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necrosemancy · 20 days ago

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TIMING: Last night, just before sunset. LOCATION: Mother Morta's Nursing Home PARTIES: Alistair @deathsplaything & Rosemary @necrosemancy SUMMARY: Rosemary witnesses the death of a colleague and friend. She needs to fix it. Alistair is called in to help. (This is the first half of a two part thread) Content Warnings: Parental Death tw, Hospice Care tw, Euthanasia (mentioned) tw, Human Sacrifice (mentioned) tw.

Rosemary had never realized how much blood the human body really held.

Janice had just stepped outside for a smoke break as the sun finally settled below the horizon. It had only been a few minutes between the nurse walking out to enjoy a few minutes of peace and quiet and Rosemary walking out to leave for the day. The witch had been digging her keys out from the depths of her purse when she heard a soft croaking noise. It was small, and wheezy, and something about it had caused the hair to rise on the back of her neck. Against her better judgement, she followed the noise around the side of the building.

Rosemary had seen that kind of monster only once before, and she hadn’t been the one to get rid of it. The demon stooped, jaws snapping into flesh as it enjoyed its easy mark. Beneath the creature, shallow shaky breaths still struggling to find a way to bring air into her lungs, was Janice. Janice, who ran herself ragged between working to help pay for her son’s travel hockey league (because of course the child had wanted to play as a goalie, and that equipment was the most expensive) and sewing her daughter's ballet costumes on her lunch breaks. Janice, who was one of the few people who actually remembered Rosemary’s birthday her first year in Wicked’s Rest. Janice, who was dying.

The witch hurriedly grabbed the cement block they used to hold the door open when a patient needed to be moved to the hospital and rushed back. The demon was too engorged in its meal to pay any mind to the woman who, in a spike of adrenaline fueled rage, wound back before smashing the brick into the demon bird’s skull one, two, three times. The demon let out a shriek of pan, shooting itself into the air and fleeing. Rosemary scooped up the nurse as best she could and hurried her back inside to an empty room, depositing her on a bed.

Now everything seemed to be red. Blood soaked into the sheets, into Janice’s scrubs…It was everywhere- staining the witch’s hands as she packed gauze she’d stolen from the supply closet into the gaping slash across the chest of the nurse. It smeared the screen of her phone as she frantically hit the first number on her speed dial. “Alistair? Alistair I need you to get over to the nursing home now, this is an emergency. I need help, I can’t do this.”

——

Things have been relaxed for Alistair for the past few months. Granted it’s because they had forced it to be that way, but still. Relaxed. Well, as relaxed as a single parent of a newly turned thirteen-year-old could possibly be, of course. They’d shut out the world except for work, they’d refused to do anything that didn’t directly benefit Tommy or their student, Rosemary, in some way. Otherwise? Count them out.

Rosemary had become something like family to them and Tommy ever since coming into the picture. She took Tommy out to do things, brought coffee over, and even showed up with things to do just because she was thinking of the two of them. It was nice, as if Melody was looking out for them. But of course, Rosemary was a handful. She was chaotic and didn’t care about the truth of things, she just wanted to be good at it. And she wanted to be good at it yesterday. So of course when her name announced itself on the caller ID, Alistair let out a little sigh before answering it.

As soon as they answered the phone, Rosemary was frantic. They frowned, looked over to the worker, then to the customers in the store. Well, they had to, right?

Shit.

Fine.

“Alright, give me time to get there.” Alistair responded, calling Brutus to their side with a whistle. “I’ll be back! Don’t light anything on fire! Family emergency!” They told the workers in the store before rushing off out the door, Brutus leading the way as happy as could be.

Now of course, being blind complicated things in terms of the whole navigating the world thing. It took time, but they got to the nursing home, only to be grabbed by someone and yanked around back. “What, hey? Rosemary, y’need tae calm down.” Alistair instructed the frantic woman, putting their hands on her shoulders as their accent grew thicker, giving away their own nerves on the situation. “Now tell me what happened, and if they’re human or not.”

Time felt as though it had dilated. Every passing second felt as though it took hours. This woman who she’d grown to consider a friend’s life was slipping through Rosemary’s fingers because she was too inexperienced to be able to fix it. Gods above, she wanted to fix it. She knew what it was to grow up without a mother, and from everything she knew about Janice, the woman was the best kind of mother a child could ask for. Loving, and attentive, and willing to go the extra mile, even if that meant she had to work twice as hard to get everything done. Grief for what she’d never got to know welled up, threatening to drown Rosemary in it as she waited and waited and waited, trying to spare two children she’d never met the same sadness she’d always walked hand in hand with.

The second she saw Alistair pass by the window on their way in, she sprinted from Janice’s bedside and grabbed hold of them with blood-soaked hands and dragged Alistair and Brutus to the secluded room with the woman who was just barely breathing. “It was one of those demon things- remember I told you I almost got attacked by one?” The witch could hear the tears in her voice but couldn’t recall when she’d started crying. “Janice- human, she’s human- she just went outside for a break. I was on my way home- you have to help me. Please. Please, she’s got two kids, Alistair.”

——

There had been extensive conversations between Rosemary and Alistair regarding their upbringing. They knew about the absence of her mother, they knew the harshness of her father in return, she knew the coldness of his parents, the indifference of their siblings. There was an unspoken understanding between the two of them. Alistair would do what it took to make sure that Janice lived, even if it meant doing something that one would view as unthinkable. In the past few months, Alistair had come to embrace what they were. They were a necromancer. They had the ability to play with death and come out on top. They had beaten death and for Rosemary, they would traverse Hell.

Letting out a deep breath, Alistair nodded slowly and walked over to the bed, putting a hand out and pressing it to Janice’s neck, checking for a pulse. There wasn’t one. “Rose, she’s gone.” Their voice was quiet, as if afraid to break the woman. A hand moved to touch the blonde’s shoulder and carefully gripped it. “You know what you have to do.” Their voice was soft, not a command, but a gentle reminder “I will be there with you helping,” they told her. “But you will be leading this. We need a sacrifice and we need to get her out of here without being looked at funny.”

“You get the sacrifice, I’ve got an idea.”

The witch felt her heart plummet at the sound of those two words. She’d known deep down there was no holding on to life with wounds that deep, not for as long as it had taken for Alistair to get there. Part of Rosemary wanted to scream, to cry, to tear the stupid room apart, to go out and find the creature that did this to her friend and tear it limb from limb, piece it back together, and raise it to do her bidding as punishment for doing as its nature bid it. But the steady hand on her shoulder reminded her of one very important detail.

There was always another option.

Her blood soaked hand covered the one Alistair had placed on her shoulder as she let out a long, shaky breath. She could do this. With Alistair, she could do this. There was no time like the present to learn the big stuff… Rosemary jerked her head in a stiff nod. “Okay,” she breathed, blinking rapidly as her mind shifted gears. “Okay.” If anyone was going to teach her how to do this, it would be Alistair. No longer because she thought they were her only option. No, she trusted them implicitly. They wouldn’t let anything bad happen, and even if something did occur, they’d be right beside her, weathering the storm together.

“I’ll be back.” The witch hastily scrubbed her hands off in the sink, trying to get as much blood as she could off to avoid suspicion. She grabbed some spare scrubs from a cabinet, and tore off in the direction of the hospice ward.

The nursing home always smelled like disinfectant and death. It was quiet enough that the occasional cough and beep of the heart rate monitors always seemed to echo down the halls. Rosemary skidded to a halt in front of room 113. She swallowed, the words she needed seeming to tangle in a ball in her throat. She opened the door to find Mrs. O’Hara, coughing and wheezing feebly, but a bright smile wrinkling the corners of her eyes. The old woman raised a crepe paper hand in a gentle wave of hello. Rosemary couldn’t believe what she was about to ask of this old woman. But knowledge of the people in play was her most powerful tool at that moment. She knew Janice cared for -had cared for- the old woman, spending most of her time in the hospice ward. She knew if she had hope of anyone in this hospital would understanding the balance needed, it would be this woman. Gods help her…

Twenty minutes later, Rosemary wheeled the old woman into the room with Alistair. She swiped the back of her hand at her bloodshot eyes, the tired, cheerful voice of the old woman still in her ears. “I only have a few weeks left of what? Sitting in this room, in pain, just waiting for this to be over?” The woman had shaken her head, pushing the blankets off and trying to pull herself from the hospital bed. “No, I’d rather go and know I’d done something with the end rather than play gin until my lungs finally give out.”

“Ready to go?” She asked Alistair in a thick voice.

——-

As soon as Rosemary left, Alistair got to work. They slipped out of the room and walked down the hall towards the elevator. Using Brutus as their eyes, they navigated the halls in the basement. When they found the morgue, the snatched the lab coat hanging on a hook on the wall and put it on. Then, they took a gurney and a body bag. If they were going to get Janice out of there, they’d have to play the part.

The instructed Brutus to jump up onto the gurney, then cover the dog with the body bag, leaving his eyes and nose uncovered so that they could see and began to push the gurney towards the elevator and back to the floor, where Janice had been left. Now Alistair was no Medical doctor, but they did their time at the hospital they used to work at back in New York. They had seen countless bodies being wheeled toward the morgue in the nursing home, where here it was even more the norm. As long as they stayed calm and acted like this was routine, then this would go off without a hitch.

We just finished putting Janice into the body bag when Rosemary came back. Still using Brutus‘s eyes to see, Alistair concealed their frown at the sight of the woman that rosemary had chosen. “Let’s do this” Alistair told Rosemary with a curt nod. “Get your car and pull it to the front“ Alistair instructed the blonde.

Even though they were a necromancer, Alistair didn’t have much experience with raising the dead; they were much more versed in healing. But that didn’t mean they didn’t know what they were doing for over thirty years, Alistair was trained on how to be the perfect necromancer. Even when they left, they never gave out the craft. They were good at it. They excelled at it. And even if there was a part of them that aboard what they did, there was a bigger part of them that took pride in their abilities.

Even with all the doubt it swirled in their mind, they would do this for Rosemary because they knew that she would do it for them.

The witch walked quickly to the car, depositing the old woman in the back seat. She tried not to think too much about what was to come, but when she glanced in the rearview mirror of her car, there it was waiting for her at the door of Mother Morta’s. Rosemary threw the car in reverse and kept moving.

She pressed the button to pop the trunk of her car and hopped out to help Alistair. “Thank you.” The words were barely a whisper as she hastily shut the trunk of her car, hiding the body bag away from any prying eyes. The witch didn’t speak again. She opened the door for Brutus to hop in the back, opened Alistair’s door, and hopped into the driver's seat. She glanced in the rearview mirror once more. There was nothing there now, but she could almost feel the eyes of the fates trained on her, daring her to restore the thread they’d cut. So be it. She put the car in drive and sped off.

____

After getting into the car, Alistair took a deep breath after holding in a breath they hadn’t realized they were holding in. Death was never an easy thing, even as a necromancer. Death came for all, in the end. Being a necromancer only meant delaying the inevitable. Alistair focused on their breathing, feeling the grief radiating off of Rosemary in droves. “Rose, you need to breathe. We’ll fix this. Together.” A hand drifted out to touch hers as they rolled to a stoplight. “You aren’t alone in this. I’m right here.” They weren’t going to let her feel alone. She’d spend so long alone in her abilities, and they didn’t want her to feel that way anymore.

They withdrew their hand as she began to drive again. “We have to wait until nightfall,” they reminded her in a quiet, far-off voice. “If she doesn’t have something of importance in her, we need it. Maybe a photo of her children in her wallet or something.” They knew they’d have to figure things out, and it was easier for them to worry about the details instead of quizzing Rosemary about it when she was already stressed out and hurting.

“I’ll worry about the setup, you take care of…” Alistair frowned, realizing they weren’t alone in the car. “Dorothy O’Hara,” the kind but feeble old woman spoke. “Well, Dorothy, we’ll make sure your last moments are well-spent, won’t we, Rosemary?” Alistair spoke, shooting the blonde woman a look.

She sat ramrod straight behind the wheel, taking every ounce of self control she possessed to force herself not to push her foot all the way down on the gas pedal. It wouldn’t matter how quickly she got back to the Sugar Pot. Her speeding wouldn’t alter the reality of the dead woman in her trunk, nor would it hasten the sun's setting. Rosemary could feel their attention fixed on her, and knew without looking over that Alistair was concerned. She flipped her hand on the steering wheel to give the hand covering her own a reassuring squeeze she didn’t quite mean.

Guilt prickled in her chest. What if that demon had been the same one from the night she’d visited the Raven? What if it had followed her to work? Rational thought told her that it was simply a case of ‘wrong place, wrong time’, but Rosemary wasn’t feeling particularly rational. “There’s one taped to the back of her lanyard.” Her voice was hollow as she tamped the sorrow and anxiety down, down, down. “I know they’re her phone screensaver too. But I’m not sure how technology would play with the craft. I don’t think it would work well.”

The witch glanced in the rearview mirror to the old woman who sat next to Brutus, scratching the dogs chin. “Of course.” She said with as much warmth as she could muster. Rosemary felt she’d made the wrong choice in asking that kind of sacrifice from the kindly old woman. Perhaps she should have picked someone less personal. She had never realized how deeply emotional this process would be if anything hit even a bit too close to home. She let out a long, slow breath as she focused on the path ahead. The street lights flickered on in the rosy evening light to punctuate her thoughts.

The sun was a hot pink disc gleaming just above the horizon as she pulled into the parking lot. The witch felt an eerie sense of calm settle over her as she switched the ignition off and stepped out of the car. A cool autumn breeze whipped through, and she reminded herself. Balance. An old, full life lived for one that had been cut too short. Rosemary helped the old woman out of the car, and hurried to fix her a pot of tea inside.

——

Alistair got out of the car and retrieved Brutus, who quickly went back into working mode the second his harness had been grabbed, despite having loved the attention from Dorothy. They said nothing as they unlocked the front door to the tea shop and flicked on the lights. “Drive into the alley and get Janice inside. I’ll take care of Dorothy.” Alistair told Rosemary in a calm, careful voice as if the woman could break at any moment. Part of them was afraid that she would. “You know I can’t do it myself,” he then added before she could protest.

After she left, Alistair decided to spend some time with Dorothy. “You don’t have to do this,” they spoke gently. There was a long silence as Alistair poured the hot water for the tea. “You’re right,” she finally said. “But I want to.” Another period of silence. “The doctors gave me no time at all, I’m already on borrowed time. But to let my death mean something? I’ll do it.” Her voice was hoarse and breathing labored, and Alistair felt their heart shatter to pieces.

“I’ll make it as painless as possible,” he assured her. It didn’t sit right with him, using someone who was so friendly. But then, what was left of a life that she spent suffering? She wanted this. She wanted to help, and yet…

“I can see the struggle written all over your face, young man.” Dorothy said to Alistair from her wheel chair. Alistair didn’t respond, the guilt eating him alive.

“Janice was the only one who spent time with me. My family, I don’t have any. Not anymore.” Her voice was sad, but honest. It made Alistair feel that much worse.

“She visited me after her shifts, you know. Showed me pictures of her children. Her children need their mother.” Alistair thought to Tommy, then nodded his head. They understood. “I… understand.” Their voice was low and quiet, still very much grappling with the torment of it all.

“Don’t tell her it was me, she’ll never forgive herself, even if I was destined for death in a matter of days.” Dorothy spoke, voice as severe as she could make it, which earned a nod from Alistair.

“You have my word.” They spoke in reply, right as Rosemary walked through the back room and back into the main store. “We have some time.” They told her, walking over to the student that had become a dear friend to them.

After turning a kettle on, Rosemary went back out to her car to drive it into the alley. After backing the shiny silver car into the alley, she sat frozen in her car staring blankly at the rearview mirror. Her eyes kept falling on the trunk as the witch tried to focus. She drew in a long, deep breath, and held it until she felt as though her lungs would explode if she didn’t release everything that was pent up inside her. When she exhaled, it came out as a sob. Manicured nails dug into the leather of the steering wheel as she gave herself a moment to simply feel. And what did she feel?

The shock and rage she’d felt in the moment of watching someone she considered a friend die in a truly horrific way had dissipated. The guilt that had set in on the ride over had settled in, twisting and morphing from the grief driven guilt of losing a friend, to the guilt of asking a dying woman to die even sooner in order to save a younger woman. The guilt of knowing if this didn’t go perfectly, she’d be depriving two children of a life with their mother. But the emotions weren’t all bad. The strangest feeling of anticipation buzzed through her veins. She’d never done magic this big before. Gods knew she couldn’t do it alone but with Alistair? Between the two of them, they could do this.

She closed her eyes and took another deep breath as it all washed over her, giving it all a moment to be acknowledged and validated. When she breathed out, she opened her eyes. “Let’s fucking do this.”

#parental death tw #parental death mention #human sacrifice tw #murder tw #; alistair #thread: abandon all hope #; threads #deathsplaything #hospice care tw #euthanasia tw

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