.”

Natural silence falls between you until Namjoon’s stomach growls. “You go eat. I’ll watch him for a little bit.”

“You sure?” A simple question, not a doubt of capability.

“Yeah. I’ll be fine.” Namjoon heads out of the clinic as you take a seat across from Jungkook’s bed.

He looks so much livelier than when you found him. Body rising and falling with even breaths, and face relaxes in slumber. His skin returns to that natural beautiful tan tone you remember. Despite the scarring on his face, you can see through them to his handsome features. Of course, long gone were the remains of baby fat around his face that were there the last time you saw him.

He’d grown into a man. He looks so much longer, like he sprouted another half a foot in height. His bones grew bigger, giving him broader shoulders and thicker arms and legs. Although he was imprisoned, the Citadel must have kept him fed. Muscle still remains on his body, albeit larger in volume than they were twelve years ago, but he was still very lean. You’d venture to say he is wavering towards being a low normal weight for his age and stature.

You brush the uninjured back of your hand lightly against his shoulder, needing to feel him. He didn’t even stir the slightest. You wonder if he is dreaming. A part of you hopes he isn’t so he’d get a deep, restful sleep while another part of you hopes he is dreaming of happy things.

You have no idea how he is going to react when he wakes up, but you know that you’d be here to help him heal from the trauma. There were going to be good days and bad days, but it isn’t anything you couldn’t handle. It would be a while longer before you could see if Jungkook still saw, or even remembers, you as his best friend and lover, but you could wait for him because you never stopped loving him any less ‘lo these many years.

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debbiechanclub · 5 years ago

Text

Paradigm Shift

Characters: Kenny Omega x OFC x Jon Moxley (fka Dean Ambrose)

Summary: In the cold war between WWE and AEW, Hannah McMahon has a foot in both worlds: she's climbing the ranks in her father's company while also dating Kenny Omega. But as more disgruntled wrestlers leave WWE for AEW - including a certain lunatic fringe - Hannah faces an impossible choice: fight for her family or for love?

Note: Featuring my OFC, Hannah McMahon. Takes place within the same universe as a couple other fics I wrote over on FanFiction. I’ll be cross-posting this over there, as well.

Part 1/?

Chapter One: Cheaper Than Therapy

Sunday, April 21, 2019 Davenport, Iowa

“Alright, alright—everyone raise your glasses!” The table grew quiet as Colby called for attention, and everyone reverently raised their shot glasses and drinks in toast. “I’ll try to keep this short and sweet,” he started. “Tonight was The Shield’s Final Chapter, and I’m not gonna lie: it’s bittersweet. When The Shield debuted at Survivor Series 2012, in those god-awful turtlenecks, I had no idea that it would become one of the greatest stables in WWE history and, in my very biased opinion, all of wrestling. Those first two original years not only shaped who I am as a wrestler and person, but gave me a sister and two brothers in Hannah, Joe, and Jon. And no matter what we’re going through or where we’re working, I know they’ll always have my back, and I’ll always have theirs.

“So here’s to Jon, who’s going off to greener pastures. We wish you nothing but success in all your future endeavors. And here’s to The Shield, the greatest faction this side of DX.”

“To The Shield!” the table proclaimed, and after clinking glasses with everyone around her Hannah McMahon kicked back her shot. She twitched unpleasantly as the Jack Daniel’s burned down her throat; it’d been awhile since she’d drank hard liquor, but tonight called for it.

Just over an hour ago in front of less than 12,000 fans in Moline, Illinois, The Shield had wrestled their final match. Hannah had fought back tears as she’d raised Seth, Roman, and Dean’s arms in the ring for the last time; truly, it had felt as if she were closing not just a chapter, but an entire book in the anthology of her life. The Shield was what had brought her to WWE TV after years of refusing to become an onscreen character. It had been her creative outlet for all her backstage frustrations; it had molded her philosophy on the business; it had made her a stronger person, both in front of and behind the camera. It had given her love; it had given her pain. And even though the show had been a beautiful send-off for the group, it would take more than just a final match for Hannah and the rest of them to adequately close that chapter. So here they all were, just over the Mississippi River in Davenport, Iowa, where they could all pour one out for The Shield at Colby’s favorite hometown haunt.

“Hannah! What do you want? I’m buying.”

She snapped out of her reverie at the sound of Baron Corbin’s voice. Most of the other wrestlers on the card had come out to celebrate—either because they were good friends with Colby, Joe, and Jon, or just because they enjoyed a good time. “Oh, I’m good,” she said with a shake of her head. “I’m gonna head out here in a little bit.”

“What?” Joe whipped his head around when he heard that. “Six and a half years of history and you’re only gonna have one shot? I’m disappointed, Hannah. As I recall, the very first time we went out drinking together you rode a mechanical bull on Bourbon Street.”

Bayley’s eyes lit up at that. “Are you serious?! Okay, I have to hear this story.”

“No, you really don’t,” Hannah interrupted before Joe could elaborate. “All you need to know is it was Bourbon Street. And a lot has changed in six and a half years, Joe.”

“Yeah,” Fergal—a.k.a. Finn Balor—said from next to Hannah. “Now instead of staying out drinking with us she wants to get to the hotel so she can have phone sex with Kenny.”

Everyone within earshot either gaped in shock or burst out laughing. Hannah backhanded Fergal’s shoulder. “We don’t have phone sex!” she proclaimed in disgust.

“Bullshit. You two’ve kept up a long-distance relationship for over a year, you must be doing something.”

Hannah’s entire face burned bright red. What she did behind closed doors with her boyfriend was no one’s business. “Well, you’re an asshole, and I think I’ll take that drink now.”

“That-a girl,” Joe grinned.

“I’ll get it,” Fergal said in consolation as he got up from the table. “You know I’m just teasing you, Hannah.”

“Uh huh,” she muttered; but when he returned with her favorite beer all was forgiven.

The night continued on, friends and colleagues reminiscing about the past and wondering about the future, and one by one people closed their tabs and headed out to the next town, until there were only a handful left at the bar. It was nearing midnight when Hannah finally decided she should hit the road herself.

“Are you sure you don’t want to crash at my place?” Colby asked as she stood from the table. “My guest room is only 20 minutes away.”

“Thanks but no thanks. I’m gonna let you two,” she suggestively wagged her finger between Colby and Becky, “have the house to yourselves. Besides, you know I like my midnight drives. They’re cheaper than therapy.”

“That I do know,” Colby grinned. “Come here.” He wrapped her up in a hug, and suddenly Hannah felt tears pricking at the back of her eyes again. While her relationship with each of the guys in The Shield were unique and special in their own way, her friendship with Colby was beyond. Colby was her brother, her partner in crime both on and off-screen, and the best friend she’d ever had. Now that The Shield was officially disbanded, she didn’t know if they’d ever get to work together on TV again—and, deep down, that was what really got her.

“Okay, I’m gonna start crying again,” she forced a smile as she pulled away and wiped her eyes. “I gotta get out of here.” She turned to Becky and gave her a warm hug. “See you at the next one.”

“Drive safe, alright?” Becky said. “Send us a text when you get to the hotel.”

“I will,” she said, and with another wave she went up to the bar to settle her tab. Jon was there ordering another drink. “Planning on closing the place down?” she asked.

He sent her a crooked smirk. “When have you ever known me to do anything else, Hannah?”

“Fair point. Renee’s driving, I hope?”

“Yeah, but we got a hotel here. She’ll go to Des Moines in the morning.”

Hannah gave a silent nod as she handed the bartender her card just as the other barkeep set Jon’s drink in front of him; but he didn’t make a move to take it. He just stood there, watching her.

“What?” Hannah finally asked.

“You know I’m going to AEW, right?”

The bluntness of his tone caught her off-guard, but the statement itself didn’t. “Please,” she dismissed. “Of course I know you’re going to AEW. What kind of dumb fucking question is that?”

They locked eyes across the bar—and then both let out a wry laugh. “That was a dumb fucking question, wasn’t it?” Jon grinned.

“It really fucking was.”

Their shared smile lasted a few seconds longer, but soon enough a lull fell between them, as it always inevitably did. Over the years there’d been far too many words left unsaid, and they’d pooled up like a vast gulf separating shores. When the bartender brought Hannah her receipt, she all but jumped to sign her name and split. But then Jon said something that really did catch her off-guard.

“I’m gonna miss you, Hannah. Really. You always stood up for me.”

Hannah fiddled with the pen in her fingers. “Well, I just wanted you to be happy and succeed. Same as I want for everyone in this company. And I’m sorry it didn’t work out. For you in WWE, I mean,” she quickly added.

Jon flashed that smirk again. “No worries, boss. We had a good run.”

Crimson involuntarily blossomed across Hannah’s cheeks. Knowing Jon, he’d fully intended the double entendre behind that statement. She scribbled her name on the receipt. “Well, I’m heading out—”

“Hannah! Are you leaving?”

Hannah momentarily closed her eyes at the sound of Renee’s peppy voice. She really needed to go. “Yeah, I gotta get to Des Moines. I think I need the drive to unpack tonight, honestly.”

“Oh my God, I know,” Renee empathetically intoned. “The Shield was like your wrestling coming of age story!”

“That’s… actually a really good way of putting it,” Hannah agreed.

“Well, even though tonight was the end of something special I’m excited to see what you’ll do down in NXT. I really think the show will benefit from having you as GM.”

Hannah couldn’t help the puzzled look that crossed her face. Why did Renee have to be so nice? It would be so much easier to just ignore her if she wasn’t so nice. “Thanks, Renee. That means a lot.”

Suddenly her phone buzzed in her hand—it was a text from Kenny. “Gah, I really should go,” she said, and after a second’s hesitation she gave Renee an awkward hug goodbye. She turned to Jon. “Good luck, Moxley,” she quipped; and before she knew what was happening, he pulled her into a hug.

Every muscle in her body tensed. It’d been what felt like a lifetime since they’d touched like this. It was something foreign that had once been familiar, and that made it all the worse. “Maybe I’ll see you around,” he said into her ear. It sent goosebumps down Hannah’s neck, and she had to pull away.

“See you tomorrow,” she said to Renee, and she walked as quickly as she could out of the bar and to the illuminated parking lot where her rental sat. She dialed Kenny as soon as she climbed into the SUV. He answered on the third ring.

“Hey, baby.”

Hannah relaxed back into the driver’s seat. Hearing Tyson’s soft voice floating through the speaker immediately put her at ease. “Hey. You haven’t been up waiting on me, have you?”

“Well, technically not; I’m up playing video games. But you know I can’t sleep until I know you’ve made it to the next stop.”

“I know,” she said apologetically. “I’m leaving Davenport now; I should be in Des Moines in about two and a half hours. I honestly probably should have left here an hour ago.”

“Why?” he sounded surprised. “Is everything okay?”

She sighed. “Yeah. Tonight was just… emotional. The Shield was like my version of Bullet Club or The Elite, you know? And now it’s over.”

“I know. But it was time. You’ve all outgrown it, and now you’re each going on to do more amazing things. And from now until the end of time everyone will look back at The Shield as the thing that first put four incredible performers on the map.”

Hannah’s smile risked splitting her face in two. God, she was in love with this man. “How do you always know exactly what to say?”

“It’s a preternatural gift, I can’t explain it.”

“Well, thank you. And you’re right. But nostalgia’s a hell of a drug.”

“That it is. But don’t you worry; in two more days I’ll put you through a strict detox program.”

Hannah bit her lip at the thought. After SmackDown’s show in Lincoln, Nebraska on Tuesday she’d make the short two-hour flight to Winnipeg to spend a few days with Tyson before she had to be back on the road Friday. That was how they’d managed their time together ever since he’d left NJPW in January: splitting their free days between his place in Canada and hers in Connecticut, or wherever was most convenient. It could be stressful at times, and Hannah lived out of a suitcase—but it was the same for any other pro wrestler who maintained a relationship with someone outside the business. The only difference was that Tyson was in the business; he just worked for a different company. A rival company. But they both chose not to think about that.

“Oh really? And what will you prescribe, Dr. Omega?”

“I have a few pretty intense regimens planned,” he said, and Hannah couldn’t help herself—she let out a laugh. “What?”

“Back at the bar Fergal accused me of wanting to leave early so I could go have phone sex with you. I told him we don’t do that, but this is sure starting to sound like it.”

“Please, this is barely phone foreplay. Besides, Fergal doesn’t have any room to throw stones about phone sex.”

“Yeah, don’t wanna know,” Hannah quickly said. “But I’ll be counting down the days until Tuesday. I’m excited to finally get to spend some time with you in Winnipeg again. I feel bad that you’ve mostly been the one traveling to see me the last month.”

She could almost hear him shaking his head through the phone. “Don’t. You’ve been really busy and I haven’t. And if the roles were reversed, I know you’d travel to see me.”

“I would,” she said, and in that moment her heart swelled with joy. She was so lucky to have found someone as understanding and supportive as Tyson. It made all the difference. “Well, I’m on the highway now, so I’ll let you get back to your game. I’ll text you when I get to the hotel.”

“Ok. Drive safe and listen to loud music.”

“I will. I love you.”

“I love you too, baby.”

Hannah ended the call, her soul a million times lighter. She turned up the radio and focused on the road ahead, the past in the rearview mirror. As she’d told Colby, midnight drives were cheaper than therapy.

#jon moxley #dean ambrose #kenny omega #dean ambrose imagine #dean ambrose fanfiction #jon moxley imagine #jon moxley fanfiction #kenny omega imagine #kenny omega fanfiction #wwe #aew #wwe fanfiction #wwe imagine #aew fanfiction #aew imagine

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wrestlingisfake · 5 years ago

Text

Final Battle preview

Rush vs. PCO - Rush is defending the ROH world title. As far as I can remember, Rush is undefeated in Ring of Honor. The only singles loss in ROH that I could find for PCO was his last shot at the world title. It is probably worth noting that each man’s contract is expiring at the end of the year, and there has been little word on whether either of them plans to re-sign.

Rush is probably the hottest star in wrestling that isn’t signed to WWE, AEW, or New Japan. You see his entrance and you can tell this guy is a big ass deal, far beyond anything else going on in ROH. I’m still surprised they managed to sign him. Pierre Carl Ouellet, meanwhile, is a minor name from the 1990s enjoying a cult resurgence as a monster brawler with a Frankenstein gimmick. At 51, PCO isn’t a hot prospect bound for the big leagues, but he’s a can’t-miss draw at the super-indy level. So this is arguably the biggest match ROH could deliver in 2019. It reminds me of a big match from ROH’s early days, where a WWE fan wouldn’t get the appeal but hardcore indy fans saw it as a dream match.

Even someone like me, who only half pays attention to ROH, can see the appeal of this match. Rush’s matches are fast and intense, and he quickly destroys guys with big explosive moves. PCO’s matches are about how he feels no pain and keeps getting back up to do increasingly insane spots. This is, fundamentally, the irresistible force meeting the immovable object. I can’t believe we’re getting such a match from “The guy who taught Tetsuya Naito how to be cool” versus “The Mountie’s tag team partner,” but such is wrestling in 2019.

Ring of Honor has really fallen off a cliff this year. The core of their star power left to found AEW, and their alliance with New Japan seems to be at its lowest ebb. The whole controversy of CMLL firing Rush and Dragon Lee, who have become key figures here, would also seem to be a bad sign for the ROH/CMLL alliance as well. So it’s been a rebuilding year for the company, and frankly I haven’t been impressed with what they’ve rebuilt. Except for this one match. This is very symbolic of their one shot to turn things around for 2020. I hope they don’t blow it; I expect that they will somehow.

My gut tells me Rush is moving on to greener pastures, whereas PCO probably can’t do much better than being a big fish in a small pond. Wild as it sounds, I think we might get a title change tonight.

Jay Briscoe & Mark Briscoe vs. Jay Lethal & Jonathan Gresham - This is for the Briscoes’ ROH tag team title. The biggest question mark here is that Lethal broke his arm back in October, and although he’s vowed to make it to this match it remains to be seen if he’ll be healed enough to really go.

I haven’t followed the story closely, but Lethal and Gresham were friends until Gresham decided that he needed to cheat to get ahead, and then they fought over that, and then they reconciled, and now they’re both whacking the Briscoes with chairs. I’m still not sure if the Briscoes ever officially turned babyface this year. So to me this is a pretty standard 2019 ROH story, where there are no heroes and everyone’s an asshole.

In theory this should be a down-and-dirty brawl between two teams that would prefer to fight than wrestle. But since it’s not officially billed as a street fight or anything, what we’ll probably end up with is a basic wrestling match where they just sneak a few weapon shots and low blows behind the ref’s back. That’s fine to build to a bigger, wilder spotfest later, but not so much to be a featured tag match on Final Battle. I guess Lethal and Gresham will win the belts with shenanigans to set up a rematch.

Shane Taylor vs. Dragon Lee Ryu Lee - Taylor is defending the ROH television title. Dragon Lee had been a big name in CMLL, and a frequent representative of the company in New Japan, and of late he’s been getting involved in ROH through his brother Rush. But since CMLL suddenly fired him, and they own the rights to the name, he’s now adopted the name “Ryu Lee,” using the Japanese word for “dragon” to honor his new deal with New Japan. Lee’s preference among those three companies is to work for New Japan, so now that he’s got that contract I am very curious whether he remains a ROH regular. I suspect this match will be the first clue. Taylor has been a dominant champion but Lee has friends in high places, so the one they want to push should be very telling. I’m kinda thinking Taylor retains.

Matt Taven vs. Vincent - Vincent used to be Vinny Marseglia, a member of The Kingdom stable with Taven and TK O’Ryan. I’m not sure what happened to O’Ryan after Taven lost the ROH world title, but Vincent turned on Taven and has gone all in on the gimmick of being a horror movie slasher. This means Taven is doing the “asshole champion you come to respect drops the title and then improbably turns babyface” thing. I’m not sure I buy that, but I guess ROH kinda has to make the best of what they have to work with. All I know is when I see Taven plugging his DVD I’m just reminded of when TNA put out that Jeff Jarrett retrospective as if he was Triple H or something. Anyway, I guess the King of Kings King of the Mountain King of the Kingdom needs to win this match.

Mark Haskins vs. Bully Ray - This is being billed as a street fight, so the match cannot end by count-out or disqualification. Bully Ray has been playing the bitter veteran bullying young guys for the better part of two years now. He was mainly feuding with Flip Gordon, but even after they blew that off he just kept doing it, and when Flip turned heel they just sort of switched to Haskins. They’ve even got Bully going after Mark’s wife like he did with Flip’s wife. It’s the exact same fucking thing. Which, I suppose, means Bully has to win this match to generate more heat for more rematches. I would literally rather be escorted into a room where Bully bitches me out for being a bad fan than watch this crap one more time.

Marty Scurll & Flip Gordon vs. Bandido & Flamita - All right, so months ago Juice Robinson came to ROH to found a stable called Lifeblood, with the goal of elevating some new stars to replenish the roster after the AEW exodus. Well, in an apt metaphor for ROH’s fortunes in 2019, Lifeblood quickly fell apart with half the team disappearing from ROH, leaving Bandido, Mark Haskins, and Tracy Williams. They tried to recruit various guys to fill the void, but nobody has stepped up and Flip Gordon even turned heel on them to join Scurll’s Villain Enterprises. Then Flip blew out his elbow during the heel turn. Anyway, Haskins has his hands full with Bully Ray, and I don’t even know where Williams is, so now Bandido is starting a new tag team with Flamita and this is the closest we get to blowing off the Lifeblood/Villain Enterprises feud.

Scurll’s contract with ROH actually ended a couple of weeks ago, but he has a handshake deal to work this show and the one on December 15. The big questions now are which company he’ll sign with and how ROH will write him out of the company. But presumably those questions won’t be answered until the 15th, so even at this late date we’re still in a holding pattern, and I’m guessing they’ll keep acting like everything is normal.

Logic would suggest Scurll should do the job so ROH can put over Flamita and Bandido. Then again, it wouldn’t shock me to learn that Bandido is getting ready to leave, so you never know.

Jeff Cobb vs. Dan Maff - This is basically a battle of two big mean guys. Cobb is just back from a month-long tour with New Japan. Maff is a recent acquisition, and notably filled in for Brody King to help Marty Scurll and PCO defend the ROH trios title. That kinda makes me wonder if Maff could end up playing a role in the final fate of Villain Enterprises, but that probably won’t affect this match.

Cobb is--say it with me this time, folks--expected to have his contract come up soon, and may or may not be getting ready to leave. If he’s staying, he should probably win this match to build him up for whoever is champion going forward. If he’s leaving...well, Maff seems to be a budget version of Cobb, so it would make sense to have him be the guy to send Cobb packing. We’ll just have to see what happens.

Angelina Love vs. Maria Manic - Love won the women’s title at the last ROH show I watched, but it turns out she lost it back to Kelly Klein shortly thereafter. Then Klein suffered a concussion, which turned into a pretty big story abut ROH not taking care of her and letting her contract expire, and I don’t know what’s going on with the women’s title anymore. I occasionally wonder if they’ll even continue to have a women’s division after this show. Manic is clearly their big new project, but apparently they almost let her go to NXT before locking her into a contract.

The story of the match is that Manic is a big mean monster and Love is terrified of her. Usually in this kind of story the heel gets to demonstrate that they can come up with some clever way to outwit the monster, and the match is about whether that works or not. But as far as I know they haven’t given Love anything--she seems to just be a lamb led to the slaughter. It’s possible Love is preparing to leave and this is the blowoff for her character. If so, I’m not sure who will be left to fight Manic. There’s only like five other active women in the official roster, and I haven’t seen any of them wrestle in months.

Dalton Castle & Joe Hendry vs. Silas Young & Josh Woods - This is scheduled for the pre-show. Young and Woods are apparently calling themselves “2G1T” (“Two Guys, One Tag”), which is possibly the most alarming sign of the creative energy left in this company. I think Castle and Hendry have been passive-aggressively feuding and teaming for months and I’ve kinda given up trying to figure out where this is headed. I guess Castle and Hendry win.

Rhett Titus vs. Kenny King - Another match set for the pre-show. Titus and King were a tag team ages ago, but now King is a wannabe top heel and Titus is a prelim guy. Well, I guess they’re both in the pre-show so technically they’re both prelim guys. I assume the point is to give King a win, but if this guy was ever going to be something in ROH, he would already be well beyond the point that beating Titus would mean anything.

#roh #ring of honor #final battle #rush #pco

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halloweenvalentine1997 · 5 years ago

Text

A short story I made out of short stories I’ve written under other names.

When she died, I felt a series of perforations, hollows and bruises

about my skull. I saw her die behind static.

By the stone wall adjacent to the office supplies store, I

bewailed her, screaming,

burning myself later with the tip of a lit cigarette.

I put ash and poison on my wrist for the ones who died.

I wanted to pick a strawberry off the plant in my parents’ backyard

and once more taste its succulence. I wanted to impale my head with the

iron tip of a weathervane. Slice open my vibrant red aorta.

Seeing them all in a hole

through the light emitting

through the asylum blinds.

I myself am a corpse in a bed

in the forensics ward,

green moths on my blanket,

rotting silently in a pastel grave,

killed by medicine,

wasted by time.

If you come close enough to hear my thoughts

(like a chemically-enhanced ghost)

distort and clamor

amongst the traffic, the television,

the noise a death in a family brings,

I will let loose my hatred

like a ribbon from hair,

unraveling red Medusa strands.

I will draw more ribbons on your flesh

if you touch me,

bleed you into the wood,

hammer a nail into your heartline,

devour your fear like a shot of amphetamine

to my malevolent blood.

2013

Stacey

Some of us are the river’s current, floating through life swiftly or slowly, as if in a trance of somnambulism. Some of us are a human shell at its edge, refusing to follow its pattern and be a part of it. Why follow them when you can live on the fringes of society, away from its stigmas and scrutinizing scorn?

When Ellie married Samuel Barnes, the world was a rose-gold utopia. Three years later, at the age of twenty-nine, Ellie no longer felt that the chemistry they had once remained. On a windy September afternoon, when she returned to the red-brick bungalow she shared with Samuel on Hillsam Avenue, Ellie heard moans and sounds of sexual ecstasy emitting from their bedroom. Another woman was there. Ellie’s eyes instantly began to burn like hot coals in a campground grill. She examined her wedding portrait on the wall of the hallway as she moved in slow motion through it. They had been photographed in front of the church’s stained glass windows, a spectrum of color radiating behind the couple adorned in black and white.

She ran her fingers through her long brown hair, blinking through the lake of sorrow in her dark eyes, and suppressing a sob, pushed open the bedroom door at the end of the hall. Another dark-haired woman Ellie didn’t recognize was riding Samuel, and when she registered the door slamming open, she turned around wide-eyed with a cry of alarm, her brown nipples in full view.

“I knew it,” Ellie told Samuel bitterly. “I knew for at least a year that there was someone else!”

Samuel looked at his wife blankly and didn’t reply, his face almost smug.

“Who are you?” Ellie shrieked at the strange woman.

“Lila Stern,” the woman replied. “And clearly, Sam doesn’t love you anymore. He loves me. He has for the entire year you suspected something was going on. We would both like you to leave.”

“Don’t dictate what I will do in my own house, you fucking homewrecker!” Ellie shouted. Lila, remembering her nudity, covered herself with the indigo comforter.

“I agree with Lila,” Samuel said. “Just pack your things and go, Ellie. You’ve been a nagging, paranoid pain in my ass for too long. You’re in need of a psychiatrist, but you won’t pay heed to my advice. All you are lately is a cold fish who’s no fun. A fucking schoolmarm. Find an apartment somewhere. Leave.”

“Now,” Lila said.

Ellie slammed the door shut and bolted down the hall and into the kitchen. She opened the cutlery drawer and grabbed the sharpest knife she could find. Tested its point with the tip of her index finger. A small blood-drop formed in the small pad of flesh. Although Ellie’s tears rained down like heated glass, she felt no physical pain.

I won’t pack my things, she thought. I have a better idea.

She glanced at the neon green digital clock above the oven. It read 1:11 p.m. It was September 24th. As she placed the knife into the pocket of her navy blue peacoat, grabbed her smartphone, scrawled a quick note and left the house, Ellie knew what to do. No more morning to afternoon shifts as a psychiatric nurse at St. Mary Medical Center’s psych unit. No more wondering when Samuel would be home from his nightly excursions. As she walked towards the river, passing the other houses, the Texaco, the railroad tracks, the boarded-up, shutdown factories, memories flashed before her. She remembered her lonely childhood, her even more tumultuous adolescence where she slept with a crowbar in her pillowcase and read The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird at the edge of the schoolyard grass away from everyone.

“I wish you’d never been born,” Ellie’s mother told her, swilling red wine from a tall, dark bottle.

“I second that,” her father said, puffing on a fat cigar. Once she made it to the river, Ellie collapsed like a house of cards to the white sand, and howled the loss of her love into the godless sky. She glanced from side to side to make sure no one was watching. She couldn’t be sure if someone was for all the foliage and bushes. But she didn’t care. She sat there for the longest time, her breathing a series of hyperventilation. Samuel’s face was all she could see, then Lila’s, the two of them like a rotating holographic image. She wanted her cremated ashes bequeathed to the river. She wanted no tomb in the town cemetery. No funeral. The note she wrote with these directions was in her left pocket of her coat. Such a heavy coat for the nice weather, but Ellie was always cold. Her body, feather-boned and catatonic, slumped over a large rock and she let the tears wet it like a water nymph mourning the loss of a handsome sailor on a receding boat.

Ellie turned on her cell phone and listened to Paula Cole’s “Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?” one last time. It sounded faint above the river’s churning. Just like the woman in the song, she too had an non-devoted, careless husband. She wept hardest at the chorus:

Where is my John Wayne? 

Where is my prairie song?

 Where is my happy ending?

 Where have all the cowboys gone?

“To greener pastures,” Ellie said to herself. “To rose-gold utopias I’ll never see.“

The clock on the wall of Mrs. Sykes’s math class ticked in time to my heartbeat. The hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach that I get when I crave marijuana was there, screaming like a lacuna asking to be filled. The time for more recalcitrance (in this case, truancy and drug use by the river) was near. While Mrs. Sykes droned on like a monotonous honeybee about the Pythagorean theorem, I got up from my desk and slung my backpack over my shoulders. Her gunmetal grey eyes followed me to the door with the poster of the Power Rangers on it, all teamed up together. Always use the buddy system, the poster said.

“Where are you going, Stacey?” Mrs. Sykes asked.

“Skipping class,” I told her. “And dropping out when I turn eighteen in February. This is non-negotiable. You can’t stop me.”

Before my teacher could retaliate, I flounced out of the room, leaving the scoffing and titters of my peers behind me. I left my textbooks in my locker to lessen the load in my backpack. I unzipped a small pocket and grinned at the verdant green pot in its glass pipe.

Jimmy Stirling is the one who introduced me to pot when I was a junior a year before. He was a senior, and one of Lewis and Clark High School’s few homeless students. His dad was a cantankerous drunk and gambler who threw him out. Jimmy spent time singing songs on the sidewalk for spare change, or sleeping at the homeless shelter for adolescents. For someone who was homeless, Jimmy frequently had a remarkably full tin can of bills and change. His singing voice was a rich alto tearing pleasantly through the downtown breeze. On October of last year, he found me crying under the highway after school let out. I recognized him from my creative writing class.

"What’s wrong, Stacey?” he asked.

“My brother’s locked in the loony bin. He’s possessed. He killed Alvin, my guinea pig. Everything is falling apart, and to top it all off, Liam broke up with me this morning.”

"Man, I’m sorry,” Jimmy said. “You every try marijuana? It might make you forget all that stuff.”

“I don’t have any money,” I said, knowing that anyone with marijuana downtown expected payment in return for it.

“That’s alright. I have some I’ll share for free. Let’s sit in my favorite place to do it.”

I followed him, listening to him sing as we walked the few blocks to an alleyway with a set of cement stairs against a condemned apartment, leading to a bolted door. He sang Skid Row’s “18 and Life” and Black Sabbath’s “Killing Yourself To Live.” We sat on the bottom step . He loaded the pot into a glass bowl and taught me how to light it, how to inhale the hit of smoke without exhaling it too soon. I caught the gist of it. Suddenly, within a few minutes, everything was funny. My mind was suddenly devoid of all negativity. I was giggly, light as a tumbleweed blown by a gale of fierce wind. I felt energetic, talkative, and happier that I’d been a long time. Shortly after my day with Jimmy, I learned he went to jail for getting caught with Ecstasy tablets in his lockers. He was also rumored to be selling cocaine and heroin downtown. He wasn’t allowed back at school. I never saw him again. The flashbacks vanished when I approached the river and saw her. She was a woman with long brown hair. She was wearing a peacoat, jeans and pair of black loafers. I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw what she was doing. The woman older than me by at least a decade, was holding a kitchen knife to the veins in her right wrist. She made no sound when she punctured them, her hand dangling over the water. I watched her bloodletting turn part of the emerald river red. It was spouting out like the slashed throat of a sacrificed farm animal. She turned and saw me when i stepped on a twig by accident and snapped it in two.

“Go away,” the woman told. “Believe me, you should be letting this happen.”

She took in my red ringlets, my sharp green eyes, my pink hoodie, my Converse sneakers. Then she went for her throat with her knife and slit it open with perfect finesse. There was a vibe coming off of this woman that insinuated I should just let her die. I could sense that her life had been miserable and mean. I sat on a rock out of sight of the dying woman and got high, thinking of her spirit rising, transcendental and free, into the sun and clouds. I thought of how the first settlers of the city I live in came here 10,000 to 30,000 years ago. Before there were cemeteries, they buried their dead in unmarked graves. I thought of all the skeletons that must be under the grass of the lawns and parks, the sidewalks, the urban streets. I thought of the days of religious fanaticism, and how had I been born then, I would have been buried in unconsecrated ground for my heathen ways. I didn’t believe in god, but I did believe in Satan.

2019

Stacey

I am not sure exactly when my family died. Before they died, I was a genuinely innocent soul whose conscience burned to a crisp. I couldn’t blame myself for it, but I didn’t know who to blame because the ones responsible for my family’s death never came out of their disguises, synthetic human skin and features made to look exactly like my family members would look if they were really there amongst you. I still hear them call to me over highway noise and wind, while I’m taking hits off a meth pipe or smoking a cigarette on an overpass with dead eyes and no ache. I’ve already ached so much. Without them I am a branch breaking off of a tree. It’s hard to explain what I mean by disguises; they look so much like my family but aren’t. They could look like anyone and they’re wearing synthetic skin designed to look like my mom and dad.

I am Stacey Galloway. I was born to a family that never loved me but that I tried to love fiercely. I may have turned into a drug-addled street kid but I still wanted them to love me, anyway. I remember when I first suspected them to be dead. I was sitting in my old apartment in the living room with a scream in my ears that sounded like my mother’s emanating from my laptop and whirling through the dusty air like a trap I would remained enveloped in. I heard a chainsaw start up and then the sound stopped. It was like an audio recording that just stayed there screaming and sawing in my computer speakers. The voices told me my parents were dead and replaced by “skin masks.”

I asked, “What is a skin mask?” “Synthetic skin made to look like your parents. Exactly like your parents. And your younger brother,” a man replied out of thin air. “Someone else is wearing skin that looks like them now. Every feature of your family has been replicated, special contact lenses have been made, someone with the same height as them is wearing skin masks.”

I couldn’t see him but maybe he could see me. I hoped not. What he was saying was too horrible to want to comprehend. It’s humanly possible to do this, with the aid of a lot of fake skin and ways of knowing how the victim worked, how they spoke, where they lived, whom they spoke to. I will never know that world and don’t want to. It’s insidious enough just to live in the city I live in, gone and waking up with ice in my chest in a house that is now unfamiliar and rearranged. All I want to do is get high to forget about it, and it’s worked after awhile.

I know the police will do nothing because I don’t know how to explain it without dying or not making sense. I never wanted this.

I never wanted to lose the only lifeline I had.

So after the voices came from my laptop and told me these things, I left my apartment, locked it and went to the stone wall by the office supplies store about a mile away. I sat there in the gravel and lit a cigarette, the parking lot blurring through my wet eyes. I didn’t know why I believed what I was hearing, but I was anorexic and schizophrenic, and didn’t know how to not believe something that seemed so real. Before all this, I heard voices talk to me in my room that really were there. No one was physically present around me, but their voices reverberated throughout my walls, my silent television, my closed laptop.

“We’re going to kill your family,” said the voices.

I didn’t believe them. I didn’t reply. I thought they were full of shit.

Now I know they’re not, because although the identity thieves of my family are never in prison, the handwriting of my parents has changed, and so have the cadence of their voices. They speak in European accents now when they think they’re alone and that I’m out of earshot. But I can hear them. It’s hard to understand what they’re saying. It’s plain English, but indecipherable at the same time. My brother’s identity was never actually stolen. He is eighteen and currently going to college. I am twenty-three and never doing anything with my life again. I’m in the loony bin.

I stare through the green and blue in the slit in the blinds and think about the house I grew up in, a green bungalow in the middle of a golden field of grass, a porch swing, wind chimes and an attic window that never lit up. My father always told me our attic was full of asbestos and that it could cause mesothelioma to inhale it after years of exposure to it.

“But,” he said, “there is no asbestos in the rest of the house. You’re safe.”

In the backyard, my mother grew strawberries and tomatoes. There was a one-car garage and a deck, a wooden fence and a glass picnic table with chairs surrounding it. I remember days, years of smoking marijuana in my room and listening to music. Grey smoke filling the room with the scent of weed, filling my lungs with blackness and my heart with euphoria. I will do that later on, in another place, when this institution is tired of me and forces me out the door like I want.

When I went home after my tantrum by the stone wall, I noticed that my parents were still there, or they just appeared to be. I saw no blemishes, no redness, nothing but them with a synthetic look to their skin, it appeared to be fake. But there was my mother’s hair, my father’s hair, my father’s eyes, their faces. Over the next several years that I lived in the house with them, I noticed that while they copied the handwriting of my parents well, it was slightly altered. They could do their signatures perfectly, but their notes to me and their grocery lists were different looking than a note would be were it from my parents. I was distressed by the way my father’s eyes were either a dark blue or a light blue. They looked like two different sets of eyes. He tried to hit me three times, but never went any further than that. I could tell he was an angry man all of a sudden, and though he looked like my father, I knew he wasn’t. He was wearing a synthetic skin mask. It looked like my father, but it wasn’t. Its skin is fake. It wasn’t real. Same with my mother. Whoever these people were, I know I need to chop them up and leave their remains to dissolve in a landfill somewhere. I want to leave my brother, Steffan, out of it. I know there’s a way to make them expose themselves. Purchase a gun, aim through the summer air at the targets, themselves and tell them, “Take off your skin masks! You’re not my parents! You killed them.”

They wouldn’t be able to reply, and if they were somehow compelled to reply and tell me what they did with my parents, I would happily kill whoever is underneath that fake human surface and tell the cops that they were serial killers who spied on my parents for years and stole their identities. Something I never wanted to happen to them or to myself. I hardly ever talk to “my parents” anymore and Steffan stays the hell away as well. I know I have to have them buried but for now, I think I’ll drown myself in writing. I haven’t explained what is going on to the psych ward, which is going to let me out anyway soon. I know how to handle it myself after hearing one of the directors of the facility tell me, “Your family is skin masks.” The sick fuck laughed to himself and I knew I had to flee and get those people who thought they could ever replace my parents, who were unkind to me but were all I had. I hated everyone else or lost the ones who mattered. I’m going back into their house and I’m going to dig up my gun and aim it, loaded with silver bullets, at their brains. I know they’ll unmask. I’m not born yesterday. I know I should do this. I would never duplicate a mask made to look like real skin and identity of someone else, and wear it over myself as though I could become that person. I’d rather swallow a bottle of pills and go to sleep forever. Fall asleep in a meadow of bluebells and Vicodin.

Before here, I hung out under a train bridge where I always wanted to follow the mysterious Mathilde, a girl whose surname I didn’t know to this day, anywhere and everywhere. She came there to buy meth and was always hanging out with older men, smoking a meth pipe and blowing the smoke up into the lights under the train bridge on the cement walls, watching it float, a white demon mask, in the illumination. I joined her once. She asked me, “Why are you doing meth, Stacey?”

“Because I’m miserable without it. It makes me feel like I could walk for miles and it feels like it’s only seconds until you’re at your destination. I feel like I can die alone on the autumn breeze and die happy.”

“Don’t die, Stacey. You’re the last one of them that should be killed.”

“Some of these bitches really should die. Last night, someone threatened me with a lead pipe after I threatened his friend with a lit cigarette after that cunt tried to beat me up. The both of them should burn up in a chamber underground.”

Mathilde smiled. “How did you know I love that sort of thing?”

“Because I can see through you. I’ve seen you in fights under here, too. Try to keep a low radar. I know you haven’t initiated any of those fights, but try to see there are real dangers here in town and don’t let anyone know where you live. I heard you lost your ID recently and had to get it replaced. It was stolen. I’m only saying this because I care about you, Mathilde. I don’t think they’ve done anything with your ID except disposed of it, by now. I think we should stick together.”

“I don’t have any friends except you,” said Mathilde.

And a few days later, I was shoved away into the psych ward, the loony bin, the human menagerie. I felt like a psychiatric science experiment, doped up with meds and lost in the dull, utilitarian rec room, playing ping pong, watching an episode of Intervention in drug therapy, browsing the bookshelves, learning different coping skills, watching the bus park and then leave through the glass cage of windows, learning about different behavioral therapies, making collages with magazine pictures, standing in line for more meds, staring at the ceiling light reflecting from their TV, craving drugs and wanting to cast off all purity. I couldn’t stand it here any longer. I still can’t. I’m crazier and know I won’t pay for what I’m about to do, considering how horrible what these people did to my parents is. I can’t let them live any longer and everyone is buying into their disguises except and another lady whose name I don’t know. Their old friends won’t speak to them. A lady who lives me nearby told me my mom isn’t herself anymore.

“She’s not Autumn,” the lady told me. Autumn is my mother’s name.

She said nothing about my dad, but all the voices ever reiterated to me was that my dad, Roger, was killed and that I would never know where or what had been done with him. I’ll forever remember that scream and chainsaw sound on my laptop, playing through the speakers out of dead silence. What was I supposed to do with that information. Say I heard it out of thin air? I’d sound psychotic to law enforcement, mental health services and anyone listening. I can’t just ramble about this to random drug addicts, either. I can’t tell them why I’m purchasing the gun, what its purpose is, or where I’m going to kill those thieves. I am haunted by days of sleeping and screaming and all I can do is bleed Ativan and never want to wake up. But still want to avenge my parents’ murder as well. I’m getting out soon. I will sleep under the stars for a night out on the deck, and wait until the daylight breaks to kill them when they emerge from behind their locked door and into the interior of the basement.

You’ll see. They have masks that are so fake-looking they betray themselves, they give themselves away. I can find a way to move on and I know I shouldn’t blame myself, because this destruction of the family foundation was never my doing. It was theirs, whomever is living in those disguises. I’ve told no one. I can’t allow myself to be labelled as psychotic or severely mentally ill, but I have been. I can hear the voices to this day, and four psychiatrists told me that schizophrenia is incurable. The voices can only be tapered down with medications. There is no cure alive for hearing voices, for visual and auditory hallucinations. I’ve seen things too. I’ve seen people that look ghostly and transparent appear by the river, or sitting on curbs, and they vanish into thin air just as quickly as they appeared. A cop by the river, a man in a grey hoodie on the street curb. I see black shadows above me, or white or golden flashbulbs emanating in the ceiling like there’s a camera taking my picture. The voices still talk through speakers, walls and televisions. Car radios. Computers. A speaker will transmit a voice faster than anything. All they’re telling me is that my family was bad and that they deserved it. I know most people wouldn’t agree with this or think this is okay. Nothing is okay. I will never feel like I’m wholly human again.

2016

Mathilde

In the woods there whispered a secret I felt compelled to follow, just to discern its meaning. It could’ve been a blessing or a curse, and still I was brave enough to leave my repressive household for those screams that normally would frighten someone, but I’ve been reduced to a frozen-hearted Banshee on the floor of a seclusion room more than once. I remember the fog of those moments and feeling more broken than even the most dismantled women could get. Screaming because it was expected of me.

I left home when I was eighteen, dropped straight out of high school, a nightmare I never hope to relive. Age eighteen was the last time I saw a psychiatric facility. My family and me lived in a Tudor mansion in the city’s most affluent neighborhood. It was my parents and my sister Sinead, who was always the opposite of me, the black sheep.

“Mathilde, no one is screaming in the woods,” she’d tell me when I first heard the shrill, ear-scorching girl’s shriek echo from the trees bordering the park.

I ignored her and ran knocking a stone statue over, and sought out the source of feminine distress.

“Hello? Are you alright?”

“No matter where you go, I’ll find you,” was the whisper that fervently replied from somewhere in the foliage. As though the angel or apparition (whatever she was) could read my mind. I was thirteen.

Pale and whey-skinned compared to my sister, who perpetually blushed and took better care with her pretty countenance. She snagged Dale Tierney before I could get to know him; naturally someone like him would gravitate towards an extroverted floozy like my sister Sinead. He greeted me politely but tersely upon visiting our house, as I was not the subject of his interest. My sister was seventeen, and a senior in high school, while I was in ninth grade, a razor-freak and antisocial, maladjusted misfit. Sinead pretended not to notice. My cuts bled on tiles to industrial rock music. No one could stop me.

“Mathilde-”

“Don’t speak, or I’ll excavate your heart from your chest and incinerate it while I smoke a coffin nail,” I replied. He was chasing Dale with a bat, and I remembered a brief feeling just like getting fucked with a knife. Some bat-wielding perverts had jumped me several years ago and shoved the handle in.

“Mathilde!”

“I’ll eat your heart before I burn it over the pyre,” I snapped.

In the abandoned grain elevator building made of cement, a place I pretended was a mental institution, I executed him. Lobotomized, Never anesthetized, because I wanted him to feel like hell. I always knew there was no inferno underground where bad people like myself and this man who is dying beneath a series of rope knots. I have bound him in a length of chain as well. Years ago, long after the screaming in the foliage to the cacophonous magpies had ceased, I heard a woman or young girl wail in agony above the ceiling. The attic I never went up in because it was asbestos-ridden, and I wondered how schizophrenic I had become.

I told my father (a man who once told me “try harder” while I pretended to asphyxiate myself with a shoelace adorning the knob of my bedroom door) that I heard a scream erupt from the attic.

“Well, your intake with mental health is tomorrow,” my dad replied. “We’ll get you on the right meds.”

I hoped and prayed there was no reality behind the scream.

The house was over 100 years old; it could’ve been a benevolent or malevolent apparition.

He’s dead.

I’ll splash him with acid and dissolve him into the floor.

I see Dale watching me from the doorway all of a sudden.

“I am Hell itself,” I tell him. He seems to know the guy I offed was scum.

We laugh.

I wake up from my zoning out on the couch at 3 a.m., content, knowing I had no part in it. None of it was my fault. Tori Amos’s To Venus and Back album has played on repeat all night. I could’ve retained my innocence if the city’s pathetic excuse for a population cut me a little slack, but now all I have time for is complete, indisputable indifference. And euphoria over everything, hedonistic amusement showing at all times. So happy I could die in outer space. I wouldn’t even care. I used to put methamphetamine mixed with angel dust, or PCP into my bloodstream and it was then that I discovered a drug that could take away the fear of death itself. A man said, “Get the fuck out of here or face my gun.” I saw no gun to speak of and felt numb with nothing but mania in my head under the freight train bridge. I moved myself as far away from him as I could go. I was full of amphetamines under the bridge. A place downtown full of drama and drugs. I saw a man hold a knife to the throat of a man in his late teens or early twenties. I told the older man with the knife, “Don’t cut him. Just don’t. I don’t want police under here. I’m not calling them. Just…don’t,” I told him lifelessly. This was before the gun threat with the possibly non-existent gun in one of his pockets. The man withdrew his silver blade and backed off the guy, who was the only one allowing me to use a meth pipe. I felt no affection for him considering I don’t know him to this day, but I wonder how I’m not afraid to waltz out into the insidious Spokane night. A hellhole in the central eastern part of Washington state. I never liked this city, famous for its underground whoredom and criminal activity since the early nineteenth century. I intend to haunt it just like the screaming ghosts.

But I won’t scream. I’ll just make them their own worst enemies. I don’t feel I will ever really die, even when my body does.

“I hate you and I love myself, you pathetic fucking city,” I whispered to the mirror. I would place them in an underground chamber. Baths of acid dissolving useless DNA. When people like me are crossed, the night can scream and sleep will reveal what Hell can be. I’ve dreamt of being in a kennel on a plane. Jail cells on a bus with cages lining the aisle that remind me of a jail on wheels. It deserts me by the side of a road aligning a river. Sometimes I dream of treading deep water and drifting along in its waves like a damned soul. I dream of people glaring at me in dark alleys, houses where there’s nothing to watch but a woman in a peach-colored dress entertaining some businessman, drinking something out of a wineglass while she does it. An abandoned asylum being haunted by myself and others. It’s like I’m haunting somewhere that is judging me as I judge it.

I made a carbon copy of him. A clone. I drifted away on dissociative hallucinogens to the sound of his voice in my ear. I don’t care that he’s not really here.

Whenever anyone badmouths him, I feel like they should meet the Windex I pretend to pour in their coffee.

I’ll do what I please for the rest of my life.

Colored balloons and iridescent papier-mâché dotted the walls on the summer evening of my sister, Sinead’s, suicide. I staggered home to Stevie Nicks’s “Stand Back” blaring from her room above the stairwell on repeat, a bottle of Robitussin lingering in my bloodstream. I felt high as a kite. I stared into the rainbow vortex, the littered warps of tinsel on the floor, and remembered hours earlier an argument ricocheting off the walls between Dale Tierney and Sinead. I couldn’t understand them through their slurred drunkenness. I remember a wineglass breaking against his car as it was tossed aside by Sinead.

I had never known her to fall apart.

I would have never done this to him, but I chose to keep out of his way and never tell him how I felt. I was like winter without him, cold as silver and bracing as the winds of the east. I could sustain the fantasy of him more than the reality.

He was somewhere in the house, probably, drunk in the kitchen and avoiding the drama of prior hours.

When the song played one more time, I ascended the stairs and traipsed down the corridor to Sinead’s room.

Do not turn away, my friend

Like a willow I can bend

No man calls my name

No man came

So I walked on down away from you

Maybe your attention was more

Than you could do

One man did not call

He asked me for my love

And that was all

The lines from the song tore through the air and were like bells of 80s euphoria in my ears. I saw Sinead dead with a jagged red line across her throat, torn open from a self-inflicted wound. Blood spattered the mirror of her vanity table. I never thought she had the guts to even prick her finger. I watched her white face for a moment, its waxen marble idiocy, its vacant, grey-eyed death. In extremis, she looked more at peace than I’d ever been in life.

Dale was nowhere to be found on the property. A white sheet covered my sister’s face and they wheeled her to the morgue. I would soon adorn her grave with clematises and dahlias. I would miss her soliloquies on the balcony before he entered our lives. She was so melancholic sometimes, but nowhere near as much as I.

The day after her funeral procession, a blur of black hearses and silver cemeteries, mounds of dirt cascading over her coffin, I smoked angel dust and watched the rain fall outside as I blared heavy metal from the stereo. Tears only burned once and I allowed them to fall for two minutes. Nothing could bring her back, and when Dale rang the doorbell I only told him, “She’s gone,” and closed the door in his face. His double stood behind the closed door ready to embrace me and disappear with me into the bed.

“No one should be allowed to even reach me, touch me or talk to me,” I said. I told the silent thin air. I didn’t want a reply, and I awoke the following day to a touch on my shoulder. When I turned, I saw nothing. Not a person. Not even a trail of vapor. I’d deny anyone from knowing the monster that is me.

Something in me still laughs, despite the grief.

I can see her in dreams. I can see Dale in dreams.

I’d rather daydream on drugs and live in the ruins of my old house than deal with the heinous society around me.

Broken doorknobs and glass I can’t shatter. I swallow pills and wrap myself in blankets, dreaming of a boundless, lazy sea that carries me in its midst. When I reach land, it is steep and treacherous.

I awaken in my mirage’s arms. I am an endless realm of sadism when someone poses as a threat. I once pointed a silver crescent of a knife to the skin of one of his would-be attackers. I won’t ever let go of the image Dale embellished in my mind.

I am as dead as the man in the cement left in a puddle. I am as dead as Sinead, wallowing away in a hallucinogenic reality.

I find nothing damaging although my health is rotting like the grass in the heat waves. Rotting like the relics in every yard, made of metal and plastic. I hate everyone in the world and all I wanted was to end the city.

All I wanted was to end time.

To corrupt and corrode.

To slide right out of life older than anyone had ever been.

I’m only twenty-five years old, and it took me that long to finally kill someone. It was in defense of Dale while we wandered for a couple minutes when I ran into him, discovering he also had an affinity for the abandoned grain elevator where I killed whatever his obtuse name was. I knew somehow he would grace my presence that day. The would-be attacker was quite the opposite of a graceful presence; he was a storm. A storm boiled in my blood, too, and instantaneously, I made the baseball bat fly out of his brandishing arm and struck him several times. Dale Tierney grinned as he watched me debase the humanity right out of the man’s veins. I left him there to rot by some old filing cabinets.

Months after all of that happened, I no longer cry tears or cling to a crucifix on my pillow in the shade. There is nothing more to make of myself; no one will expect anything of me for a long time. Maybe never. Isolative by both night and day, I crave no presence to sustain me through the day. My parents flit about the house and are mostly not in it.

Yesterday I met a girl in a white dress with glittery, crimson-bleeding eyes in the foyer. She bid me follow her to the mirror beneath a chandelier and told me my beauty would wane. Then she vanished into the air like an exploding star. I didn’t care and I told her to hush and leave me be. I gazed into the mirror, not as dissatisfied as I used to be. Sinead was always prettier, but I no longer envied her for it. If anything, I missed her. I never knew, in my cough syrup-induced state, what Dale had told Sinead that pushed her over the edge enough to slit her throat. She took her own life right off the planet. I will forever imagine her ricocheting into the stars, an astral angel leaving her own body and becoming a new being in the form of a spirit. The girl with blood rivers in her eyes was nowhere near as beautiful as my sister.

Whenever I think of the glow of emergency vehicles outside the limits of the mansion, I pacify myself and push away the thought as fast as it came. I know there were no witnesses besides Dale and me. There was no one to see us all meet there, not knowing one another would gather there to explore the grain elevator. Barbed wire, rusted beer cans and rejected heroin needles littered the ground at the base of the cement building. It had been shut down since the 1970s, and not a soul usually stirred in or around it premises by the railroad tracks. There was nothing to do at the place besides fuck or get stoned. In this case, I killed someone and left him for dead in the place’s basement. The bat was disposed of. Everything wiped clean. No information regarding me can be salvaged because I am a lightning bolt full of speed running as fast as I can away from everyone.

I am sitting by the 7-Eleven high on acid. Halos and wings bleed out of the sky and litter the parking lot in a debris of feathers and gilded circles. I cannot scream in my house, so I went downtown to swallow an LSD-laced sugar cube and careen in the opposite direction from rational thinking. There was nothing to do but melt away along with everything else around me. I wanted the patterns of the strip mall across the street to keep melting, the neon of the bar on Dante Avenue to keep illuminating the girl beneath its sign with the darkest eyeliner I’d ever seen. She kept moving from side to side erratically, as if she were high on speed. I just can’t sustain my lifeform without drugs. I become other selves. I talk to ghosts of humans, both living and dead. She is talking to the empty air that always has answers. Her cigarette smoke forms a crown. I get bored and walk down the street, the church on its corner alit with hallucinatory flames. I think I see Sinead staring at me beneath the wainscoting in someone’s house through their window. I hate everyone except her and Dale, but whatever he said to her caused her to slice her own throat open. I can’t trust him to not make me capsize. I can’t let my iron guard down when it comes to my walls.

Do not touch me, I command every living human.

There is a star I stare at to the south that shines its light upon my shoulder blades ripping open, my veins bluer than before in my wrists. I caress them. The most important love is self-love, I tell myself. That is how I will flourish.

2019

Mathilde

They found the remains of the body that I left behind in a fit of post-traumatic rage. It was a puddle of lye and hydrochloric acid, and gone was the baseball bat-wielding storm of a man after he tried to assault my sister Sinead’s lover, Dale Tierney. A few years ago, my sister committed suicide over an incident with him in which the circumstances are still unknown to me. Since then, I’ve been laying on my bed with voices compressing my head, telling me they’ll sell me and kill me. I am too strong, too fortified with indifference to care. My parents are rarely at home and I’ll never tell them. My dad would just advocate for changing the medication combination I’m currently not taking.

My twenty-eighth birthday is just around the corner. A brand new gun I purchased from one of my meth dealers shines in my hand in the starlight, full of a fresh supply of bullets. My red-lipsticked smile could enchant the devil. On top of the hill where I stand are two high school enemies, Jamie Frances and Stormy Hale. The last place I saw them was under the freight train bridge. They were sharing a pot pipe. They called me an ugly dog. That time, I let it slide off like snow from a gabled roof. Now, I’ve got the two of them right where I want them and I’m still not bothered by their comment. Underneath of them the grass blades look like ebony knife blades and my hand is on my cheap but efficient gun. It’s a silencer so there won’t be much sound when I snuff their lives out. I know how reckless this is considering anyone could have seen me out their window at 2 a.m., but I’m willing to risk it anyway. Jamie and Stormy don’t see me watching from the top of the metal stairs.

I approach with quiet steps across the hilltop. Their backs are turned. My hand grips the gun more firmly than a snake’s coiling hold on a victim. Closer. They turn around. Closer still. Jamie yelps like a mouse before the gun’s bullet catches her in the head, embedded in the wisps of her brown hair. She collapses like a darted, tranquilized animal to the grass. Next, I point the gun at blond, self-righteous Stormy. I see nothing. The fear in her face screams a novel’s length of words. I fire at her forehead and she, too, is done for. It’s my lucky night that they chose this hilltop to smoke weed. I was coming here to smoke meth. I embellish each bitch with another bullet hole and calmly leave them there, the swishing sound of the gunfire replaying in my mind.

The hill. The black grass blades. An abbatoir for two girls who crossed a thin line.

I go home, hide the gun and decide I’m already too high to take another hit. I open an antiquated copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel and nearly read the whole thing, satisfied that the voices in the wall have been silenced. I’ll read the end tomorrow. Before I close my red-tinted eyes at 8 a.m., I think I see Sinead standing at the edge of my bed.

“Good job, Mathilde,” she tells me. “You snuffed those cunts out just like a hurricane takes out a wooden house in southern floods.”

I love her.

I miss her.

I almost cry, but my emotions are in a graveyard somewhere. My eyes are only ice instead of liquid tears. My heart isn’t broken. I know she’ll always be with me. I know that the mirage I made of Dale will always love and caress me, even when I’m no longer young and dangerous. He’s not really here but it’s like I can see him anyway.

I imagine the bones of Stormy and Jamie decomposing under the cold earth. And if they are cremated, their ash is undisturbed in urns for centuries. I think of crimson bullet holes on the hilltop of a feminine warzone. It’s the last thing I see before I fall into a pleasant slumber.

2019

Stacey

They released me from the psych ward. I have a gun in my hand. I’m veering towards the bungalow with meth reeling in my veins, my hands on a fifteen dollar loaded gun. I purchased it from a man in a trench coat in an alleyway. I open the door.

“Where were you?” asks my non-mother. She looks and sounds like my mother, but she isn’t my mother.

“It’s late.”

“Take off your skin mask,” I tell her, withdrawing the gun and pointing it at her head. “Stand up and unmask! You’re not my mother! Take that damn thing off!”

She starts to hyperventilate, and stands up. She fumbles with the layers of skin parts that originated in some clandestine building. They come off and underneath is another pale woman. I don’t study her face but I don’t recognize it. The moment I realize I’m right and that this is a malevolent identity thief, I blow her brains to pieces. I shoot her full of three holes. I only wish this were a smoking gun. I steal away into dad’s TV room and he does the same thing. He’s just an ordinary guy underneath. These two strangers are people that have lived the lives of someone stepping into a stranger’s skin. Stealing their house, their job, their lives. I’ll never sleep again. Once they’re both dead, I call 9-1-1.

“I just killed my parents’ identity thieves. Come and pick up their remains,” I tell the operator once asked what my emergency is. I tell them my address and they wheel them away. They’re covered in white sheets. A bunch of cops tell me, “You’re not going to pay for this. They were dangerous. They were unpredictable. They could have killed you, too. You haven’t assaulted us, and we thank you for that and understand how hard this is to talk about for you. So we’re going to just let you stay in the house for awhile. Keep the gun with you.”

They leave.

I’m considered a murderer in self-defense. I’m not even going back to the psych ward because I haven’t told them my history of hospitalization.

I scribble a murderous vignette in a composition notebook that night called “Cornfield Rot.”

It reads:

“Some of us are wraiths gliding through your world, blissfully unaware of your cryptic eyes staring past us, of your mouths that eject inanities. All we’ve heard is noise for years.

We’re used to it.”

This is the paragraph I hear spoken aloud to me in a phantom whisper at 3 a.m., my alarm clock bathing my stoned self in a neon green glow. It’s a feminine voice, half-familiar and as faint as the illumination from the clock. My pillow is like a wreath of thorns. I eat pills, caffeine, switchblades and shards of broken teacups. There is a prevalence of apathy that spreads me in me, but what I lack is fear. What they say I lack is self-respect. I suck down another joint, draining the grass until it glows like the motel fire I will see in a few days. Lighting up the firmament with incandescent flames, fiery orange mingled with slate grey. I always wanted to rip open the sky like paper and end the world. When the Days Inn burned down from one of my lit cigarettes, I fled the scene as the firetrucks skyrocketed past me. Black flames filled the town with poison. The colors blurred through the water in my eyes. I hated everything around me since I could think, since I could speak.

Something explodes behinds me as I propel myself further away from the scene of my infantile crime. No more late-night TV, no more waking up to the same sailboat prints on the walls. No more panhandling at the hamburger restaurant next door to the Days Inn. I’m as thin and intangible as a wisp of smoke floating through the adrenaline-suffused air. I’ll disappear into the fields and search for rotting bodies under the pines.

I imagine swallowing a handful of pills next to the concrete platform by the abandoned bowling alley, the one with the crimson anarchy sign spray-painted on it. I see a haze of red Victorian wallpaper and a knife aimed at many skulls. A flash of fire will light up in other places someday. I won’t kill myself while they recline in the brambled ruin and laugh.

Sometimes I can hear the dead in the dirt beneath me say, “I am under here.” I’ve heard them come from underneath the bus stops I wait at, the sidewalks, the swimming pool, the abandoned drive-in theater at the edge of town.

I can’t see them, but I can hear them with ears that hear nothing but bells, voices, or chaos. I can feel my pain get carried off with the breeze at such times. They give me the hope that death is an opening to a portal of the soul’s immortality.

My makeup is burning off. I’m a limp, ragged doll in the corn maze getting eaten by ants. I got lost looking for the exit. I am rot given back to the earth.

2015

Janine

Amanda Warwick, age twenty-two, lay submerged in a halfway-house, painted yellow walls, dirt yard, a place to be jettisoned to. She had overdosed on methamphetamine in the heated, sunlit parking lot of multiple storage garages, her head in a hole in the cement next to an empty Halloween candy basket shaped like a Jack O Lantern. After the sharp inhalation of crystallized smoke found her brain, she was set off balance with the cathedral’s clamoring bells, the beauty of the wind’s white noise. She drenched herself in the calm black water of the lake, washing asunder the sins of Janine Crellin. Janine, with her green eyes and reddish-blond hair, a contrast to Amanda’s coarse black curls and hazel orbs, was in an infamous fixture in Amanda’s past. She had bled Amanda in the alleyway, bedazzled by the trails of blood flow, scarlet stars, mesmerizing to Janine. They were both sixteen and lived next door to each other. A red brick house with a picket fence (Janine’s) set beside a white house with green shutters (Amanda’s).

Janine was belligerent. Amanda was polite. They weren’t friends and Janine’s problem with her originated from a source unknown to her. In wild, vociferous rage, Janine left cigarette burns, several of them, that felt like surface tumors after they swelled with ash and pain.

What could I have done to you? Amanda thought.

Amanda was never wholly perceptive of what she was doing to Janine. If the evidence of Amanda’s taunts and provocations had been recorded, her remarks would have been proven to have been said aloud. On that day in the alleyway, Janine couldn’t refrain from assaulting Amanda because of Amanda stealing a plastic bag of marijuana. All they both wanted to do was get high. Janine withdrew a knife, the steel blade glinting, sawing gashes formed like lightning bolts. Gashes made while Janine sat on Amanda’s neck to choke and carve across her stomach, the spaces between her ribs where Janine slightly poked Amanda’s ligament, tearing it. When Amanda passed out from lack of oxygen, Janine began to carve some more. The thighs. The calves. A turning over of the deprecated body. More blood pools against the jutting bones of the shoulderblades.

What a passage to destitution, what a decline of descent into the laconic state of shades pulled down, the swallowing of Vicodin. Amanda was in for it. After the cutting and the burning done unto her flesh was concluded, Janine took off into the night where she was always most comfortable.

Amanda never would have been revived if not for a lone transient who discovered her with a faint pulse and numerous raw wounds, blood cold, veins a transparent blue beneath the skin on her crooked arm. He called an ambulance at a pay phone and Amanda was swept to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with a concussion, loss of blood, five broken ribs and amnesia. It took Amanda one week to recall Janine’s attack and even longer to recover her memory; her head had been hit so hard on concrete. She chose to press charges and Janine was confined to jail for eight months and later on to psychiatric care on and off for three more years. She was very troubled. Her anger seemed baseless. Amanda wondered, withdrawing from meth in her bed, if she had died that evening in rigor mortis in the snowfall, if some silver angel of death, one of grace and storms, would have absolved her of fear and taken her to another side. One separate from life where we all may go, anointed. Amanda wasn’t sacred anymore. She had survived but now she wanted to expire. Amanda thought of Janine in a devious city, weapons hidden away, only to come out again for the dismemberment of corpses, dragged in burlap thorough a secluded forest, placed in a ditch by the railroad tracks under a pine tree, branches hanging low with needles. Amanda’s thoughts were decay, wasp stings, rotten fruit, sour wines, aspiring homicide. The residents of the group home generally ignored Amanda, but as of recently, they wanted her dismissed as a resident because of her conflict with them over trivial matters of ones full of more depth than would have been suspected.

Meanwhile, Janine was exactly where Amanda supposed, in the position of a merciless killer. She let the bodies sink into remote lakes with heavy stones tied to them, not a trace of her DNA left on their remains because she wore hair nets and was careful. She often got high and was free of institutionalization. No more secluded cages or millstones of grim prophecy. Amanda was only an attempted murder. When Janine left town at eighteen, she acquired a car to transport the bodies. In her new town, a population of nearly 30,000, she knew the civilians to target. She knew who they were.

Fanatics.

Chaos itself.

Dysfunctional child-abusers.

Every house with a shrine dedicated to only the pristine. Their gilded monuments.

So far, Janine had killed seven people.

Her victims:

1. Jay Motley, 36, convicted child rapist and wino

2. Alyssa Sparrow, 14, student, frequent bully

3. Martha Wilde, 45, child killer and teacher

4. Karen Wilder, 21, employee of Burger King

5. Kevin Fielding, 7, was terminally ill

6. Tess Moriarty, 22, bartender

7. Matthew White, 29, pawnshop owner

When Janine Crellin was four, she saw in her parents’ living room, a black halogen lamp with white flames flickering at the top. Either it had been left on too long, or her mother had set the fire herself, Janine decided.

“Look what you did,” said Mrs. Crellin, blaming the fire on her. She would grow up to relish those flames, pyromania impending. First, Janine burned her journals, then people.

In remote plains tied to wooden stakes with twine, gazed at by onlookers, the only ones who could hear the screams.

Amanda Warwick, in her reverie of Janine, planned to kill her. A new resident told her where she was living. Not far away.

“Here’s her address. I’ve smoked weed at Janine’s house. After what she did to you, Amanda, I would undo her.”

Seven people were dead so far and Janine still slept, tranquil at night. Never would she allow grief or guilt to disturb her. She had made to list of victims, having met them all, knowing their crimes. They had moved to the town for its quaintness and scenery as well as to carry on their traditions of immorality. Only one victim was innocent. Kevin Fielding, who was only seven years old with severe cancer. Just a needle in his vein put him to sleep and sent him, Janine supposed, to celestial firmaments.

How far could she get by being a killer? In the distance, Amanda tried to peer into the room of Janine and sacrifice her dead.

Amanda

I was born in the middle of nowhere in a Gothic castle with saints and gargoyles guarding the doorway. My father had painted blood coming from their eyes as they knelt in prayer, keeping watch over our mercenary riches. He was blond with brilliant green eyes. When I lived on the grounds of his castle, I had to be his farm slave doing yard work and keeping the flowers by the moat neat and alluring. He made me kill the animals I admired more than the humans. I will forever remember what he did to my eyes. A complicated surgery that lifted up my skin and transformed my eyes from squinty and listless to bulbous and beautiful. I was staring into an antiquated mirror surrounded by four girls prettier than myself preparing me for eye surgery. My father grabbed me aggressively by the wrists, placed me on a cot and put me to sleep momentarily to perform plastic surgery. An eyelift, he called it. The girls giggled in their pinafores, playing dress up at girls from the nineteenth century. I will kill Janine. They looked just like her. I will kill her. We are sisters. We have the same father and I killed him when he came to my adopted parents’ house to kill me. Shot him point blank in the head. His ghost will never be able to speak to me from the dead.   I am ready to kill this girl Janine who fucked me up when we were teenagers. People tell me to stop being so high school and grow up, but I’m not in high school or hanging out with high school kids. Just people that keep the mentality around too much and I’m bored of them. Where will I find her and how will I get past her gang of people that I know is protecting her, driving her around in cars to burn people and sink them into rivers. Nobody can find her but I know she’s the type to kill and I heard a woman discuss her and use the term “murder” and “rope.” I don’t know how to take a person down and a part of me tells me to stay away from her. But a part of her wants Janine to kill me again and send me on my way to a better place. The government wants to control my health and not allow me to smoke meth. It houses me in group homes that are unkind to me and compare my surgery to drivel compared to what their daughters with a lot of money paid to get. They got way better facelifts. I have weird eyes. Currently, I’m on the road looking for a way to find out what Janine’s doing, spy on her a little. She lives in a plain wooden house and I can see her in the window, staring out at me knowing it’s me; I am easily recognized by my eyes, even at a far distance. I’ve changed my mind. I want Janine to kill me. I can take a lot of pain. I know I won’t survive her and I can’t help but throw myself at the mercilessness of this sadistic girl. 

Nobody saw Janine drag Amanda’s lifeless corpse up the three cement stairs and into her house to dispose of her with acid. She shot Amanda with a silencer the moment she saw her face loom large and moon-like at the window, open and paneless. The neighborhood Janine lived in was full of gang bangers and drug addicts that shot up and shot people driving by them at night in the street. I must be in the right place, Janine reassured herself. She planned to dispose of Amanda in a nearby landfill, to never be figured out.

2019

Mathilde

My old friend, Janine from summer camp, was just arrested. She told the news she assisted in the suicide of Amanda Warwick, a girl who Janine claimed wanted to kill her. A girl I once met under the train bridge, Stacey Galloway, is not being prosecuted for the murders of Brian Harlow and Jane Seymour, her parents’ identity thieves. It’s really sick shit. Brian and Jane wore skin masks that were completely like real human skin and the features of Stacey’s parents had been duplicated. She didn’t really know what to do about it for many years until she just went crazy. She told me about the recording from her laptop, and I didn’t know how to explain it. I had heard the voices, too. If you don’t want to hear voices, I recommend that you don’t do drugs. You will become a schizophrenic satellite. You’ll hear the world speak to you, and the people in public will say what you’ve heard your voices say when you think you’re alone at home. They can hear you breathe, they can hear you sing, talk, even think. I don’t know how to put Stacey at ease. I’m never really on edge anymore, but I can tell she is. I always wanted to make her my partner in crime. Even Janine would have done well, but I’m against her opinion that Kevin Fielding needed to die. He was just a kid, and I’m against killing kids. Apparently something leaked out and someone turned her in. She is now in prison forever.

I know the same thing won’t happen to me because I plan to stop after three killings. I wish I could free her and I wish I could ease Stacey’s pain. What’ s happened to her is horrible.

Like my old friends, June and Marcelle. Their group home has been shut down and I don’t know where they are, now. Both girls were beautiful and crazy. They had been raped by strange men who met them at the house of their legal guardians and they killed their guardians in self-defense. Marcelle didn’t pay for her crimes, but June had killed the neighbors as well as her guardian and got locked up in the criminal forensics ward for seven years. Just as I’m thinking of them, I decide to write. It’s about a girl who’s always being watched.

It runs on like this:

It was my sophomore year of college. I had just completed the first day and everything depressed me, especially the shadows of the maple leaves dancing on the wall in my dorm room.

“I’m going out for awhile,” said my roommate, Naomi Carver. I assumed she would be gone for a long while. My homely reflection stared back at me from the rectangular razorblade I held in my hand. I took in the zit on my chin, my black curls, my lackadaisical brown eyes. I turned the blade away from me and reflected the white, utilitarian walls covered in posters of new wave bands, the fake plastic red flowers in a vase on the nightstand, the Russian dolls next to it. The bottom of the blade was still covered in cocaine powder from a night Naomi spent partying at a friend’s apartment. My eyes stung. I moved in slow motion to the bathroom and ran water on my wrist in the sink. The key is not to think, I silently told myself. The key is to gash the vein and not fear what’s beyond. With the past, present and future forgotten, I made a vertical red line on my wrists, tearing into the blue creek of vein beneath my porcelain flesh. It brought forth a mild sting, like a bee’s. Blood spurted like a fountain into the sink, onto the mirror.

When I began to feel weak, I allowed myself to fall to the linoleum and wait for a bright light, a celestial set of golden gates. Before I faded out entirely, I felt a pair of arms pull me up and heard Naomi’s distorted shouting.

“Mildred!”

I blacked out, thinking it was only a hallucination when I saw a girl who looked like me staring at the scene from the entrance to the dorm room. I would see her later, in new circumstances. It turned out that Naomi forgot her phone, which is how she found me attempting to end my dismal life.

They sent me to a local hospital, where they staunched the bloodfloow and where I eventually came to. The first thing I remembered was how I used to be such a sweet little girl. I think the most soulless day I had was when I was in junior high and I burned Elena Miller with a lit cigarette, all the world curdling behind my eyes with anger.

“Where do you want it?” I asked Elena, wielding the cigarette like a knife against her arm. “Your skin, or your clothes?” I pointed the tip at the polyester of her blue blouse. At the finality of my outburst, I chose her pale wrist as the target. Elena gasped instead of screaming. I spent two weeks in juvenile detention, was expelled and transferred to another school. As I was recalling this savory memory, a psychiatrist came to evaluate me and she concluded I needed inpatient treatment in the psych ward on the upper level of the hospital. Once I was up there, I frequently threw thermonuclear fits in the blinding flourscence of the ceiling lights. The leather restraints they placed on my bed burned like fire. They were too tight. A whole week later, they sent me to a place of higher security, a building as old as the 1950s called Astria State Hospital. Located in Astria, Washington, a small country town full of orchards and horses.

Over the course of the next two weeks, I covered my bedroom window with collages and childish colored pencil drawings, once of which was a depiction of me rising above three pastel-colored buildings and into the sky. I wore a black dress and had no legs. Often, I stared up at the sky during cigarette breaks and felt like falling to one of the hollow black holes in outer space, but I was bound by the limitations of earth. My heart felt like hellfire.

“Mildred Swain should burn with fire,” said a patient with wild hair, pointing at me and taking a puff of his cigarette. I could only wonder how he knew my last name, let alone was he was saying this. I had been as friendly as possible since I was admitted into the hospital. As I lay in bed one night, a litany of insults came from both patients and staff passing by the door. They called me ugly, weak and deserving of death. I pulled the blanket over my head and refused to fight back. When I felt they were gone, I emerged from under the blanket, and saw her come in. The girl who looked exactly like me loomed, pale and spectral over my bed. She moved as though she were walking on water.

“Who are you?” I asked her.

“An extension of you,” she said. “You are doomed to be hated until you die. Humans are forever to be your plight. When you go home, they’ll talk about you on the sidewalk, in the park, in the classroom. All you can do is be strong and persevere.”

She went on talking until I fell asleep. When morning came, I felt groggy. The sunshine evaporated me. I felt like a puddle of snow melting beneath my blanket. Slowly, in the midst of the empty room, I willed myself to rise to the ceiling and become united with the camera I felt to be hidden in the light above. I watched myself from the top and there was my strange twin in the branches of the cherry tree outside my window, snapping my picture with a polaroid, the black eye of the lens like the eye of an observant spider.

2019

Stacey

In the dream, I am small enough to fit into a crawlspace. I cannot hide from my mother’s red wine in our barren living room that is as black as a power outage, as black as my rotten innocence. My mother picks me up and takes me to the car, says it’s time to go, I need help. She parks outside a stone clinic and leaves me inside. I cry out and am told to be silent by a stern receptionist. Two white coats hold me down and drag me to a white room with a thirty-something redhead in it. She has painted the word “borderline” on the wall next to an immaculate, gold-framed mirror. When we face it to see our reflections (mine child-like, hers much older), we are propelled from its shattering glass by a defiance of gravity. We coil up and writhe, possessed by demons. Satan lets us die together, which is a blessing compared to living in the hospital. I close my eyes one last time without seeing my mother. I only see the broken glass, the blood on the wall (bright as an ambulance light), the linoleum beneath my cheekbone. I am a dead husk of a human determined to haunt the city I was born in. Life grows black again. I don’t scream.

Marcelle

2012

Marcelle Trahern was raised by two cunts with Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a term derived from the original Munchausen syndrome itself. If one has Munchausen syndrome by proxy, it means a caregiver (in this case, the godmother of Marcelle), chooses to refrain from giving their charges the right health, supplements and nutrients to keep them alive. In fact, they make them worsen with sickness and degradation. Subtly, so the good doctor won’t notice they’re causing the illness for their charges. The first bitch had decided to poison her subtly instead. Marcelle’s godmother favored ipecac. In their small village, church was a mandatory service where all girls had to see the Lord Jesus Christ be praised or crucified on film. A montage of filmy sunlight and a golden cross shone from an array of manipulative Christian imagery, perceived on an overhead projector.

Marcelle went every Wednesday and Sunday in a grey stone building with elaborate brick arcs painted black outlining the stained glass windows. The broadcast room was like an insidious revelation opening up a nightmare to the eyes of sensitive Marcelle, without the abrasive steel to pry a pair of eyes open. Especially when the topic was eternal damnation or the crucifixion of Jesus. It was like a metaphorical film lobotomy. They just stayed peeled open, unable to shut or fall asleep for any reason. Nanny Cravat insisted she stay awake. She favored those antiquated neckbands.

The girls sat around her in stiff, ungraceful lines, backs upright or slouching depending on the girls’ preference to posture. Ms. Winifred Scarlet, who had been killing off children in her home for three years, took Marcelle in at eleven years old the year her mother died and Marcelle was never able to know the woman by heart in a way her memory could rely upon. Winifred was a registered foster mother and she was ailing. Marcelle killed her foster mother (and made the police and medical examiner rule the death as a suicide). She sang “Don’t Fear the Reaper” in her choir voice while spoon-feeding Winifred “sugar in a spoon bowl, so the medicine goes down.” She gagged on the Drano and no longer said the words Marcelle needed to hear: “You should be ashamed of yourself,” “You should be grateful,” “Why didn’t you try harder?” Winifred was involved in a canned television broadcast again for that last comment, a boring, banal comedy Winifred needed to have Marcelle watch with her before bed in 2011.

On March 24, a clear, shiny spring morning, Marcelle knew that she had no one to rely upon any better by the time the next foster mother came around to raise her. She was a distant harridan of a woman with a thin, pert mouth shut tight at church and open like a wrathful shrew to chastise Marcelle at home.

“See that window?” said Nanny Cravat, her second godmother: a malevolent, Puritan woman with brown hair in a frizz and vacant eyes.

“You’ll be lucky if God saves you when you fall out of it. It’s all shit. God’s for nothing. But I fear hell just as much as you do. All we can do is try to believe and see if God listens.“

In her dress made for church, the stiff lace a cascade of black and white. A knee-length skirt and pilgrim collar. Church uniform. The telepathy Marcelle heard: “devout truths”, “deep breaths,” “if you need to console yourself, use these coping skills.”

All the things Marcelle picked up on by reading minds that she could never express piled up in her head and she was crazy.

“Marcelle may be crazy,” said a soft-voiced man about to make an assumption based on what he saw in elaborate artwork in a journal: a drawing in Bic pen, of a realistic-looking Nanny Cravat swallowing a spoonful of something, reminding him of milk poisoning and a scary story his mom sometimes read to him at night in his portentous childhood. Marcelle’s self-portrait was accurate. She overheard the bell ringing in the distance beyond her thoughts of his voice by the cathedral bells that rang with worship, clanging vehemently. When Marcelle got home after spring choir ended, she planned the Drano death. It was under the kitchen sink, meant to mingle with Nanny Cravat’s cup of milk.

“Nanny, I hope you enjoy your milk,”

“Come, have a sit-down,” said Nanny to Marcelle. She set the glass of milk in front of Nanny Cravat, who was wearing her red velvet blouse and white cravat.

“Put that milk on the table carefully. Don’t spill it.”

Time to die, Marcelle wished. Down the throat went that blue liquid permeating Nanny Cravat’s esophagus as she choked. The only number Marcelle knew to call wasn’t an option, and she had to make her own way in the world feeling like humans weren’t worth anything and we’re all just partially alien. Meretricious, cheap people.

Marcelle wanted to die in outer space. She left the raw death and agony of Nanny Cravat slumped over on the table after she choked. Marcelle became the third eye, the third shrew, the ultimate survivor of destiny and doom.

June

2014

My lucidity died in the house I grew up in. I was raised in an arcane Hitchcock mansion with a cupola. There were no servants due to my guardian, Scarlett Freeland’s, illicit exploitation, and her fear of it being discovered. Therefore, she let everything collect dust. Her mansion was tall and monumental. It reminded me of a Halloween sticker decoration one puts on a windowpane. On our street, Cupola Avenue, named for the cupolas on each house, I suffered many seasons of violent turmoil at the hands of Scarlett. She owned a video camera that she balanced on top of a tripod and told me it was my “surveillance.”

On several occasions, at the age of thirteen, I was raped by a multitude of strange men that Scarlett invited inside. She would put 80’s hair metal on the stereo while they raped me and she sat in a red armchair, smoking numerous cigarettes. Sometimes, I wouldn’t get raped and instead it would be my deed, according to every person in the room, to kill a person in front of me. I’ve killed 37 people in Scarlett’s house, each one dissolved with acid in the cupola on film, and killed on film as well, before being doused with acid. Each time this event happened, it was recorded and burned onto a disc to be viewed on Scarlett’s TV.

There were only two other houses on Cupola Avenue: the Tarringtons’ house and the Miltons’ house. Clyde Tarrington lived in a two-story house painted white with black shutters. He lived there with his daughter, Blithe. On their front door was a poster of a symbol that held a cryptic enchantment for me: a cross with an hourglass in the center of it. It always reminded me of their time running out. I had wanted to kill Blithe for so many years. I felt her to be prettier than me with her lustrous black hair and piercing green eyes. She always loved to remind me of how I would have been killed by my twin sister, Adele, had she lived. In the womb, she was the alpha and I was the omega. On a rainy day when lightning split the sky into slices, Adele and me were playing dress-up with red velvet gowns and silver high heels. We were twelve. I convinced her into a “baptism,” holding her head underwater. Despite my carrying the title of the omega twin, my newfound strength prevailed and she soon ceased to breathe.

When Scarlett found out, she didn’t seem to care. Neither did the rest of the neighborhood; they were always killing people. We melted her body into the floor of the cupola with acid.

My name used to be Lillian Freeland, but once my twin was dead, I uncontrollably became someone named June. She came to me, like a doppelganger, looking exactly like me, but bearing no evil intentions.

“I am here, and I am not leaving you,” June told me. I regret killing Adele despite her greater knowledge of schoolwork. We were both homeschooled and Scarlett never told us what she did for a living. I learned later on that she worked for the federal government.

My liberation from Scarlett’s persistent and unyielding abuse came on the day of my eighteenth birthday, April 17. After she made me read Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shallot” to two men, who raped me when I was done, and when they had left, I waited for Scarlett to go upstairs and watch one of her movies. I sauntered to the garage and snatched an axe, the same one Scarlett used in satanic rituals when she was young. I made the predatory ascent up the stairs and into her bedroom. Then, as though she were a chopping block and as though her sanguine bloodflow was sacred, I swung the axe down upon her skull. Hard. She was watching The Caretakers, a black and white movie about women in group therapy. She fell to the side, writhing in pain. I went to the front of the chair and brought the axe down upon her back until her spinal cord was severed and her tenebrous heart gave out. I left her there and ran back downstairs, screaming the whole way.

Next, I opened Scarlett’s freezer and grabbed a carton of Marlboro 100’s, lit one, and burned the subtle swastikas hidden in the patterns of an Oriental rug. I gazed around me, took in the contents of the living room: the Kit-Kat clock shaped like a black cat with bulging eyes, the white topaz chandelier, the gutted hearth, the period furniture. I decided it was time to leave my home behind forever. I grabbed a pink backpack and shoved the carton of cigarettes inside, along with a drawer full of working Bic lighters. I threw in three shirts, six pairs of socks, six pairs of underwear, two pairs of pants, a journal, a pen, and a gun. I topped off the luggage with some rubber vampire teeth I endeavored to save for a malevolent purpose: murdering Blithe Tarrington.

I put my hand on the gun as I walked outside, holding it securely within the large pocket of my forest green trench coat. To my knowledge, the Miltons across the street were always killing people (Scarlett always said so.), but I didn’t know how they felt about Blithe. I didn’t care. I rang the doorbell, staring down the cross and hourglass on the door’s poster. Luckily, Blithe answered the door. I pulled out the gun, and her face became as stricken as one being lashed with a switch.

“Get inside,” I gnashed, pushing her onto the floor and slamming the door behind me. “And don’t get up. Don’t even talk.”

She talked anyway. “Lillian, please don’t kill me. You don’t have to - “

“But I want to, and I can, and I will kill you and nothing will ever be able to resurrect you!”

“What’s going on with that Freeland bitch? Why is she in my house?” screamed Clyde, who had just descended the stairs. I shot him in the head, and he slumped over, instantaneously dead.

“You’ve been killing people in this house for years, and it’s time to go!” I vociferated over her harrowed wailing. “Now, put these in.” I unzipped my backpack and handed her the rubber vampire teeth.

She stared at me, wide-eyed with feral fear. She did nothing. She said nothing.

“Your mouth, dummy. Put them in your mouth.”

I handed her the teeth, and she took them from me and placed them over her own toothpaste commercial-white teeth.

“You look the very caricature of Halloween,” I said, laughing as I blew out her brains. The remains flew against the wall and painted an inkblot test of blood smears everywhere. I walked into Blithe’s bedroom after I was sure she was dead, and saw a purple canopied bed, a bookshelf filled with many classic and contemporary novels, among them: the Brontes, Oscar Wilde, Theodore Dreiser, Jane Austen, Anais Nin, D.H. Lawrence. I grabbed Nin’s House of Incest, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, and left the house.

I didn’t make it very far. I was down the road not very far when I was arrested. I always feared them coming for me. I fell onto the asphalt, scabbing my knees and not feeling it. I denied what was happening. I muttered to myself incoherently.

“We know you killed some people, Lillian.”

“My name is June,” was all that I said before my mind shut off and I suddenly woke up vegetative in a jail cell.

Eventually, I was labelled not guilty by reason of insanity. The police found Scarlett’s recordings and the recordings that the Miltons and the Tarringtons made of their own killings when I told them about the neighborhood, and what Scarlett had done to me. One day, I will get out of the forensics services ward, where the criminally insane are housed. I have spent many nights here, remembering the death and ravagings, my hair coiling like Medusa’s on the pillow of the restraint bed, the leather straps leaving black bruises on my wrists. Every night, I pray to God and Jesus and all the saints that ever were that I’ll be forgiven for my killings, and be accepted into a realm I can call heaven.

My lucidity will live again, resurged.

2017

June and Marcelle

Cathleen Carter

She led me to the house with the cupola

Where she stabbed me in the backyard

Blood flowed glowing red from my pale skin

Staining my white blouse

And my throat ached

I haunt the halls

And my voice resides within the walls

I’m a phantom floating through the inmates

Living in my killer’s group home

Eyes stare from the cupola

I don’t know who saw me die

I’m buried under a thorny bush

Bones hidden by woods and tiny baby teeth

She scattered

Covering my grave with evidence from her recent infanticides

She stabbed my baby

And cut me for giving birth

In her bed

My lover carved our initials in a tree

And we’ll always be in touch

I eat strawberries off a plate in his room

We hung a dreamcatcher to capture his nightmares

Of me being tortured by her ringed hands

Bag placed over my head

Cathleen Carter, the snuff film queen

(I have killed many)

Choking on film reel

Always having to be polite

In the morning light drinking tea

Deirdre, the killer, laced it with GHB

Putting me to sleep

Separated from my lover

Pillow soaked in warm tears

His tears and mine

We drink them in vials and kiss under stars

Soon he too will be a ghost

Swallowing pills on a blanket in the cemetery

Deirdre will find us and take our picture

Maybe she’ll capture my phantom on camera

With curiosity, Marcelle Trahern saw from the window Deirdre Carter and her niece, Cathleen, arguing. The infant was dead, that much Marcelle knew. Cathleen Carter had given birth to a baby girl now with stab wounds, lying in red and white rigor mortis in her crib with blood on the teddy bear, in the dolls’ hair and on the lampshade on the side table. Most of the inmates, as they were known due to the group home’s strict rules, were gone for the day at an event and June Freeland was downstairs Deirdre Carter quickly took over June’s life after leaving her post as nurse at the asylum where June was housed. June was incompetent to stand trial, declared insane and sent away for seven years. She had returned to Scarlett Freeland, her former guardian’s, mansion to live. It had been converted into a group home for women with trauma issues.

All thoughts of June vanished from Deirdre’s mind when the knife blade shone in the sun, an ominous metal glint that suddenly penetrated the naked pearl throat of Cathleen. She collapsed to the grass in the fenced-in backyard and as the earth was fresh from the rain, Deirdre found a shovel leaning against the toolshed and dug a fresh grave. Marcelle had never liked Cathleen much because she was always harping on the girls to follow the rules: don’t smoke dope, don’t invite boys over without permission, etc. She had gotten herself knocked up by Miles Sutherland, and Deirdre highly disapproved of him with his leather jacket and cigarettes. Marcelle only saw him once when he drove to pick up Cathleen for a date, his handsome face a silhouette in the dark window. Marcelle decided to keep quiet about the death. She watched Cathleen be tossed into the grave liked a broken doll. Deirdre had tied a plastic bag over her face and stabbed her in the chest. For ten minutes, Marcelle watched Deirdre extract Cathleen’s heart from her chest cavity, holding the dead, lifeless muscle in her palm, her calm blue eyes narrowed and focused on it like a witch in a black magic ritual. June suddenly appeared beside Marcelle.

“The bitch is finally dead,” Marcelle said, breaking her vow not to tell anyone. “What is she going to do with the heart?”

“I don’t know,” said June.

The girls, both in their twenties and too old for Cathleen’s trashy immaturity, watched with morbid fascination as Deirdre snapped a polaroid (after turning off the video camera)

of Cathleen’s corpse before throwing dirt back over her and packing it in. She laid stones over it and from her pocket, she took something white and scattered it over the grave. When she went back inside the house, Marcelle and June left the cupola to inspect what Deirdre had spilled. Six tiny teeth in the front yard, taken from a toddler’s mouth. A previous killing. When the cops led Deirdre away after June called them, June put on a nun habit and took over the house.

They heard Cathleen’s whispers of love for Miles and reassurances that Deirdre was gone. They buried her baby in an infant cemetery labeled merely “Infant Cemetery” in iron above a fancy gate bearing an entrance to the graveyard. June called the cops by her own policy, knowing hiding a murder is wrong.

“Marcelle, she’s a psycho, bats-in-the-head bitch and she could have come after us, too. It’s better that she’s gone.”

“I guess so,” said Marcelle. her mind on Nanny Cravat choking on her milk laced with Drano. Marcelle had fled the world of Christian broadcast rooms and the sex trade. Nanny Cravat had invited several men over to force themselves on her, and she was glad she couldn’t remember it in great detail. Dissociating was so divine. Girls wore meretricious makeup to school and church and their naked limbs stuck out from cheap, mall-bought

miniskirts. Marcelle would have given them all Drano in a cup, too, if she knew how not to get caught.

But she was far from their bratty voices now, with June Freeland, Anika White and Marilyn Sanders to keep her company. In the meantime, the house became less of a group home and June began paying the monthly bills with Deirdre’s leftover income found stashed in a safe in her room. Marijuana smoke soon filled the rooms and the girls giggled at the enhanced cartoons on the television, making funny faces at the ceiling. Then, Cathleen appeared in the mirror behind them in her prom finery, staring sternly with her stab wound, The blood withdrawing and disappearing into the gash. Anika screamed. When the others asked what was wrong, Anika revealed what she saw.

“You’re too high,” Marilyn said, running a hand through her rainbow hair. But Cathleen stood behind them, strawberry juice the color of blood on her mouth, back from Miles who contacted her spirit and she came when summoned and manifested herself in the flesh.

Cathleen

My baby is gone

In an infant coffin underground

I wear black to mourn her

And place flowers on her grave

Miles embraces me in the cemetery

Where we have sandwiches and milk

He marvels as the food disappears from the plate

And the milk drains from the thermos

He can see me fresh as daylight

A rose haloed in gold

I am fragile dust and fairy winds and gilded blond hair

They find him dead the next day

By the gravesite of his daughter

His lips blue from the pills

His hair plastered to his head

In the spring rain

His indolent heart gave out and from her prison, Dierdre laughed at the television giving news of Mile’s suicide and the note he’d left:

I’ve gone to be with Cathleen, who drew me into hear heart forever, and our daughter Melanie’s, too. Dierdre couldn’t kill my love, though she tried very hard.

I saw Deirdre from the corner where I stood, staring at ladies dressed in orange watch the television and play cards. Now that I’m dead, I can go anywhere I want to in the world. I’ve explored the moors of England and I’ve been to Alaska, the northern lights illuminating the night sky and I didn’t feel the cold nor the heat of Death Valley, California. I flew and touched the top of the Eiffel Tower.

“Anything can be done in death, it’s like magic is yours after you die,” I told Miles.

Down he went with me and they buried us side by side. We go into earth, then Summerland, then back again. When I haunt the group home, I conjour nightmares for the girls who tormented me, especially June Freeland who told me I looked dressed as gaudily as she had for one of the snuff films her guardian she murdered made her do. I know many murderers: the worst of them being June and Marcelle. I read the evidence of Marcelle’s Drano murders in her journal and her revelations of sex with strange men who came when called by Nanny Cravat, Marcelle’s godmother. But something told me not to be a hypocrite and tell on her. I never had a mother like these girls. She abandoned me on the doorstop of St. Xavier’s Orphanage and Dierdre, the nun (she was a devout Catholic before she moved on to work for the hospital) who knew her sister’s face and knowing I was her niece, took me in and after years of her impossible violence and nagging, I am finally set free and better off, even if by her hand.

The Ouija Board

“Miles committed suicide,” said Marilyn to Marcelle. “It’s on the news.”

“Oh,” said Marcelle. “I bet Cathleen’s ghost dragged him down with her. Anika keeps seeing her everywhere and is freaking out.”

Anika was fast asleep in her room, having taken a dose of Haldol to help the hallucinations.

“But you aren’t hallucinating,” Cathleen had insisted when she came to Anika late at night. Sometimes she wore a nun habit like June, who had taken to smearing on red lipstick and blaring Courtney Love from the stereo. Sometimes, she sang opera with a crucifix dangling around her neck, and quite good. The girls loved listening to her sing her songs of lovers who lost their loved ones like Miles and Greek tragedies where Persephone became trapped for six months in Hades with the Lord of the Underworld and six months on earth. Gods and monsters fighting their battles to the death. The Ouija board they used to summon Cathleen worked. Anika revealed the messages to them of their conversation she heard in her head. Anika directed the board marker’s movement in their hands.

“Cathleen, where are you?” Anika asked, finally facing her fear of the unknown.

“In Summerland, with Miles,” was the reply.

Anika spelled it on the board and all were shocked.

“I knew it was real, like heaven but better than clouds and angels playing harps, waiting at the gates to judge you,” Anika said. “In Summerland there is no judgment, or pain or violence. Just love, laughter and magic. I learned all about the theory of the afterlife in Summerland from a Wiccan book I found in the used bookstore downtown.”

“Are you sure it isn’t fake, Anika?” Asked June, who doubted the paranormal.

“I heard her voice, just the way it was when she was alive!” Anika stormed out of the room, offended by June’s remark. The Ouija board remained still. Out of all of the girls, Cathleen found Anika most vulnerable to her presence. Cathleen enjoyed scaring them a little. But she never spoke to June, who ascended the staircase with a boy from the nearby prep school, holding a candlelabra and smoking a Marlboro cigarette. Marilyn played 20 Questions with Anika in their room and listened to her account of what she read in Marcelle’s journal.

“I saw too,” said Cathleen. “She sent people to their death same as insane June. I wonder what sort of terrorism Dierdre endured at a young age.”

“Probably witnessed something violent, or had no parents like you. I didn’t,” said Marcelle, who stood behind them listening and hearing Cathleen’s voice just like Anika.

Deirdre

High on a precious hill stands my home for abandoned, unstable girls

I can’t return to it

I’m in prison garb in the women’s prison surrounded by barbed wire and a river runs past, saturated in pollutants spilled by the nearby plants and factories.

I used to be a nun, then a nurse, mercy-killing the elderly, smothering infants and pretending they died of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), immune to the wails of inconsolable parents informed by the doctor in the corridor.

I spent my early childhood in a ramshackle farmhouse in Louisiana, smothered by my mother and her hot back coffee thrown in my face. How her knives danced before my eyes. When my baby brother died when I was fourteen, they thought it was SIDS. I hated babies. My mother told me to kill it, it was a sickly, weak little boy and wouldn’t last the year. I fed him to a hungry feral cat and watched the skin ribbon over her bones from the cat’s carnivorous snacking. My mother, a widow always in grey with shadows under her eyes the color of her sweater, watched the baby’s decomposition.

I felt an affinity for June the most out of all the girls in my home. We had killed and had bad mothers who abused our bodies and sucked our souls out through crazy straws, leaving us bereft and insane. I couldn’t plead insanity the way June could, though.

I wish I were out of this stale air and away from these women, with their murderous stairs and rancid shouting, their fights that lead them to solitary. I won’t put a hand on these women. I won’t go to solitary.

June

I murdered this whole neighborhood besides Clinton and Mary Milton and their twin son and daughter. The parents went to prison for murder, and the kids live somewhere else now. The house is vacant. I never enjoyed what Scarlett made me do. They housed me in an asylum, where I spent the majority of my time in restraints staring at the ceiling with vacant eyes and Medusa coils in my hair that snarled on the pillow.

I dreamt of black widows biting me and in my dreams, Deirdre, who worked there at the time as a psychiatric nurse, didn’t tend to my bites that reddened on my hand. When I wasn’t dreaming, Deirdre liked me. Now she’s in prison where she belongs. I no longer handle nitric acid or kill people or endure stiff baseball bats tearing open my cunt.

Scarlett watched my defiling from behind the camera, recording the rapes in the dark room. I was smothered in her cellar and remembered it, screaming, spitting out the pills, refusing to take them. Deirdre heard my whole story, decided to move into the old Freeland estate and take over as group home director. I moved out of my trailer to stay there. Weird I should live here after killing someone here. I used to hallucinate Blithe, who I shot and killed, but I don’t see her lately. I dismiss Anika despite my own experience. Sometimes, the ghost of Cathleen gets old as a topic and I think all should remember the living and forget the dead that can’t reach us, gone to nether realms.

But what if she was there? What if she can reach us?

I’ll never know. One day I’ll be a ghost myself. I have faith that there is something prettier to see than this insidious earth after our bodies run out of time and our souls transcend.

There must be something better than what I had, what Marcelle had, what Cathleen had, what all of us had.

I think I just heard a voice. Is it the still, small voice of God, or is it a spirit coming from some divine region, holy or unholy?

I am a combined angel and demon. I want to drink absinthe and sleep with that voice.

Mathilde

2019

I stood in the calm, obsidian woods and gained my frail balance against a ramshackle cabin. Wolves dashed out of the shadows, ignoring me and veering towards a carcass in a wildflower-bordered clearing. I was pretty certain it was human. Then I saw a ski-masked perpetrator, blood channeling from his disguise. He offered me a bouquet of purple irises in his scathed left hand. In the shunning woods, feeling like the ghost of someone gone, I tore my lavender dress on a nail in the cabin’s wood. I declined the masked monster’s offer. Suddenly, I was pulled inside by someone behind the front door. I cried out, closed my eyes and could hear the door shut and bolt. Once the lightbulb on the ceiling flickered on, I saw my rescuer’s face like a sanctified revelation. The kindest pair of dark eyes I had ever seen. My speech failed me but his did not.

He told me, “Nothing will kill your equilibrium while I’m here. You no longer have to claw at wooden walls are cry into a pillowcase. Notice that soon the sun will come up and figuratively, I’ll give you a pair of rose-colored glasses to view the world through. A better world than this.”

“I-“ I began.

“I love you,” he said.

Of course, he was handsome and I coveted him highly. He pressed his perfect mouth on mine and carried me to bed. After the sex and the sun-glow, he told me he’d be my dreamcatcher, and if not the destroyer of my enemies, the bane of them. The unidentified mask never showed up again. We soon left the cabin to live in a castle. He taught me to love instead of maim, to be tender instead of destructive. I learned to give myself away to a man created by the sparks of imagination itself.

I ease myself out of bed after this dream and take another hit of glass. Something to make the world glitter with white ice and a way to make the hell inside freeze over. I see him blur on every bridge, every riverbed, every highway. There is no hallucination more powerful than him. Nothing will perforate me and make me stop haunting this city. Nothing will make me bleed out onto the sidewalk because I am too fast for the blade, the bullet. The smoke flows through the open room and hits the sun. I wake to sirens piercing the quiet. I’m the cause of them but I know their glow won’t alight on me and swallow me up.

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nelvana · 6 years ago

Text

In which the journey begins

First: In which the human is transformed Next: In which the fire bird is fought Previous: In which the team recovers from the rescue

“Are you sure you have everything?” Keahi’s father asked for what felt like the billionth time that morning.

“We’re sure,” Keahi groaned, “and if it turns out we don’t, there are plenty of storage statues on the way, you said so yourself. We’ll be fine.”

“Dearie, have faith in them. They can handle this,” Keahi’s mother assured, gentling bumping her forehead against her mate’s for a moment.

“Hm… I know, I know…” Blaziken murmured, “just, remember that your lives are more important than this mission, there is no shame in teleporting back home.”

“We know,” Keahi repeated, as zie had done many times before.

“You still have my map, right?” he added.

“Yes dad.” Keahi rolled zir eyes and tapped the bag slung over Alex’s shoulder.

“And watch out for the Absol,” he added, “I’ve only seen them a couple times in all my travels there, but they’re very dangerous. I know you’ve beaten legendries, but Absol-”

“We know. Can we actually go now? I love you guys, but we were supposed to leave at dawn, and the sun has been up for a long time now,” Keahi sighed.

The rest of the evening at the torchic line household had gone well. Once finally getting to talk to the rest of the family, they received many thanks, compliments and questions, the latter especially from the younger ones. While it felt taxing at first, the warm chatter and positivity in the area felt pleasant, especially after all the recent stress. Everyone ate a large meal, and luckily Keahi’s old room hadn’t been renovated yet, so the trio slept there after visiting Combusken again. The plan was to wake up at dawn, to get the most travelling out of the day and not have to trudge through an armada of goodbyes, but it turned out that Keahi’s parents would have a lot to say too before the team could leave.

“Of course, hurry along before your father thinks of another doubt,” Blaziken chuckled.

“Alright, thanks mom,” Keahi giggled, looking at zir teammates. “You guys ready?”

“Been ready for over an hour now,” Nelvana sighed, but was smiling.

Alex nodded, but didn’t speak. While the cubone had piped in a couple times during the stretched-out goodbye, the grovyle had remained silent.

“Okay! Off we go then! No more delays!” Keahi exclaimed, “bye mom! Bye dad!” zie said, hugging both zir parents before stepping back again and turning to leave.

“Goodbye kids! Good luck! Say hi to Ninetales for us!”

Then, with some waves and distantly yelled goodbyes, they were finally off.

Their journey started off simple. The first dungeon was a few hours away, and they had been told it was the easiest to get through, so they weren’t worried about that. Nelvana took the lead, and Alex took the rear. There were a few jokes about how Alex was at the back even though he was the fastest, but the order remained the same regardless, even when they stood side by side instead of single file, Nelvana was always slightly ahead of the others and Alex was slightly behind. He was keeping watch, he insisted. Keahi thought that was silly, but Nelvana agreed with the grovyle and the matter wasn’t spoken of again.

Simple chatter grew amongst the trio, sliding from one topic to another as they exchanged opinions, facts, and stories with one another cheerfully. Nelvana surprised herself with how many survival facts she knew, and managed to quickly demonstrate a few. Alex, of course, knew the same facts she did, but found less excitement in sharing random bits of information, and let his partner ramble away. He did chime in to recount how he got to Pokemon Square with Team A.C.T., and begrudgingly made sure to go over the details of what the high ranked team was like for the eager fan, Keahi. In return, the torchic would talk about what zie knew about the guild and the world in general.

The scenery around them remained open fields the entire way, although as the distance between them and Scorched Plains grew, the windswept grass around them looked longer, greener, and happier. However, since it was a bit overgrown with no obstacles, they found it a bit sharp and waded through it to a more tended to path as soon as they could. Alex commented that it appeared that no one had walked through here in a very long time, which despite being assumed already throughout the group, hearing it stated felt oddly surprising.

The absolute silence that followed their pauses in conversations was discomforting, giving them all the more reason to keep chattering. It also gave them something to think about in the back of their minds. Aside from the rare breeze, it was quiet enough to hear one another’s heart beating when they didn’t fill the air with their own voices.

Arriving at the top of a hill, Alex turned around and paused, looking back at the path they had just come from. Noticing him stop, Nelvana paused as well and looked back at the grovyle.

“Is anyone there?” she asked.

Alex shook his head, smiling softly, “nah, just enjoying the view.”

“I doubt anyone is following us. We haven’t seen any other pokemon since we left my place!” Keahi commented.

“There were some flying-types overhead earlier,” Nelvana replied.

The other cubone and torchic joined the grovyle in looking out to the horizon. An open landscape could be seen in front of them, in the distance they could make out forests, the burnt fields of Scorched Plains, dusty rocks in Ancient Canyon, and if they squinted, they could spot the tiny houses of Pokemon Square.

“Woah, we’ve come really far already,” Nelvana gasped, looking out in awe.

“Yeah! Go us!” Keahi exclaimed, “look! I can see Pokemon Square from here! Do you think the rest of our team is there?”

“They’re probably out on missions by now,” Nelvana answered.

“Oh, yeah,” Keahi agreed.

“I hope the townspeople haven’t bothered them much,” Alex commented.

“What do you mean?” Keahi questioned, raising a brow in confusion.

“Well, they are part of our team and staying in our house. Someone is bound to go snooping around and ask too many questions,” Alex responded courtly.

“Hey look, there’s Mt. Thunder!” Nelvana observed, shifting the topic as she pointed out the large mountain with storm clouds dancing around the peak.

“That’s where Zapdos lives, right?” Alex asked.

Keahi nodded, “yeah! I wonder how they’re doing?” zie said, staring at the mountain for a few more moments before looking up at the sky. “Huh, looks like it’s already past noon! Do you think we should break soon?”

“Why…?” Alex mumbled.

“To eat lunch of course! And to regain energy to keep going! We do have a dungeon coming up after all,” Keahi replied.

“Taking a lunch break only wastes food and supplies. Ideally, we should only have to eat again at the end of the day and we’ve already maxed out our distance. Plus, we’ll want to save most of the food for colder climates,” Alex explained, then paused as he remembered that the torchic lacked the travelling experience that he and Nelvana had. “I suppose if you’re tired though, we could have a snack break,” he added.

“I…” Keahi began, but stopped themselves and stood up straighter. “I’m fine! If it’s better to keep going, if you guys want to keep going, then so can I!” zie exclaimed, puffing out zir chest feathers.

Alex chuckled at Keahi enthusiasm, “alright, let us know if you have to stop though,” he told zim.

“I won’t need to!” Keahi stated, starting to walk again. “Let’s keep going!”

Continuing on their way, the journey went on similarly as it had before. Their conversation carried through as they kept their walk uphill. It was only another hour or so later when they finally arrived at the mouth of Lapis Cave, its name immediately justified by its bright blue rocks that formed the dungeon, each of them reflecting softly off the sunlight.

“This… this is a really pretty dungeon!” Nelvana exclaimed, gingerly reaching out to touch one of the blue stones.

“Yeah… I didn’t expect it to look like this! It’s really nice!” Keahi agreed.

“It certainly is…” Alex trailed off, at a loss for words.

Alex joined Nelvana at examining the crystal-like exterior, eventually the pair decided to break off a piece as a souvenir before entering the dungeon with Keahi. Right inside, they were reminded that appearances meant nothing in dungeons as they were attacked by a nincada. After the initial surprise, it was swiftly dealt with by Nelvana’s bone club attack, and they moved on through the dungeon. Lapis Cave was filled with pokemon they hadn’t seen anywhere else in the area, but none of them were terribly dangerous, aside from a tangela that snuck a critical absorb on Nelvana, but it didn’t last long after that, after all, Alex and Keahi were both eager to get it out of the way. The dungeon itself wasn’t terribly big, they’d sometimes run into two sets of stairs in a row, and all in all, it only had fourteen floors. They were in and out and on the go again within the hour.

Now out on the trail again, the trio joked about the simplicity of the dungeon compared to the warnings they had received. All of them were aware that the warnings were meant for the next few dungeons, but it felt nice to feel on top of the danger for now. After a check of the map to make sure they were still going the right way, they were off as they had been before.

It didn’t take long for them to spot their next destination in the distance. Mt. Blaze. The huge mountain was easily visibly from where they were, and so was the burning lava that was pouring out from the top of it. Smoke circled the peak, and just looking at it made one feel warm.

“Dear Arceus! It’s spewing up lava!” Keahi blurted out once the volcano was in sight.

“Do you think it’s always like that or we just had bad timing?” Nelvana asked.

“I think dad said it’s always like that, but wow!” Keahi answered, “it must be broiling hot there!”

“Which is why we’ll want to stop for tonight before we get too close,” Alex responded.

Keahi nodded, doubts beginning to resurface but zie pushed them back down, “can we check the notes again?” zie asked.

“Yeah sure.” Alex pulled out the map that Blaziken had given them, and flipped it over to look at the scratchy notes written on the back. “Apparently Moltres is rumored to live there, but according to your dad’s notes, he has never seen them,” he commented, “and yeah, it’s always got lava flowing out of it.”

“How many floors are there?” Nelvana asked, leaning over to look for herself despite asking.

“Fifteen total, twelve regular and three for the peak,” Alex told her, “a bit shorter than I thought, thankfully. Actually, looks like all the dungeons we’ll go through are around this length. That’s relieving.”

“Yeah,” Nelvana agreed, “I guess we should keep going though,” she added, leading the trio off again.

They didn’t go too much farther on the account of not wanting to get too close to the heated dungeon right away. After wandering around for a bit, they spotted a small clump of trees off the trail, and decided to rest there for the remainder of the day. The state of the trees told them that it wasn’t too dry there, so they would be alright to rest for the night and not get overheated or dehydrated.

“I think we should eat the food that Kangaskhan sent us, it might be best not try saving whatever it is for too long,” Nelvana said, sitting down against one of the trees and calmly exhaling in relaxation.

“Good call, let me get it out,” Alex replied, digging through the bag to bring out the small sac, it now holding just what Kangaskhan had sent with them. “Oh, they’re muffins!” he exclaimed, pulling out the three large muffins that had been gifted to them.

“Oh! They’re pretty big muffins too, that’s nice,” Nelvana murmured, accepting one of the muffins from Alex. “Looks like they’re blueberry, but homemade, unlike the ones I made,” she added.

Keahi didn’t say anything, instead scarfing down zir muffin the moment it was passed over to zim. It was messily eaten in a matter of seconds, leaving crumbs scattered around zir feet, which zie pecked up as well before settling down beside Nelvana.

“Was that enough for you?” Nelvana teased, finishing off her own muffin and brushing the tiny crumbs off her bandaged hands.

“We haven’t eaten anything aside from those apples we picked up in Lapis Cave! Give me a break,” Keahi chuckled, bopping Nelvana with a wing. “Besides, like you’re one to talk, you’re a bottomless pit!”

Nelvana laughed, “got me there, but at least I can hold myself off.”

“I made it through today fine, I’ll make it through tomorrow and the day after fine too. You just count on it!” Keahi huffed, puffing out zir feathers.

“Yeah, you did. Good for you!” Nelvana hummed cheerfully, closing her eyes and relaxing for a few moments before opening them again and looking at the others.

“It’s still awhile before sunfall,” Alex commented with a smile at being able to say that, finally sitting down under the tree with the others. “You got any more stories, Keahi?”

“Of course! Hm… How about the time some of my older siblings tried to steal from the kecleon brothers a few years ago?” Keahi replied, already beginning to recount the story without any confirmation.

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quicksilversquared · 7 years ago

Text

Plagg and The Butterfly Costume: Ch. 3

Plagg is willing to do a lot in order to get more cheese. When he's spotted one too many times en route to the kitchen, he decides that a disguise is in order. One purple costume later, and Plagg is free to flit down to the kitchen without people thinking that he's a rat. And then he gets caught.

(Ch. 1) (2)

(AO3) (FF.net)

After a quick nap (he deserved it, after all), Plagg cautiously headed for Mr. Agreste's office. He wasn't there, which was a little surprising. Nathalie was, though, so Plagg carefully skirted around the room (through the wall, which was gross and dusty and musty and this was why he left the detective-ing to Tikki and Wayzz and the others). He ignored the safe for now- he could inspect it whenever- and instead dove through the floor to follow the passage from the floor-elevator down, over, and then up towards Hawkmoth's lair.

Hawkmoth's occupied lair.

Plagg lurked in the shadows behind Hawkmoth, careful not to disturb any of the butterflies. Hawkmoth looked agitated and on edge, clutching his staff- or, rather, the thin sword that had apparently been hidden in the staff.

...okay, yeah, that would definitely do some damage if that hit Ladybug or Chat Noir. Plagg made a mental note to mention it to Adrien. That would be a nasty surprise if it came into play in the middle of a fight.

"I would have thought that they would have attacked by now," Hawkmoth was muttering. "What, are they waiting to attack in the middle of the night or something? Because mark my words, I will be ready no matter what! No one can get past my security!"

...okay, so it sounded like maybe Mr. Agreste was planning on really locking the place down at night. That could be a problem if the superheroes wanted to go out on patrol, since Adrien might find himself locked in or locked out. If there was an akuma attack, then Adrien might not be able to get out without triggering some alarms.

Well, if that was the case, then Plagg would have to be sure to accidentally destroy some of the wiring controlling the metal shutters that snapped down over Adrien's bathroom windows. They could manage with just one small window open.

For the next few hours, Hawkmoth paced and fumed. He didn't seem particularly inclined to make any akumas, though why Plagg didn't know. After all, an akuma would be a distraction. It would draw the superheroes away from him, so he could stop stressing so much.

Plagg briefly wondered if it would be wrong of him to wish that his Chosen's father would keel over from stress. Mr. Agreste would deserve it.

Finally, Hawkmoth decided that no one was coming for him right away. He detransformed and stepped back onto a certain piece of floor. Before Plagg could fully focus on what was happening (he had been drowsing a little, so sue him), the floor was opening up and taking Mr. Agreste back the way he came.

Very efficient, very slick, very dramatic, very high tech, and, most importantly of all, very mechanical. One small broken piece and Mr. Agreste would get stranded halfway under the house. Plagg hadn't seen any doorways or exits of any sort leading off of the tunnel that the floor-elevator took, which meant that if something broke, Mr. Agreste would get stuck down there. He would no doubt call Nathalie, and she would have to step out of the office to find a suitable mechanic to fix the problem. If they needed to get into the office undetected, an elevator break-down would be an excellent diversion tactic.

Plagg would thoroughly enjoy breaking Mr. Agreste's stupid toys.

After another glance around the lair- Plagg had been hoping that Mr. Agreste would leave Nooroo up here so he could talk to the captive kwami, but no such luck; he would have to try to corner the other kwami at night, once Mr. Agreste fell asleep- Plagg plunged back down through the house. He loitered in the office, making sure that Mr. Agreste wasn't going to move anything from the safe, and only once Mr. Agreste headed off to bed, complaining of another headache, did Plagg zip back to Adrien's side to moan for cheese.

His stomach had never been so empty! He had done so much legwork, and that deserved a reward, right?

"I requested a second portion of macaroni and cheese at dinner," Adrien told Plagg, pulling out a Tupperware container full of warm, gooey, cheesy goodness. "I claimed that I had been practicing basketball in my room all afternoon and it made me really hungry so I would get more. I thought you deserved it, for all of the discoveries you're making." He looked exhausted, even more so than he normally did at the end of the day. Plagg wondered if trying to pretend that everything was still okay was taking a toll on his Chosen.

...he was definitely not the right kwami for the emotional stuff.

"Did you learn anything?" Adrien asked. Then he froze and glanced around. "You don't think the room is bugged, do you?"

Plagg glanced around and sniffed at the air before doing a quick circuit of the room just to be sure. "Not bugged. I suppose we should probably check on a regular basis until we can get Nooroo to feed your father some story as a diversion."

"What if he hears the story but doesn't believe it?" Adrien asked anxiously. The tension was clear on his face. Having to live in the same house as Hawkmoth was clearly starting to take a toll on him, even though he had only known for a few hours. "But then he tells Nooroo that he does, just to make us get our guard down?"

"He can't trick Nooroo, not when Nooroo is paying attention," Plagg told him. "He probably got tricked on your father's intentions initially, because he likes to see the best in everyone. He probably sensed the curiosity, because he was looking for it, and there were probably some other emotions too, I don't know-" Again, Plagg was not the kwami to ask about emotions, they were annoying and cheese was much better- "but if he's looking for lies, or deception, then he'll find it if it's there." Plagg was of the opinion Nooroo could stand to be more cautious, but the other kwami would probably never listen.

Adrien looked marginally more relaxed. Marginally.

"I learned that I should probably destroy the shuttering mechanism on one of your bathroom windows," Plagg said, eying the macaroni until Adrien opened the contained and pushed it towards him. "And I probably should explore the other security stuff and see what else needs destroying so you can come and go freely." He gobbled up one noodle, humming happily at the cheesy sauce, and then refocused for a moment. "And Hawkmoth has a pretty dangerous weapon, so we should be careful about attacking him when transformed. I know where his little elevator tunnel goes, and I did happen to spot some good places where I could make it break if we need him out of the way and not akumatizing anyone for a bit."

Adrien looked alarmed at the information about the weapon. Plagg somewhat regretted mentioning it, but someone had to remember to tell the old man about it and Plagg sure wasn't going to remember everything.

Also, Adrien was going to have to deal with Plagg talking with a full mouth because he couldn't keep himself from the mac 'n cheese any longer.

"I didn't get to look in the safe yet," Plagg mumbled a few seconds later around a mouthful of cheesy deliciousness. Man, if this was the reward he got for doing detective work, maybe he should do it more often. "I figured I would do it after Nathalie left, since you father already went to bed."

"And you'll count the number of scrolls and check the pin and see what else there is," Adrien said, either to remind Plagg or to remind himself of what they were trying to do. "How many scrolls there are, if there's anything else that we need to know about."

"Mm-hm," Plagg managed, his mouth stuffed full. "And then I come back and you take notes, and then I go to see if I can talk to Nooroo and see what all your father knows."

Adrien nodded. Plagg suspected that he would probably stay up until Plagg came back with news about what all his father knew. Plagg didn't blame him- Adrien probably didn't feel particularly safe with the thought that Hawkmoth might suspect who he was, especially when they lived in the same house. Hopefully Plagg would have some good news and Adrien would be able to stop worrying so much and get some sleep.

Or maybe Plagg would come back, gather his Chosen up, and hightail it back to Fu's house. It depended entirely on what Plagg discovered.

After the macaroni and cheese was thoroughly polished off, the container licked clean and he had washed the meal down with a lovely creamy piece of Camembert, Plagg felt energetic enough to venture out again. He took the time to disarm the security stuff around one of Adrien's bathroom windows so they would have an escape route, and then he dashed through the mostly-dark house towards Mr. Agreste's office. Nathalie was only just heading out, leaving the office dark and empty.

Perfect.

Plagg proceeded cautiously, making certain that he was alone. His eyes scanned the room, looking for shapes that weren't supposed to be there, but he found nothing.

He was free to explore.

Without even pausing, Plagg dove through the portrait and into the safe. He paused to let his eyes shift. If he were a normal cat, he would need a little light to see. But since he was a cat god, he wasn't particularly bound by such earthly rules.

Maybe his vision was a little greener than normal, but he could see details on the things around him just fine.

The scent of magic and power (and dust) hung heavy in the air, not anywhere near as nice-smelling as cheese. Plagg first made his way down to the middle shelf, the one that had held the book and the peacock pin. The pin looked really, really strange with his green-tinted vision, but that didn't matter.

Plagg held his paws out and placed them against the pin. The rush of magic he felt was overwhelming.

Yup. That's definitely the Peacock, all right.

Well, at least they knew where it was so they could recover it. As long as Adrien's father didn't completely freak out and try to rearrange all of the things he hid, they could just come in and take it once they got all of the persnickety details about hiding their tracks figured out.

Plagg glanced over the stuff about Tibet again (it wasn't magical) and then headed up a shelf. There were a few scrolls there and a stray book or two. Plagg flipped through the book and found design illustrations of the akuma next to what had to be redesigns, with notes in the margins about what improvements he should have made. There were a few with just the original drawing of the akuma, with the words "COMPLETELY USELESS" scrawled in a heavy hand next to them.

Plagg sniggered.

He flipped through another sketchbook and found it mostly blank. Some of the pages had scribbled ideas about emotions Mr. Agreste wanted to look for and target in the future, along with the powers he would want to use. Interesting, probably good information for Ladybug and Chat Noir to know in case those kinds of akumas ever did pop up, but ultimately too much for Plagg to keep track of.

So he headed down to the bottom shelf.

This shelf had a lot more stuff. There was a whole pile of scrolls and notebooks. It would be pretty fast to count the scrolls, which was most important, but it would take forever to look through the books properly and make sure that there wasn't stuff copied (and potentially attempts at translation made) from the books and the scrolls. Plagg wasn't certain what Fu would do if Mr. Agreste did have stuff like that, but that wasn't exactly his problem.

Overall, Plagg counted fourteen scrolls. They all had the same writing style, he discovered, and he couldn't see any drawings on them, which was good. Mr. Agreste would notice for certain if drawings randomly rearranged themselves or disappeared on his scrolls. He peered through the first book on the pile and saw a whole lot of notes, written in a very cramped hand.

He had better get a whole lot of cheese for this. Plagg wasn't meant to be a detective. He hated reading.

Scowling, Plagg started scanning the page. There were some mentions of the Miraculous, but most of the scribbling was notes about some Tibetan monk temple in the middle of the mountains. There were all sorts of notes about the myths about the location and what had happened there, some of which contradicted each other.

Plagg squinted. Huh, some of that stuff was sounding strangely familiar. There was a drawing of the place described in the myths- just a sketch, really- and it was ticking at some old memories-

Oh, right. It was the training center for young people- boys, mostly, if Plagg's memory was serving him correctly- who wanted to become Miraculous holders. Dozens were trained, and only a few were chosen. It was the most structured the Miraculous distribution had ever gotten, and the kwamis had all hated it. They were missing plenty of suitable holders in the general population, it had been annoyingly focused on research of the Miraculous instead of do-gooding, and the temple's trainees had been ridiculously skewed towards boys. It had been doomed to fail, really, and Fu's mistake that had led to the training center being destroyed had been a long time in the making.

So Adrien's father had been trying to find it, then. That was... good to know, Plagg guessed. It was probably old news, since Mr. Agreste had already found the Miraculous and the scrolls and book and everything. But maybe the pages would include information on why Mr. Agreste had been trying to find the temple in the first place. That could probably be important.

Deciding that that was quite enough information for one night, Plagg pushed everything back into place and zipped back out of the safe. Keeping low to the ground, he skirted back to Adrien's room to tell Adrien what he had found and to get some more cheese. He arrived to see Adrien diligently pretending to work on his homework, the windows behind him shuttered.

Apparently Mr. Agreste could trigger the home defense system remotely without being in his office. Either that, or Nathalie had been ordered to initiate the lockdown despite the absence of an obvious immediate threat.

"The peacock is real," Plagg reported once Adrien looked up. "And there's fourteen scrolls. There's some sketchbooks in there, too, but the ones on the top shelf are just a record of all of the akuma and their powers. The ones on the bottom I only glanced through, since there were a lot, but they seem to be journals. I'll need to go back sometime to read them, I guess. I just glanced at them, but they seemed to be from before your father went to Tibet. Can I have some Camembert?"

"From before my father and my mother went to Tibet, you mean," Adrien corrected. He reached under his desk and opened the mini-fridge he had stashed there, pulling out a few slices of Camembert and handing them over to Plagg. Plagg pounced greedily. "So fourteen scrolls, you said? Master Fu should probably make a couple extra just in case my father had some out."

Plagg barely heard, too busy savoring the delicious creamy Camembert. Adrien had been generous with his slices this time around.

"It's probably going to take a while for Master Fu and Wayzz to get all of those replicas made," Adrien fretted. He glanced at a bit of wall- probably actually in the direction of his father's office, if Plagg thought about it- and looked anxious. "Weeks, probably."

Plagg yawned- he had been working pretty hard, after all- and nibbled on the cheese some more. This whole deal was going to mess his sleeping schedule up so much. He was probably going to turn into a nocturnal kwami, and that was always so boring. It was hard to get in proper naps when Adrien was running all over the place with classes and photoshoots and seeing his friends.

"So are you going to go see Nooroo soon?" Adrien asked anxiously. "I just- I mean, I should get ready for bed soon, probably, but there's no way I can sleep if- if-"

He didn't need to finish. If his father was waiting for Adrien to let his guard down, then that would not be great, probably.

...darn it. Plagg was going to have to become a nocturnal kwami, wasn't he? He'd have to sit up all night like some sort of guard kitten and make sure that no one came into the room, even if Adrien had locked his doors.

Ugh. Messing up his sleep schedule like that always gave him indigestion.

"I gotta get my energy back up first," Plagg informed Adrien. "And I need to be positive that your father is asleep. The last thing we need is for me to get spotted again."

Adrien looked morose.

After another half-hour, Plagg zipped out of Adrien's room again. He had to pause in the atrium area- where exactly was Mr. Agreste's bedroom? He had definitely never been there before- before he caught a trace of Nooroo's magic aura.

...okay, it was possible that he should have maybe detected that before. The entire house smelled of butterfly. Ugh.

Following the trail, Plagg sniffed his way up to Mr. Agreste's room. He paused as soon as he got inside.

If Plagg had thought that the security on the rest of the house was ridiculous...well, he hadn't actually seen ridiculous until now. An iron plate had slammed down over the door as well as over the windows, and if Plagg really focused, he could tell that there were laser beam motion detectors crisscrossing in front of the windows.

...actually, that was pretty stupid. If Mr. Agreste was in the room and somehow missed hearing the sound of superheroes banging against the metal shutters, then how would he catch the sound of an alarm? And what good would it even do him to have an alarm to tell him after intruders had broken in?

Weird. Weird, weird, weird.

Mr. Agreste was definitely asleep in bed. He looked completely conked out, unlike the purple kwami perched on the bedside table next to him. Nooroo perked up when he saw Plagg, and then zipped towards him. Before Plagg could say anything, Nooroo was pushing him through the wall out into the hallway.

"I don't want him to wake up and overhear us," Nooroo whispered once they were in the hallway. "I already did some damage control, and I don't want that ruined."

"What does he know?" Plagg wanted to know right away. "How much did he see?"

"He saw a flash of green," Nooroo told him, and Plagg winced. "He figured it had to be either the cat or the turtle kwami, and I told him- well, I told him that there was no way it was you, because you're too lazy-"

"I'm what?" Plagg demanded, only just remembering to keep his voice down. "I am not!"

Nooroo fixed him with a look. "You normally aren't the type to explore, unless it is in search of cheese. And don't complain, my Master bought it! But I had to tell him that there's a Guardian that hands out the Miraculous and that he's the turtle and it would make sense for him to send his kwami out as a scout, because he was suspecting Adrien and that was the only way to throw him off."

Plagg almost pouted, then realized that Nooroo had a point. Wayzz and Fu were the type to go poking around. Plagg preferred to leave that kind of work to his Chosens.

"However, he is still suspicious of Adrien," Nooroo told Plagg, and Plagg cringed. That was not good news. "He saw Adrien's ring right after he saw Chat Noir's ring close up after one of the attacks. The magic interfered, so he isn't positive that the ring shape is right, but if he checks again and it matches..."

Plagg scowled. He could change the shape of the Miraculous (and he had before, so it would blend in better with the times), but it was always so. much. work. and it took a ton of energy. And he would just be changing it a little, and then what about when the superhero duo next turned up on TV? Mr. Agreste probably followed that, and he would keep a close eye on the Miraculous and note any changes.

He and Adrien would have to go talk to Fu again right away, apparently. The old man would have to think of some solution.

"He's getting close to cracking the code on the book, I think," Nooroo whispered. "Too close. And if he does, he could access new powers! Even with the magic fighting against him, that would be awful."

"We're planning to replicate the book and the scrolls and replace them with similar-looking fakes," Plagg told Nooroo, smirking a little. It wasn't often that he was the one who knew the Plan. Of course, that was usually because he wasn't paying attention while plans were being discussed because there was cheese nearby and plans were for his holder to pay attention to and remember, but those were minor details. "And the fakes would have letters scrambled around or altered to make nonsense."

Much to his surprise, Nooroo's eyes grew wide in alarm. "You can't! I mean, it would get the real things to you guys, maybe, but my master rarely looks at those anymore. He has everything scanned into his computer and he does all of his deciphering work on there."

...okay, that would probably be harder to deal with.

"I could tell you the password to that account," Nooroo told Plagg. "He has it under a different- a different user, I believe it's called, all separate from his design stuff. But how would you make practically identical files and switch them out really fast? And the office is really guarded- either Nathalie or Mr. Agreste is always in there, practically, and once they leave for the night or for a long time during the day there's a motion detector set up."

...somehow Plagg had missed that. It wouldn't pick up him, of course, but if Nathalie turned the system on when she got called away during their diversion, that could destroy their whole plan.

"I need you to tell me everything you know," Plagg told Nooroo, frowning. "Everything."

Adrien looked relieved when Plagg popped back into his room.

"Well, your father thinks that it was Wayzz that he spotted, not me," Plagg reported immediately, diving for the cheese Adrien had set out. He had been extra-generous with the amounts, Plagg could tell. He decided not to tell Adrien that he had actually made a detour to the kitchen on the way back to see if he could sniff out a little more of that divine macaroni and cheese. He had found it all packaged up and cold in the fridge, so he had contented himself with some slices of Swiss instead. "But he has noticed your ring's similarity to Chat No- what did you do to the Miraculous?"

Because the ring that Adrien had been fiddling with was not the Miraculous. It was a similar size, maybe, but the face shape was different. It was more square, and the prongs were flatter.

"It's from Master Fu," Adrien told Plagg, grinning. "He thought that since my father had seen the shape of the Miraculous up close, that I should wear my ring tucked inside my shirt on a cord around my neck when I'm around my father or during photoshoots and wear this instead. Then he might see this ring and see that the shape is different, and then decide that he mis-saw the ring before and that I'm not Chat Noir."

...that was annoyingly smart. But hey, at least that left one fewer problem for Plagg to remember that they had to solve.

"Thankfully between my loose shirts and my jacket the Miraculous doesn't leave a lump," Adrien said, glancing down at himself. "But I'll have to do something else during photoshoots, because Father or the photographer will notice if there's even the tiniest bump in my shirt. Maybe I can just turn the necklace around and have the ring hanging down my back or something. I just tried seeing if I could wear it as a toe ring or something, but it dug in a lot and hurt."

"Or I could watch the ring for a bit," Plagg said with a yawn. "For a little extra cheese, of course. I normally nap during your photoshoots and I won't be able to if I'm watching the ring, so I require extra compensation. And no putting my ring on your smelly feet, or you'll make me sick."

Adrien nodded.

"Nooroo said that your father had been looking at your photos from the shoots to try to figure out when you started wearing the ring, but there's no clear shots of the face of the Miraculous at all and the ring doesn't even appear in any shots until nearly a month and a half after the first akuma appeared," Plagg reported. Nooroo had been a veritable spring of information. Clearly he paid more attention to his surroundings than Plagg did, probably because he didn't have much else to do. "So he doesn't have an exact timeline of when you got the ring."

"Thank goodness for pockets in fall fashion," Adrien sighed, looking relieved. "The photographer always has my put my hands in the pockets for those shots. And I didn't have as many shoots as usual right after I started school, though that probably had less to do with my schoolwork and more to do with him being more busy since he was just starting to terrorize the city. But a month and a half in? I can work with that. I can come up with a story."

"And Nooroo had a bunch of other information," Plagg told him. "Get your pencil out. I wanna tell you everything before I forget it, and then I want some cheese and I want to sleep. It's been a really long day."

Against all odds, Adrien slept through the night. Plagg stayed up at first, before deciding that Adrien's father wouldn't be trying to come for the ring tonight. Even if he did, the doors to Adrien's room and the one uncovered window were both locked, and the noise it would make to open either would wake up either Adrien or Plagg.

Even though he had slept for most of the night, Plagg was still dragging the next morning. Adrien had clearly noticed, and was plying Plagg with cheese. He was enjoying some cheesy scrambled eggs when they heard Mr. Agreste's voice. Adrien straightened, but it was hardly an unusual response. Plagg had heard Mr. Agreste scold his son for his posture enough to figure out where the reflexive response came from.

"Father," Adrien said, sounding impressively normal. "Is your eye any better today?"

"Moderately. The doctor said that it could take several weeks for it to stop hurting, though."

Plagg yawned and tuned out the conversation. It was just boring chit-chat, maybe more than father and son normally exchanged but also nothing important. His time would be better spent enjoying the cheesy eggs.

He was so focused on the eggs that Plagg almost missed Mr. Agreste's comment about Adrien's ring.

"Nino gave it to me for my birthday," Adrien lied easily, so smoothly that Plagg briefly wondered if his Chosen had ever seriously considered going into acting. "He thought that I might like it. It does give me something to fiddle with while I'm thinking in class so I don't accidentally disturb anyone."

"I see. May I look?"

Plagg peered carefully out of the bag, keeping himself hidden and his eyes narrowed as he watched Adrien slip the decoy ring off of his finger without hesitation so his father could look at it. It was a good quality ring, Plagg had noticed the previous night, actually metal like the Miraculous and not easy to damage at all. Even so, it probably would be within Adrien's friend's budget range easily enough. Mr. Agreste took the ring and inspected it, and Plagg watched with great satisfaction as something in Mr. Agreste's face fell. He did a good job of hiding it, of course- that cold, emotionless mask only slightly budged- but clearly he could tell that the ring was not the Cat Miraculous. He handed the ring back to Adrien, who slipped it back on.

"That was quite thoughtful of your friend," he said. "And quite tasteful. Impressive, considering that he goes around calling adults 'dude'."

Big words, coming from someone who threw temper tantrums whenever an akuma fight didn't go his way. Plagg had heard all sorts of stories from Nooroo. It was very tempting to share some of those stories with Adrien, just to try to cheer him up a bit.

"Well, I must be off," Mr. Agreste said after a short pause. "I'm quite behind on my work since I had to take yesterday off. Don't forget that you have an extra fencing lesson this afternoon."

"Of course, Father."

"I think that went well," Adrien murmured after his father had left. "I could see that he was surprised that I gave him the ring so easily. And he definitely saw that the face was different than, y'know..."

"Right." Plagg peered at the door, listening as Mr. Agreste's footsteps as he walked into his office and he stopped. "You might want to ask Nino to lie about the ring in case your father asks, though. Just to be safe. And, uh- do you have any more of those eggs? Or any extra cheese to put on them?"

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