#like okay green yellow orange and red all rain. the farther from green you go the more heavy the rain

[bunnyb34r]

There better not be a fucking tornado while I'm sleeping, or I'll be so pissed

[seizethecringeofproduction]

Flashpoint 2: Advent Solaris - Chapter 5

Author’s Note: Contains Damirae, but not how you’d expect or want to see them in the “new timeline”.

I still don't know if any of this is really happening…

Part of me thinks that any second now, I'll wake up at my desk back at the station, finding out that the whole time travel thing was just a really super long dream and the original timeline never left at all…

However, I know that if that was the case, I'd have definitely woken up by now…

Barry still was not fully latched to the fact that all that was happening around him was actually real. Every second felt like an intense fever dream of sorts - and the brief migraines and flashing purple vision did not help either. Nor did the fact that his lungs were now receiving a constant influx of smoke and ash from the heated apocalyptic air around him - forcing various coughs out of him. He received a look from Shadow as he did, silently telling him to just keep his mouth closed.

Barry was sure to obey the suggestion.

The air only got worse the farther Barry, Shadow and Rouge were from the remains of the 'future' city. Miles away were the ruins of what once had been a bustling metropolis, and close where dark, blackened mountain ranges accompanied by volcanoes which seemed to be in a constant state of eruption, their lava flows forming entire river systems, their smoke replacing the clouds in the sky, and their flaming rocks taking the place of rain. The ground, for it's part, matched the dark, blackened skies. Patches of dead grass were present, though rare. In the two centuries since the destruction of the world most of what had once been lush grass not only died, but was then stained and replaced by the ash and flaming rock raining down upon it, turning virtually all of the ground to dry, blackened rock and volcanic earth. As Barry traveled with Shadow and Rouge into this bleak realm, he only had one description for all of it:

Are we still on earth?

Or are we in Hell…

The only break from the otherwise dark, dismal lights of the blackened sky and air came from the banks of the lava streams which illuminated the immediate area with auras of heated red light. Even so though, it did not help Barry with telling the time, though considering things were still visible enough to traverse the landscape he assumed that it was at the very least late afternoon.

From what Barry could tell, both Shadow and Rouge were focused on whatever destination they were heading towards, and with how fast the three were going there was no telling how far they had already traveled from the city.

Within a matter of minutes however, their destination was reached.

Overlooking a long canyon itself overlooked by one of the larger volcanoes, their destination was a small rocky, ash-stained cliffside with only two notable pieces of vegetation in the area - specifically two dead, dried out trees that remained standing in a permanent state of silent death. As Barry, Shadow and Rouge stopped the human man could only continue to ponder if this truly was an earthly realm or some far more demonic dimension.

At the very least, the lava that supplied most of the lighting was a distance from the steep cliff that they were on top of - making their bodies less heated by the reddened molten rock.

Waiting for the three was another trio who had already arrived before them - Sonic, Tails and Knuckles. Barry recognized the green-eyed blue hedgehog and the blue-eyed two-tailed fox of orange-yellow fur, though to him the purple-eyed red echidna with the almost lego-like silver plate on his shoes and the white crescent mark on his chest was a brand new sight.

I'm assuming this is that Knuckles guy they mentioned before….

At the very least, I'm not surprised by this anymore...maybe the memories are finally kicking in, though I'm not losing the old ones...

In a fitting fashion, it was Sonic who spoke first as Barry, Shadow and Rouge approached him, Knuckles and Tails:

"Wow" he snarked, "You guys sure showed up fashionably late. What took so long?"

"Oh, us?" Rouge remarked, "We just had a bit of a detour, nothing major though."

It was then that attention went over to Barry, who was in many more ways than one the odd one out of the group. Even though he was in his complete Flash costume, the first thing out of Tails' mouth once he looked the Flash up and down was nothing else but:

"Barry?"

"Huh?" Barry was shocked to hear that, not used to people just figuring out secret identities like that, still, he had to address it: "What, what are you talking about?"

"Oh, now I see it!" Sonic exclaimed with a snap of his fingers, "You're that guy me and Tails ran into back in Soleanna! Surprised to see you here! I'm assuming you got sent to this future with the rest of us, huh?"

"Firstly, yeah, I did" Barry answered, "Secondly, how'd you figure out who I was?"

"Hahaha" Tails childishly laughed, "It'll take more than to fool me! Got an I.Q. of 300!"

"Yep!" Sonic exclaimed, "Tails is quite the child prodigy!" - Tails continued to chuckle as Sonic ruffled the top of his head, with smiles on both their faces. It reminded Barry of himself and his nephews, though in a manner which made him softly smile.

"Ahem" with that sound, the sound of Knuckles clearing his throat, everyone's attention was driven over to him instead: "Guys, I think we can save this chat for later, in favor of ya know, getting back to where we came from?"

"Luckily" Rouge interjected, "We found just the thing to help us do that!"

It was then that Sonic, Tails and Knuckles saw in Shadow's hands the green chaos emerald achieved from the city prior to encountering Barry. Tails himself was pleasantly surprised, and exclaimed appropriately:

"You guys found a chaos emerald!"

"Of course we did" Rouge said as she snarked, "I'm a real treasure hunter, after all" and it was with a smirk that she added, "unlike a certain echidna I know."

Hearing that, Knuckles quickly stormed towards the gloating bat - Shadow silently following him with his eyes with arms folding him. All Knuckles did was say a slightly angered:

"What?", before he stormed back to where he was after a huff, with Shadow's eyes still silently following him. Rouge just kept the smirk on her face. With that small exchange over as quickly as it started, Shadow was quick to resume discussion of business and asked Sonic, Tails and Knuckles but a simple question:

"Have you guys discovered anything?"

"Yeah, actually" Tails explained with a nod of his head, "We discovered a lab in the city, and on one of the computers there I was able to discover a signal indicating there was a chaos emerald around here, possibly in that huge volcano over there!"

Rouge, surprised at the nation of traversing the vast, volcanic canyon before them, could only complain in surprise at the notion:

"You mean we have to go through there?"

Knuckles, with Shadow's eyes following him, yet again turned and faced Rouge directly as she said in a confrontational tone:

"If you don't like it, you can stay here."

"You've got to be kidding."

Once Knuckles huffed back to his place, that was when Barry finally had enough of observing and interjected his own words into the conversation as he was still having quite the struggle with processing all of the information his brain was receiving:

"Okay, okay, can someone just explain to me ho-"

"No time!" Shadow exclaimed, marching forward to be ahead of the others as he interrupted Barry's words, "Let's move!"

With Shadow, Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Rouge rushing on into the volcanic, hellish canyon it was Barry who found himself left to shrug. He still had barely any idea of what was going on or what it was that needed to be done, but he followed his new allies regardless - at the very least they all seemed to be heroes like himself. Thankfully, he caught up to them all within a matter of seconds - a speed at which even Sonic was impressed:

"Wow Barry!" the blue hedgehog exclaimed as he and the blonde were virtually side by side rushing forward into the dark landscape, "You're really fast! Almost as fast as me!"

"Heh" Barry smirked, "Call me the Flash, and we'll be seeing about that 'almost' part."

"So we shall", Sonic was smirking in precisely the same way.

Sonic, Shadow and the Flash naturally led the charge into the canyon, finding themselves speeding down what appeared to be a flat highway of black earth with the heated air flowing past them as during any regular high speed run. There were brief appearances by what appeared to be lizard beasts made out of the molten rock and flames - though their entire forms were easily dispersed by being rammed by either of them ramming into the beasts at such high velocities of sheer speed.

Barry could hardly believe the geography of the place: one second he and the two hedgehogs were careening down a long, winding path faster than a speeding sports car. The next that same path turned into a loop made of darkened earth, before their speed sent them into the air to briefly overlook the lands before landing onto yet another winding pathway. All the while avoiding seemingly random pillars of fire that would sprout from the ground like geysers, requiring nigh perfect timing in order to avoid being scorched.

This is hellish, but exhilarating

Though, hopefully I don't fall into the lava…

He couldn't have thought that at a better time. Within moments it was apparent that the roads of rock they were racing down were descending, and soon they were mere feet if not inches away from a stream of the red molten rock that fed directly into a small lake of it complete with spires and even platforms of rock emerging from the top of it.

Luckily, all of this proved surprisingly easy to traverse with a good usage of momentum and acrobatics - though Barry could still feel sweat pouring from his body due to his proximity to the heat. He only hoped his suit would not glue itself to his skin.

Jumping from rock spire to rock spire and from platform to platform - making quick work of any lizard or 'bat' lava monster that manifested in their way, the group quickly found a steep wall that headed to a plateau, and headed there. The flat plateau was not very large, but did overlook a sea of lava as well as feature a closed off cave connection to it. The only trouble was the geysers of fire and the emergence of various bat and lizard demons as soon as their feet touched the ground.

What are these things…

The lizard and bat-like beasts were joined by other fiery faces however - large worm-like beasts that casme up from the ground with large flaming mouths that almost looked like two pairs of hooked tweezers, and one large, golem like beast that was humanoid in stance but incredibly large - about as large as that Doomsday beast had been. Though it was not as threatening since it's head was but a pure circle of bright, heated lava.

Still, seeing it triggered a small bout of Barry's headaches as well as purple vision. Though he avoided an outright hallucination, for a few brief moments the beast flashed into a screeching, growling paradoom while Barry himself grabbed his head and hissed due to the migraine.

This was not unnoticed by Shadow, who looked at the struggling Barry curiously while he was destroying one of the lizard beasts with a single chaos spear - alongside all of the others who also managed to take care of the monsters with relative ease. Tails, Knuckles and Rouge all had just as much ease defeating them as Sonic and Shadow: Knuckles' punches, Tails' tail whips, and even Rouge's martial arts kicks all managed to disperse the lava monsters in but a few hits - reducing them to nothing as though they hadn't even existed at all.

The only exception was the golem-like beast, which had enough blackened, heated rock to serve as armor that it seemed virtually impenetrable. It managed to disperse Shadow, Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Rouge from getting too close to it by tossing explosive fireballs at them - evidently trying to lead them towards the geysers and their regular blasts of fire.

It did not take any account of Barry, however.

Once Barry recovered from the headache, he was quick to notice the predicament that the others were in - and just as quickly he knew what to do. It was actually rather simple really, a mad dash for the mountainous 'wall' behind it followed by a jump off allowed Barry to punch the creature's 'eye' with enough sheer momentum that it dispersed to nothing within a matter of seconds. Barry landed back to the ground as the cave behind them opened up, revealing a short caven illuminated by glowing purple gemstones as it led to another section of the canyon.

"Way to go, Flash!" Sonic congratulated. Barry responded with a smirk and a nod of his head, before the group pressed on to the rest of the canyon.

Hopefully we get back to the wonderful world of air conditioning soon enough.

The rest of the canyon proved rather easy to traverse through once all of the demons within it were proven to be rather physically weak. They continued emerging to attack the group, though just as quickly they were reduced to nothing once more.

The next major section of their journey was as beautiful as it was haunting: a deep waterfall made of lava, dropping down into a small lake miles beneath their feet, though platforms of stone stuck out from the lava flow along with other platforms and even weakened 'bridges' of rock to help them get over to the waterfall. Tails, Rouge and Knuckles easily flew or glided across the chasm, though the three speedsters had to use the platforms.

The entire time, it couldn't be stated enough how both haunting and gorgeous seeing such a large waterfall of lava was. With everything else around it being increasingly darkened by just how bleak this future world was, it served as both the largest source of light as well as a reminder of the doom that occurred many years before.

It also of course, served as a threat due to the heat it gave off. The heroes had no choice but to be up close and personal with it's radiating warmth, making many of them feel as though they were being slowly cooked alive. Having to keep moving at a fast pace did not help.

Nor did the fact that the bridges they tried to cross over began to collapse the moment they were stepped on. Had Sonic, Shadow and the Flash not been speedsters they would have fallen directly into the lake of lava beneath them. They would not have been able to properly jump up the 'lavafall' via the platforms jutting out from it, and from there navigate the small platforms being sent down it's current while land bridges turned red by it's heated light overlooked them from above, forming a pseudo cave-like area.

Beyond that, they reached another plateau where they had to face off with another small team of fire beasts before proceeding. There was little time paid to them, as all of the monsters were virtually now incapable of putting up any serious resistance to the team's attacks. Within a matter of seconds they were already rushing through a second short cave towards what would be their final segment of the outside volcanic canyons:

With the massive canyon that served as their destination now looming over them in plain view of their eyes, they now only had to avoid a steep drop into the wide volcanic river that rested miles beneath them. They had various bridges, platforms and spires of volcanic rock to help them from doing just that. Due to them having to avoid flaming chunks of molten rock raining down onto them like the polar opposite of a rough hail storm in addition to not wanting to breathe in any toxic fumes, there was not much talking between them at this stage. Though there remained easy defeatings of the various fire-based demons that sprung out to attack them.

Before they even knew it, they were all blazing through the air towards the massive volcano before them - on a direct collision course with whatever existed on the inside of it.

As they approached it, it dawned on them all just how large it was. It was the size of yellowstone's grand caldera from what Barry could see, except in the shape of a traditional volcano. Though he gulped as he descended towards it alongside his newfound allies, he had hoped that soon it would all be alright.

That would prove to take quite a while, however.

The descent into the massive volcano was hectic for all of them as they dropped down for what had to be miles upon miles of heated, dark air. They held their mouths shut so as to not take in any of the toxic fumes from the stacks of smoke emitting from the large triangular mountain - though their eyes were forced to struggle.

The stacks of fumes soon were behind them though, only to be replaced by another, arguably more pressing threat. Soon surrounded on all sides by circular walls of rock, the large team was left at the mercy of fire geysers lining the side of the chasm they were falling down. Once he realized what was coming, Shadow was sure to exclaim to the others:

"Watch for the fire!"

"Here it comes!" Knuckles' own exclamation came with him and Rouge having to latch themselves onto the wall around them to steer clear of at least four different blasts of fire that came from the wall-perched geysers. They managed to just barely dodge getting burned alive by the vicious streams. Thankfully, so did the others. Tails managed to grab hold of Sonic, and lifted him to a spot not being occupied by the streams of flame. Shadow managed to grab hold of one of Rouge's ankles, and for good measure sank one of his hands deep within the walls of rock so that neither of them would fall. Barry had to push himself to the wall and with his sheer momentum sank both his hands and his feet into the wall.

"Heh" Sonic chuckled, "This place sure doesn't hold back!"

"You can say that again." Barry muttered in response, agreeing with Sonic's cocky statement. The conversation was then taken over by Tails:

"According to the signal I found, the chaos emerald is in the deeper regions of this volcano, so we're really only half way there now!"

"Assuming we don't get cooked alive down here" Knuckles added in, there was little argument to his statement - since there wasn't much of one to make. Thankfully though, the streams of flame receded and allowed the group to press on for the remainder of the chasm - there were other geysers on the way down though thanks to their timing all of them to the groups' relief only went off after they had already passed by.

Landing on a large circular platform surrounded by a small stream of lava, the six looked around and saw that the cave immediately in front of them was their only way of continued travelling, and so proceeded to rush down the winding pathway connected to their landing sight. At the very least, the cave was well illuminated by the red-yellow-orange magma beneath them - turning all of the cave walls, stalagmites, stalactites and ceiling alike into a red color just like itself.

The pathway did not last long, courtesy of the six's sheer speed. Soon enough of the winding path led them to a much larger chamber of the volcano, one where the light was not nearly as strong as it was in the previous 'hallway' they had just gotten out of.

Almost immediately did they all find themselves struggling to see, the rock pathways they stood on becoming even darker, as did the lava and magma all around them - turning a much darker shade of red in conjunction with the rest of the room. They could tell that the room increased in height on one side due to the small lavafall before them, but they could no longer properly make out what path was safest to go down due to the sudden shift in lighting.

However, Sonic took quick notice of mysterious, levitating purple spheres of rock that were present. Without much in the way of hesitation, he impulsively curled into his ball state and homed in on them - his striking of one causing it to light up and provide a source of visibility for himself and the rest of the group in the immediate area.

"If we just hit these purple ball things, we should be able to find our way through this chamber!" Sonic exclaimed to the rest of the group, though Shadow was quick to remark back:

"Thank you for stating the obvious."

"Heh" Sonic snarked back, "You're welcome too, Shadow."

"Hmph."

The group quickly continued their journey through the cavernous chamber, with each of them making sure to make impact with any purple spherical rock they found levitating in the air once they were outside inside of any generated source of light.

With all of their speed combined, it was only a matter of seconds before they all found themselves out of that dimly lit chamber and in a section of the volcano's insides, one where at the very least proper visibility was a thing. Yet again were they hit with a sight that was haunting, yet at the same time strangely beautiful for their eyes to behold:

They were inside a tall, spacious, hallway-esque cavern, standing on yet another winding pathway of blackened rock, surrounded on virtually all sides by scorching hot, red, glowing and flowing magma. Yet, there was a strange beauty to the fact that out of many large holes within the cavernous walls, flowed large and seemingly endless streams of magma into the one beneath and around their only 'road'. Rather than the sounds of streaming water, was the sound bubbling molten rock and the fire that would occasionally spit out from it. Their flows actually fed into a large, incredibly steep lavafall situated behind them, though they did not venture to see what was beyond that. As horrifying as it was, it was just as mystifying in it's own hellish way. Rouge in particular made note of this:

"You know, as horrifying as this place is, some of these sights actually are strangely beautiful too."

"Yes" Shadow admitted, looking to Rouge with a blank yet agreeing expression, "In a way, they are….but let's keep moving."

As the group pressed on down the winding path through the boiling hot cave, all Barry could focus on was thinking ever fastly to himself:

She's not wrong, this place is kind of beautiful…

In the same kind of way Hell is, I imagine, but still...

Would much prefer a honeymoon in Niagara Falls to a honeymoon in whatever 'Falls' these are called, though, not gonna lie.

Maybe Robin and Raven would prefer this place, though. Maybe.

The winding path ultimately did not last long with how fast the group moved through it - and neither did their ability to properly see where they were headed. Soon enough the group found themselves in yet another chamber that was incredibly poorly lit - quickly forcing their vision to dim down along with it. The difference this time however was that the chamber had winding pathways of its own, ascending up the chamber's lavafall and beyond - along with various platforms and miniature plateaus situated around it at various heights.

There were however two glaring differences between this darkened chamber and the previous one they had been in: one was that there were no levitating pieces of rock, but instead more widely spread out purple-ish orbs of light that were currently turned 'off' from what it seemed. Second, was that the fire-and-rock demons were emerging in full force when it came to this chamber with all currently revealed types of them appearing as though they were adamant about preventing the six from progressing any further inside of the volcano.

It was evident to all of the six that the way to press on likely had to do with those spread out orbs, though with squadrons of fire demons guarding each one in addition to being present along the pathway itself it was evident the group would not be able to deal with this chamber as a single cohesive unit, as such Rouge did not waste much time in coming up with a simple solution for their problem:

"Looks like me and the echidna are gonna have to check out those light orbs while the rest of you guys handle these monsters down here!"

Pounding his fists together, Knuckles remarked:

"Works for me!"

"Just be careful" Shadow spoke to Rouge, "Don't fall into the lava."

"Shadow" Rouge winked, "You don't need to worry about me so much!"

"Hmph."

"Alright, that's enough talkin' for the moment!" Sonic exclaimed, his own loud-mouth self smirking up a storm, "Let's kick some monster butt!"

"You're speaking my language!" - Knuckles couldn't help but add that.

With those things all having been said, the group did as Rouge had suggested - herself and Knuckles took to the air and used the parts of rock that weren't too overly heated or fading slowly into flowing lava in order to climb to greater heights in order to more easily reach the orbs while the remaining four continued on the path and engaged in battle with the monsters before them.

Of course, small groups still attacked Knuckles and Rouge as well. However, they yet again did not prove to be much of a threat.

The lizard beasts proved that they could breathe fire, but being stationary while they did so left them open to drop kicks from Rouge or near kryptonian-strength punches on the side of their heads from Knuckles. They were dispersed to nothing without burning their foes at all. The bat-like creatures generated and dropped fireballs like miniature bombs, though with Rouge's skill at aerial maneuvers, Tails' own similar abilities, and Sonic & Shadow's jumping height they were just as easily reduced to a non-entity within moments.

The large, worm-like beasts along with the tall and armored golem-like ones were slightly more of a threat, though the worms could only take a bit more punishment before fading into oblivion while the golems having their weak point exposed usually only got one strike in before said weak spot was exploited by any one of the six and they were promptly defeated. A well placed chaos spear or even just an aerial punch or kick from Shadow made short work of them - let alone one from Knuckles or Rouge.

Getting beyond this chamber was little more than a matter of Knuckles and Rouge smacking the levitating orbs on either side of the chamber - getting them to light up with bright and almost blinding light, while the others slew the monsters down below with their various powers.

At times, entire circles of the worm-like beasts would emerge, only to be taken down by a stream of kicks to the head from Rouge from the air. Knuckles with a few combined punches made short-work of one ambitious golem demon that emerged in front of him at one point.

The lizard demons tried to burn the others with their fire breath, though more often than not they were taken out from behind as quickly as they started their attack. Lunging at the heroes proved even more fatal for them.

After what we went through with those Paradooms… - Barry thought - This is practically therapy!

Before long, all of the orbs were glowing brightly thanks to Knuckles and Rouge, and equally so all of the monsters that had emerged were reduced to those two objectives being accomplished, the six saw that their way to the next section of the volcano had opened up - like a sliding door, a portion of the cavern had sunk itself into the ground below to expose the way to them. Without any hesitation, the six continued on as a group of one.

What they found once they exited the cavern was the massive, spacious core of the volcano, complete with but one circular platform for them to stay on while a massive sea of lava virtually surrounded them. There were pathways leading other caverns within the volcano, though the sheer size of this chamber pointed to this being where the entire system led to. Behind them was not only the cave they had just left, but also the jagged, rugged volcanic rock that encompassed the outer walls of the chamber itself.

Far above them was the hole, the 'eye' of the volcano, with large towers of billowing smoke and sparks of fire floating up into and out of it into the dark world on the outside.

Most important of all though, was the glowing diamond-cut gemstone levitating in the air before them - spotted just as they looked upwards towards the hole far above them. It's color and glow gave off either a turquoise or cyan coloration, depending on which way one looked at it. Naturally, it was Rouge who with a smirk was the first to take notice of the emerald:

"There's the chaos emerald you guys were talking about earlier!" she said as she took off into the air, flying towards it, saying to it and herself in an almost greedy fashion: "Come to mama!"

However, it was not long before Shadow unfolded his arms as the realization that this was far too easy dawned on him. He quickly shouted to Rouge as loud as he possibly could:

"DON'T TOUCH IT!"

Luckily, Rouge managed to fly back onto the platform with a gasp as well as a flip - as within seconds of Shadow shouting that a massive eruption of flame occurred that completely shrouded and seemingly took the chaos emerald with it. Rouge would have been charred had she not gotten out of the way. Shadow instinctively stood in front of the group in a protective, battle stance as the others got into their own fighting stances - for once the flames and lava cleared, a true monster was revealed. With his eyes widened, Barry knew immediately what it was:

Iblis…

Iblis was certainly quite the beast. Barry was sure this was not his only form, though he did not want to wait around to see any others.

Iblis in the form he appeared to the six was similar to the weak worm-like demons that he spawned around the volcano, though extended to truly massive proportions, his head alone being virtually the size of a moderately sized building while his body was akin to the trailer one would attach to a eighteen wheeled truck - perhaps two lined up beside each other even. The entirety of the beast's body appeared to be made out of concentrated lava, from the massive snake-like body to the massive, armored head. The only exceptions appeared to be it's sharp teeth and the armor protruding from the body - the latter of which appeared to be made of black, volcanic rock. The armor around the hard was complete by the presence of three large, sharpened horns. One located between Iblis' prominent, dark green, triangular pupil eyes. The others were on either side of the beast's jaw.

Looking at the beast for the first time triggered yet another splitting migraine and flash of purple vision for Barry. He gritted his teeth and groaned in pain for another few moments as the beast's horrific roar bellowed throughout the volcano. He recovered once more, but still the creature did not go away.

To him, there was something strangely familiar about this beast once he looked at its eyes. It's green, yet soulless eyes. There was as much familiar as there was new, yet at the same time his brain was incapable of piecing it together.

Nor did it have the time to do so, as defeating Iblis was now top priority for the lot of them.

Before any of the six could even speak at all, Iblis let out it's booming roar and from it's smouth a massive stream of fire was unleashed upon the group. All of them gasped, some of them shouted, though all of them immediately jumped, glided or flew out of the way of the fire's radius.

"Heh!" Sonic snarked, "This must be the origin for those monsters from before! Guess 'mama's' come out to play!"

"Sonic, take this seriously!" Shadow exclaimed to the blue hedgehog, though Sonic was ever the cocky creature:

"Relax Shadow, I think we've got this one easy!"

With that having been said, Sonic rushed in the direction that the six had just recently come from - just barely grazing the large continuous stream of fire as he did so. With a slight grumble, Shadow did the same along the opposite side of the flame, until the two were racing along the mountainous walls of the dark chamber's exteriors. Practically in sync with each other as Shadow realized what Sonic's plan of attack was, they waited until they had just the right amount of height before launching themselves directly at the creature.

Iblis attempted to raise it's head to aim at them, but their sheer momentum more than outpaced it - their fists soon landed onto it's eyes, and their feet kicked said eyes as they bounced off of the creature once it's closed its eyes and writhed in pain from the blows, even being knocked back a bit from it's position due to the strength of both combined blows.

Luckily, Sonic and Shadow landed on two small pillars of rock that spared them from falling directly into the sea of lava beneath them. However, the snake-like demon lord was not finished with them quite yet. As it recovered from the first strike made to it, it attempted to swing the lower half of its body at all of them - first Sonic, then the four on the large platform, and then shadow. All managed to dodge it. Once it had completely flipped its body around, it submerged itself into the lava beneath itself - seemingly having retreated from the battle.

"Is that all?" Sonic questioned, before chuckling a bit, "Wow, what a coward!"

Shadow however, was not so easily convinced: his eyes were locked in battle-ready suspicion, looking around the massive caldera for any sign of the monster.

When Sonic was inevitably proven wrong, he was not surprised at all.

Crawling from the lava around the platform were hordes of Iblis' various relatively weak minions. The lizard demons crawled onto the platform itself, while the more worm-like beasts surrounded it best that they could and fired balls of flame at the grounded four while the lizard beasts attempted to lunge at them. Seemingly endless were their numbers, even if all of them were excessively weak to strikes upon their bodies.

Sonic gasped as he watch this occur, not wanting his friends to be hurt:

"Guys! Hold on!"

However, his panic was soon replaced by further shock as a massive stream of lava shot up at him - forcing him to gasp and jump out of the way immediately. He ultimately had to use aerial momentum to just barely latch onto the rock that Shadow was held up on. Shadow did have to slide himself down to the lower end of the rock in order to catch Sonic's hand though, lest the blue hedgehog fall directly into the lava.

Sonic gratefully looked back up to Shadow, using his free hand to give the black hedgehog a thumbs up:

"Thanks, Shadow!"

"Don't mention it." Shadow wasted no time pulling himself and Sonic back up, though naturally the moment they were on more steady ground was also the moment that Iblis re-emerged from beneath the surface of the lava surrounding them.

Lunging it's entire body high into the air, the beast with one more growl charged directly at them from above.

However, both Hedgehogs stood their ground. Only once the creature was just about to make impact with the rock did Shadow break his brave stance and make his move against it:

"Chaos Spear!"

One well timed blast of a chaos spear struck the base of the creature's center horn, which alone caused enough of a blast to knock the beast off it's collision course with the rock, though as if that wasn't enough Sonic himself spun himself into his ball form and quickly rammed the creature in the spot of impact as hard as he possibly could. Not only did it get one final shriek from the creature before it was once again submerged, though it visibly caused enough damage to the horn to make it start becoming looser as though it was now beginning to come off.

It should also be stressed that by running up the length of the creature's body as it descended into the lava and then jumping back onto the rock formation with Shadow on it, Sonic was able to save himself from falling into the molten liquid rock.

With Iblis once again submerged, Sonic and Shadow turned back to the remaining four of the group to make sure that they were doing well as well. Luckily, they were.

They were gathered in the center of the platform, focused entirely on not letting the endless horde of lava beasts get too much time to strike. While single punches, kicks or tail swipes took each individual out easily it was still apparent that their bodies were deadly to touch for long periods of time and that with enough numbers even these beasts could cause serious damage.

Thankfully, Barry's ability to create miniature vortexes of fast-moving wind using the momentum generated by vibrating & twirling his arms around proved too much for the creatures to handle as well as an effective strategy against the worm-like minions providing support for the lizards - who were mercilessly being picked up and tossed at the former as though they were nothing, and thus causing both types of creatures to meet their demise.

Both Sonic and Shadow were happy to know that for the time being, their allies were holding their own against the weaker minions. However, they still had to deal with the progenitor.

Speaking of which, Iblis wasted little time in yet again breaching the surface - though this time he paused right in front of the two small hedgehogs. Just as the two prepared for another round of their battle against him, Iblis tilted his head back to let out a deep roar before lifting it back in their direction to let out another stream of fire from its mouth.

However, as with the first time it attempted this, they avoided it by jumping into the air.

Instead of striking the monster's eyes this time, Sonic instead landed a ball-form strike to the scar at the base of the loosening horn, before also striking one of the eyes yet again for good measure. Sonic grabbed onto one of the jawline horns as the beast tilted it's head and roared in pain - thrashing it's head from side to side.

That was Shadow's opportunity to strike.

With a single, well placed punch to the scar created by his previous attack, the sheer force of the ultimate lifeform's strength was enough to get the horn to actually break off from the beast's head - complete with a loud, echoing cracking sound as it did so and promptly fell into the lava below. As Iblis yet again shrieked in absolute pain, it was revealed that a third eye had been hidden within the horn.

"Chaos Spear!" - Shadow wasted no time in unleashing a mid-air strike to the creature's now exposed third eye. Once the chaos spear struck the beast and caused it's third eye to erupt into an intense explosion across its face, Iblis virtually screamed in absolute agony. It thrashed itself around more violently than ever, eventually forcing Sonic to jump off of it before it yet again descended itself into the depths of the lava below.

Thankfully, Sonic and Shadow both maintained enough momentum be it from Sonic's speed or Shadow's rocket shoes in order to land on the platform with their four companions as well as a few remaining stragglers of Iblis' minions.

The remaining worm-like creatures were taken out quickly by Sonic bouncing off of their heads like he was a pinball ball, maintaining enough force to destroy all of them before landing back on the platform. Shadow took out the remaining lizard beasts by stomping on one's head and using that same foot to sideswipe one that was preparing to breathe it's fire onto him from behind. Knuckles gave a third straggling lizard beast an uppercut before it could sneak up on Barry.

With the last of the minions dispersed into nothing and Iblis submerged in the lava, the six heroes were all reunited in the form of their battle stances.

They all knew that it wasn't quite over yet. Though the chamber returned to silence for a few moments more, there was a sense amongst all of them that Iblis was not finished 'playing' just yet.

Their hunches were quickly proven correct.

Iblis emerged from the lava one more time, determined to finally finish off it's six enemies once and for all - in the form of making a final charge directly towards the platform that all of them were gathered on, displacing waves of lava in his wake as he roared angrily at his incoming prey.

However, it had underestimated the arsenal of the three speedsters that it was fighting.

Shadow, Sonic and Barry did not waste any time as it approached from the far end of the caldera. Following Sonic's strategy from the beginning of the battle, the three of them rushed at their top speeds up the rock walls behind them until they were at just the right height before launching themselves directly at the creature as it approached the platform like a freight train. Just as it opened it's jaws to roar did they make their impact.

Barry struck the left eye with a maximum momentum punch, and Shadow struck the right eye with a maximum momentum kick powered by his own personal strength. Sonic, in ball form, struck the center eye with maximum ball-state momentum.

A shockwave emitted from the impacts as the three speedsters successfully navigated themselves back to the platform with their four allies - watching as Iblis screamed in agony one last time as he was sent back to the wall on the other side of the caldera by the sheer might of their combined strikes. Not only that, but the collision that the beast made with the wall was strong enough to create a hole in the wall of rocks - the sound of crumbling rock and splashing lava echoing throughout the massive chamber as the creature tumbled out of it along with a newly created lava flow and also with one final cry, this time one of defeat.

With Iblis now forced into a different chamber of the volcano, it seemingly lost interest in the group and fled to deeper depths of the lava and magma in order to lick its wounds.

As silence returned to the group of six, the heroes turned to each other; all of them had but one issue on their mind:

"Does that thing still have the chaos emerald?!" Tails exclaimed, being the first to bring up the issue. To the happiness of all, Shadow quickly revealed that he had the cyan-turquoise emerald in his hands, having grabbed it from the creature during the final phases of the battle.

Everyone nearly sighed with relief after seeing it.

"What was that thing?!" Tails exclaimed after that had been settled, the second thing on his mind.

"I'm assuming that thing was Iblis" Barry remarked, remembering exactly what he had been told about this future, "The being that ends up destroying the world, and making all of this happen."

"Oh yeah?" Knuckles snarked, "Well for a destroyer of the world, he wasn't so tough!"

"More than likely, that was some kind of larval or transitional stage." Shadow was swift to explain, "It's almost certain that we did not fight that beast in its most powerful state, and I for one would rather get back to the present time before we actually do."

There was a nod of agreement from the others in response to his words. Absolutely none of the group wanted to stick around for that.

"So" Barry spoke once more, "How are we going to get back to the present, again? Are we just going to like, use the chaos emeralds or something?"

"Well, yeah" Sonic nodded, "Unless you got any better ideas?"

Barry thought about it, though he was hard-pressed to come up with any other idea on how to get back to the present. He knew he could theoretically create a fourth flashpoint, though knew that would change everything - if there was a method that would get them back to the present without causing yet another massive rift throughout the universe, he would certainly prefer it to another flashpoint. However, as he still needed an explanation on what the chaos emeralds were, he worded his response accordingly:

"Well, no," he admitted, "I don't have a single idea on how else to get back to the present. But, how exactly would the chaos emeralds help with that?"

"Simple" Tails exclaimed, "The seven chaos emeralds are each, essentially, generators of unlimited chaos energy - with each individual emerald giving off a different type of chaos energy. I can create fake emeralds with the same wavelength and overall properties, though my fake emeralds can only have a limited supply of energy while the real ones can both store and generate energy near endlessly! The chaos emeralds are a source of truly unlimited power, hence why it's always most important that they are kept out of the wrong hands! The only thing more powerful than them is the Master Emerald."

"Which" Knuckles interjected, "I am usually guarding, but since I had to come in and help you guys again I phoned in the Chaotix to substitute."

As he stood by and listened to every word that the young fox said, all he could picture in his mind was the idea of these emeralds existing on earth in his previous timeline. The things that people like Luthor and the innumerous other villains would do to get their hands on those emeralds was about as unlimited as the power they would give to them. He almost shivered at the thought of what Darkseid would be willing to do to get his hands on them, or what he would do if he did acquire them.

His thoughts were interrupted by Tails continuing to speak:

"For the most part though, the emeralds are only most useful if one acquires all seven of them. So I'm not entirely sure myself if two will be enough to take us back to the present, but I know that with one chaos emerald, chaos control does have the ability to temporarily freeze time in the immediate area around the emerald!"

Shadow nodded at that point, speaking out an explanation of his own:

"That's correct" he said, "In addition, the sensation I felt when I was sent to this time period felt very similar to my own chaos control, only transporting me through time instead of freezing it."

It was then that Barry remembered that certain something which was told to him earlier; regarding what chaos energy had similar properties too:

"I think trying with the two we have right now is at least worth a shot" Barry said with a nod, not bothering to explain why it was that he suddenly felt this way, "We might as well try it while we're here."

Sonic and Shadow turned to each other, and as Shadow pulled out his green chaos emerald he tossed the cyan one over to Sonic - who perfectly caught it in his hand. With one more exchange of nods between the two, they approached each other with the emeralds in-hand. Holding their emeralds close to each other as they held out their hands into the air, the two said in near unison:

"Chaos Control!"

And like that, the emeralds flashed a surge of bright light before within an instant a mysterious portal was opened through the sheer power of their combined energies, starting as a small white light that travelled upwards into the air before turning into the larger portal itself. The emeralds themselves seemed to disappear, being sucked into the rift that they themselves created - presumably to be found on the other side. Barry was stunned as it appeared like a ripple in both space and time had just occurred before his eyes within a matter of seconds, a swirling vortex of blue and white that had just materialized out of thin air. Or, out of the power of 'chaos energy'.

I definitely need to do more research on these things…

Before any of the others could even speak, Sonic, Tails and Knuckles rushed into the portal and disappeared into it - travelling to whatever was on the receiving end of it. Rouge took flight and was prepared to enter it, turning back only to see what Shadow and Barry were going to do.

Barry and Shadow both were about to follow Rouge as she flew into the portal and disappeared to wherever it led, though both were stopped by the sound of something behind them.

The sound of crackling fire.

Turning around, the two saw a small stack of fire burning beside a cloud of pitch black darkness. Peering their eyes, they were able to see movement within the darkness - Mephiles. Emerging from the darkness in a manner impossible to decipher whether or not he was coming from the darkness or the ground, he was fixated entirely on the fire in front of him as it burned and crackled with each passing second.

Only when he looked directly at the two did the fire intensify, suddenly growing larger and wider within a single instant as though the flame itself was inherently enraged with their presence.

Allowing Rouge to vanish into the portal and for the portal to vanish after her, Shadow and Barry silently opted to instead chase after their common enemy. While Shadow gracefully skated and Barry quickly ran, Mephiles seemed to not move his legs what-so-ever as he moved across the ground.

Nor did he or either of them say a single word.

He was quickly leading them somewhere, and even more clearly challenging them, though neither of them had any idea as to where they were being led other than the fact it was yet another chamber of the volcano.

Soon enough, Mephiles seemingly vanished from their sights just as they reached whatever section of the volcano that he had been leading them towards - yet another circular platform surrounded by lava within the area of the massive caldera itself. Above them was only pitch, black darkness though around them the flowing lava provided enough lighting for moderately decent visibility. A small wall of volcanic rock provided small lava falls which fed into the greater stream surrounding the platform they were on.

However, there was the matter of where Mephiles had gone.

The answer was that he was in this section with them, though was standing above them - looking down on them from a single spire of rock, directly above a mysterious purple orb that rested in the 'claws' of this spire.

He made sure to point out how 'comedic' he found their choices of actions:

"So, decided to void your return tickets, did you?"

"Mephiles!" Barry exclaimed as he glared at the demon standing above him, "You lied to me! You're the one who ruined this world, aren't you?!"

Mephiles softly and coldly chuckled in response, finding the human quite amusing so it seemed. This only response was a dry:

"The answer's yes, and no...perhaps it's better to show you two."

With a snap of his finger, something appeared before the two - something which shocked both of them, but Shadow far more than Barry. It appeared to be Shadow himself, trapped in a rhombus-like stasis pod, bright pink lights surrounding him as he appeared to be permanently stuck in some form of deep sleep with his arms and legs both restrained on the inside - as though he were nothing more than a prisoner. Looking at this sight brought back deep memories Shadow had from his past, not a single one of them present. The sight also made his eyes widen, almost as though he was having a hard time believing what he was seeing to be real.

Mephiles was quick to confirm:

"Yes" he said to the stunned Shadow, "That's you."

The demonic being was quick to continue his explanation while the two's eyes were locked on the apparition he was presenting to them:

"After the world was devastated by Iblis' flames, what do you think happened? A search for the guilty. Who did this you may ask? Society wasn't just jealous of your power, they feared it. They used this incident as an excuse, to hunt you down."

Shadow couldn't help but bow his head and turn away from the sight of himself as a prisoner of the very people he was created to protect. The very people who employed him. It was always in the background of his mind that something like this would happen, though actually seeing and being told that it was in store for him in the future, it was all too real even for him to take.

"Shadow…" Barry softly spoke as he saw the Hedgehog's response. He felt sympathy for his newfound ally, though of course his presence was not forgotten by Mephiles:

"And do you honestly think this would not befall yourself, Barry?" the entity said to the human, "Now that your powers have been restored, do you not think that eventually society shall turn it's back on you as well? The story is all the same. Today's heroes can just as easily become tomorrow's villains. Who's to say that this event would not have happened in the previous timeline you were in, following such devastation of your world? If it can happen to someone like Shadow, surely it can happen to someone such as yourself. "

Soon, Barry was reduced to a similar response as Shadow. Reduced to at the very least silence. The fact that memories of the previous timeline were yet again triggered in his brain did not help him either.

Seeing as how both Shadow and Barry were successfully silenced, Mephiles took the opportunity to continue speaking to the two of them:

"Come with me" he said, holding out a single hand, "Let the three of us punish this world and it's foolish society. It's only fair to give back what was intended for you! You have every right to want justice!"

Thankfully for all of existence, Shadow was not so easily manipulated. Lifting his head back up and turning to Mephiles he spoke defiantly:

"That's absurd!" he exclaimed as he glared at the evil being, "Whatever it is you want to do, you can do it alone."

Barry, with Shadow saying everything he wanted to say, nodded in response while glaring at Mephiles himself. Mephiles, for his part, seemed to be processing his next words. Whether he expected Shadow and Barry to reject his offer or not was difficult to decipher, though response presented the latter:

"You forgive this folly then?" he asked while gesturing a hand towards the apparition of the imprisoned Shadow of the future. Shadow only had one, defiant thing to say in response to that:

"I determine my own destiny."

Mephiles was silent in response to what was said to him. At first, it was as though he had completely been surprised by what was said to him. Within moments however, the look in his soulless eyes gave off the sense that he had accepted Shadow and Barry's responses - though he was far from being willing to simply let them leave. Most certainly not alive. Extending his arms out to either side of his body, soon he, Barry, Shadow and seemingly all that surrounded them were enveloped in a black flash - as though all of the light that there was in the world had suddenly gone out, though just as quickly that flash of black turned into a flash of blinding white as the light had returned before anyone could possibly comprehend it's prior absence. Once the bright light faded, Shadow and Barry could both now see what Mephiles truly was; for he had finally revealed what was undoubtedly his 'true' form to them.

While he still resembled Shadow's form, he was now far more demonic in appearance. Any resemblance to a pale flesh color was replaced with a pale, almost rock-like blue appearance. In fact, his entire body now appeared as though it was made of some mixture of both leather and rock, with his stripes appearing to be bright, almost blue yet also almost white crystals. The sclera of his eyes turned a deep, piercing red though the reptilian green pupils remained. His hands and feet no longer resembled Shadow's, only vaguely in shape. There were no rings or gloves, only a black hand with crystalline claws for tips. His feet had no shoes either, instead only some twisted mass of crystalline features that vaguely resembled some type of foot and had the same function as them. As if these details were not enough, the demon's face was now even more unnatural, as he neither had a mouth nor a nose any longer. For that matter, even his 'ears' now seemed to be curled in a manner somewhat reminiscent of demonic horns. All of this while an aura of darkness, a flame of black, purple and blue, was surrounding him - further bringing him into an appearance that seemed far more unnatural, even more so than the appearance he had been using up to this point.

Despite all of this, neither Shadow nor Barry dare showed Mephiles any fear. They readied their battle stances, knowing full well that they were in for a fight.

That said, Mephiles' attitude came off as though he hardly viewed this as an honest battle at all.

"Such foolishness" he commented as he gazed down upon the two from his perch, "Very well, let's see how long the two of you can entertain me."

Mephiles made sure that he made the first strike in the battle, and leaped from his perch in an aerial charge directly towards Barry and Shadow with speed nearly comparable to their own. Assuming that he was intending to strike them, the two swiftly jumped out of the way - only to watch as Mephiles vanished into the ground with yet another black cloud of darkness, accompanied by the entity's demonic laughter.

It didn't take long for them to realize what he was actually intending to do.

Within moments, a pulsing surge of darkness came over Shadow, Barry and the entire area around them. While it made a shiver run down the two's spine, it did not give them any real pain. What it did accomplish however was turning the flames and flowing lava around them from their natural red color to a more unnatural blue color - by extension changing the lighting around the area as well, to a point where things appeared to be darker yet at the same time neither Shadow nor Barry suffered from impaired visibility. Though this gave off the appearance that the area was now cooler, in reality this blue lava was actually notably more heated than the prior red, with both Shadow and Barry feeling it all too well.

Just as Shadow and Barry began to ponder where the demon himself had gone to, he materialized. Under Shadow's feet, as though he was part of the ground beneath him. Not only that, but it was as though he was Shadow's very own shadow himself - moving with any stance or movement that Shadow made, mimicking him flawlessly.

The moment Shadow looked down and saw that, his eyes widened in shock before turning into an angry glare. All he could hiss out of his mouth was:

"Your tricks won't work on me, I know who I am!"

Mephiles only laughed maniacally in response as he mimicked every movement Shadow made in flawless synchronicity. Though Shadow kicked and punched at the ground, even fired chaos spears and other projectiles or beams of chaos energy all he accomplished was creating craters in the ground. Mephiles remained his shadow. Barry could only watch, not knowing what to do.

Of course, Mephiles did not forget about him.

Distracting both Shadow and Barry, suddenly the blue lava surrounding them erupted into a tall wall of intense blue flame with an echoing roar throughout the area. From this fire materialized dark silhouettes - each humanoid in shape though of varying heights and proportions. As these silhouettes exited the wall of flame and became figures standing on the circular platform with Shadow and Barry, the latter's eyes widened as another shiver ran down his entire spine.

"No..."

He was virtually reduced to tears, though they were unrecognizable due to how much his body was sweating with the heat surrounding him.

"No" he repeated, "This...this can't be…"

Surrounding him and Shadow, was the Justice League as well as the Teen Titans. Barry recognized every single one of them. Superman, Hal Jordan, Batman, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter, Shazam, Hawkman, Cyborg, Mera, Aquaman, John Constantine, Zatanna, Nightwing, Starfire, Robin, Raven, Beast Boy, Blue Beetle, Wonder Girl, Superboy, Kid Flash I, Kid Flash II, Speedy, Bumblebee, Batwoman, Batgirl, and even Lex Luthor.

Every single one of them was just as Barry remembered, including Damian being the older and more handsome teenager that Barry last saw him as - though these were not the same figures that he remembered. All of them appeared to be without color, reduced to nothing but shades of black and grey - a look that made even Batman and Raven seem unnatural due to the complete absence of their natural skin colors as well as any color that their suits had. Of course, Hal and Beast Boy certainly looked the most unnatural, with their green being exchanged for a lifeless grey, and Beast Boy's suit now being a dark black.

That's not to mention the fact that none of them had their pupils, only pure red scleras that present not souls, but only lifeless and evil and obedience to the demonic being that summoned them to the playing field. Gone were Superboy's beautiful crystal eyes, Batman and Robin's white mask 'holes' and even the two Wallys' own innocent appearances as Barry's own nephews.

Barry quivered as he saw them, his guard being forcibly let down by the sight thrusted upon his eyes. All of his friends. Members of his family. They looked just as he remembered them previously looking, yet now were gazing upon him with soulless, emotionless looks to their faces - reduced to being nothing but pawns of a demonic entity. He didn't even know if these were really them, or just apparitions.

Only Shadow, who did not recognize these people at all, remained in a battle stance as these figures surrounded him and the Flash. He could see the Flash was emotionally distraught, though knew full well that it was important for his ally to remain focused:

"Flash!" he shouted, "These aren't the people you remember them to be! You need to focus yourself, let go of your past!"

Barry shook his head of the tears joining with his sweat, and responded with a nod. Though it pained him to no end, he knew that Shadow was right. He had to battle his mind, even though the more he looked at these 'nega' apparitions of his friends, family and allies the more his mind flashed with visions of them in their colored, lively states.

Mephiles only laughed in response once more, saying to the two of them in an almost mocking tone of voice:

"Try to forget all you want" he mocked, "There's nothing you can do to change the fact that you are why they are no longer part of this world."

"No!" Barry yelled, now more angry and distraught than ever before, "I didn't kill them! Darkseid did! The Paradooms did! I didn't kill them!"

"Ha" Mephiles almost chuckled, "Perhaps that is true when speaking of the literal sense, but let's see if they feel that way, shall we?"

With those words having been exchanged, the true battle began. The soulless copies of the Justice League, Titans and Luthor approached Shadow and Barry with full intent of causing harm to them, though the two living heroes were not going to go down easily. Superman, Superboy, Wonder Woman and Wonder Girl immediately charged at Shadow - with Superboy being one to strike Shadow first with a bunch. Though he was able to push Shadow to the edge of the platform with but one punch, Shadow did manage to use his reflexes and block the punch from striking his face, allowing him to keep his feet planted on the ground. Still, that didn't stop the much larger Superman from getting a direct blow from the side which did successfully knock Shadow to the ground as well as generate a good sized crater.

That said however, Superman was kept from flying upwards and landing on Shadow when Shadow used two beams of chaos energy from his hands to successfully disrupt Superman's planned attack. He later had to deal with Wonderwoman as well as Wonder Girl though, with Superboy flying overhead like some form of support.

With Superboy using his heat vision while Wonder Girl and Wonderwoman lunged at Shadow to kick and punch at the smaller target, it was a testament to Shadow's strength that he was able to hold his own at all against them. Whenever a hit was landed upon him, it was far stronger than any opponent he'd ever faced before, though only the ultimate lifeform would be able to withstand this kind of battle. Any normal mortal would have had their bones long destroyed by this point.

Shadow's own retaliation strikes were just as hard, as he was no longer holding anything back. Many times each of them would take turns sending the other barreling to the other end of the platform, only to charge at each other once more for a few more strikes. Even when Superman rejoined the battle, using his heat vision in tandem with Superboy's to send an airborne Shadow back to the ground, it only seemed to moderately harm Shadow rather than render him unable to fight further. However, scratches and signs of battle were increasingly present on all of their bodies, showing that the ultimate life was in fact fighting his matches.

Even so, he was going to press on until the bitter end.

While Shadow did his best to hold his own against the most powerful members of the minions, Barry was left with the rest. He had to use all of his speed to dodge the charge that Shazam made at him, and was equally lucky to evade a dropkick attempted by Batman. He had to swiftly jump to avoid his neck being cut open by Robin's own use of a sword afterwards - though unfortunately for him he was then swiftly brought down by both of his nephews slamming into him from either side with their own super speed.

"I didn't kill you! It's not my fault!" Barry exclaimed as he recovered, in just enough time to avoid the white noise blast of cyborg's arm cannon, managing to race ahead of it's blast until he gave up on trying, allowing the Kid Flashes to resume focus on Barry for a while as they quickly used their speed to race their uncle allowed the perimeter of the platform - the three all going in a circle while the younger two attempted to repeatedly ram into their uncle, with Barry having to speed up or slow down to successfully dodge either of them.

He did not want to hurt either of them. To his brain, this was perhaps the highest form of torture that any being could force upon him.

"Kids" he said to them, "I don't want to hurt you! Just, snap out of it, if it's really you! If it's really you, I know you're in there somewhere!"

"That's too bad!" Wally II remarked, his voice echoing as though multiple versions of him were speaking at once through his own mouth.

"Because we do want to hurt you!" Wally I added in, both him and his cousin now grinning almost ear to ear in the most sadistic of fashions, before they grabbed each other's hands and charged at their uncle. Barry managed to jump over them and was then behind them, but he did not seem to realize what their strategy was, as Wally I carried Wally II into a small impromptu tornado and soon enough threw him at Barry, with Wally II kicking his uncle in the face and to the ground before the former had even realized what was going on.

As he slowly recovered to his feet, Barry could only force himself to ask but one question:

"W-w-why?"

"Because" Raven said as she approached him from behind, holding hands with Robin who approached Barry along with her, "You did this to us" she coldly said as she used one of her black beam attacks aimed for Barry's head. Barry managed to dodge it, though was yet again knocked to the ground when Wally I rammed into him with his own speedster speed.

"Ugh" Barry once more groaned as he got up from the blow, but he continued to plead to those attacking him in a hope that their true selves were still underneath their soulless appearances, "I, I didn't do anything to you! It was Darkseid! It was his Paradooms! I didn't do anything!"

"If you hadn't travelled through time in the first place" Damian explained as he embraced Raven's hands with both of his own, the two gazing into each other's now reddened, soulless eyes, "Me and Raven would be together in happiness."

"Rather", Raven added just as coldly, "Than in misery."

Barry was speechless upon hearing the two's words, and was further rendered speechless as the two almost disturbingly kissed in front of him. Normally, such a sight would be beautiful - true love expressing itself. However here it was unnatural and not helped by the fact their tongues were elongated, forked and snake-like as they entangled and danced with one another even after the lips had already separated - causing saliva to drool from both of the two as they remained inhumanly embracing each other.

Barry attempted to use their distraction to his own advantage, though before he could speed away he was surrounded by a purple-black aura that lifted him above the ground and effectively stopped him in his tracks - Raven using her powers to stop him without breaking her 'kiss' with Robin.

Before Barry could even think about finding a way to escape Raven's grasp, the black aura dispersed - but only because he had been tackled by a grey colored Tiger: Beast Boy. Once the two were on the ground, the soulless version of the boy turned into a massive anaconda snake and wrapped himself around Barry with full intent of suffocating him to his demise, while others such as Batman, Blue Beetle, Hawkman, Lex Luthor, John Constantine and Zatanna gathered as if to ensure that if he escaped the snake's grip that they would ensure said escape would be futile.

As the choking, barely able to struggle Barry looked into Beast Boy's eyes, he still only saw that pure red, soulless, lifeless sclera. No pupils or irises. Not even those of the reptile he had turned into. Only pure red, glowing eyes. Just as with all of the others. He wanted to believe the boy he once knew was still in there, but another part of him feared the absolute worst.

It wouldn't be long before his rib cage would begin to shatter. It didn't help that as he was facing his potential end at the hands of what was once a titan, all he could hear in his ears were repeated words from the others, their voices sounding like a symphony of judgement, blame and scorn as they spoke at him:

"It's your fault!"

"You did this to us!"

"It's your fault!"

"You did this to us!"

"It's your fault!"

"You did this to us!"

"It's your fault!"

"You did this to us!"

Those words, repeating from the mouths of his former friends. In their voices, though each one sounded as though an army of them was speaking at once, thus creating a true orchestra of echoing words once the lot of them spoke these condemnations at once.

It was enough to make his mind begin to break, in addition to the rest of his body from the mounting pressure of a long, thick cylinder of muscle slowly crushing him.

"It's your fault!"

"You did this to us!"

"It's your fault!"

"You did this to us!"

Repeating on and on...

"It's your fault!"

"You did this to us!"

It was enough to get to him. As he gritted his teeth, as he closed his eyes tightly. It got to him. It did not take much longer at all before finally he snapped. The migraines kicked in. The purple vision yet again began to flash rapidly in his eyes, until the stress of all that was going on around him was too much for him to take anymore.

With one loud, enraged scream, a surge of purple electricity coursed over his body, making Beast Boy scream in pain as he felt the full force of it's electric shock. With his coils weakening, Barry was able to vibrate his body out of Beast Boy's grasp as the titan slithered away from him to allow the others to have their turn. However, even they took a few steps back from Barry - at least until he found the nagging headache too much to handle. Just looking at his former allies was enough to send it into overdrive, forcing him to his knees while he held his head in agony.

His so-called allies showed him no mercy, however. Not even 'Batman' - who in fact made the first strike. Batman first used some of the smoke bombs from inside of his utility belt, surrounding Barry with vision-impairing smoke while Batman himself leaped into the air and descended upon the Flash with his cape extended almost as though it was a side of wings. Barry successfully kicked to the ground and pinned by the man's feet - though of course he had enough sense to quickly vibrate before Batman could take out one of his sharp Batarangs and use it to slit Barry's neck wide open. Had he not vibrated out of Bruce's grasp, that would indeed have been his fate. Batman did jump out of Barry's way before he could be kicked from behind, though at the very least Barry had saved his own life.

For the time being, anyway.

Having a standoff with Batman wasn't precisely the best career choice for him. Nor did he ever want to have one. Yet here the two, standing before each other in their battle stances - even if it was an evil, soulless version of the man he came to view as a friend and an ally.

However, in focusing so much on Batman he neglected the various other fighters on the playing field. It was only mere seconds before Batman was standing idly by when Barry was suddenly grabbed from behind, flipped onto the ground, and seemingly dragged by invisible force into the same rock spire that Mephiles himself had been standing on prior to the battle. It was not an invisible force of course, Barry could see just barely that it was a strong grip of Martian Manhunter that had grabbed onto him. He was intangible and so appeared transparent, though his shape could just barely be seen by Barry's eyes. Still, his grip was strong - and his powerful mind worked fast, fast enough that he began relentlessly bashing Barry's head brutally against the rock, even managing to draw blood from the back of the blonde's head, at least four times before lifting him by the neck and beginning to suffocate him as he struggled to break free from the martian's grasp. The usually green though now grayscale martian did phase himself out of his intangibility, though it was perhaps only so that Barry would have a face to properly look at during his end.

J'onn was soon joined by Hawkman, who also without saying any words pulled out his nth mace and with as much strength as he could muster smashed Barry's right knee with it - making Barry let out a piercing whine as he could feel his bone actually crack wide open from the strike, let alone the mace's electric stunning effect and the spikes stabbing into his skin - yet again drawing blood from the speedster.

With how hard the hand of what once was his friend held down on his throat, the speedster couldn't even speak. All he could muster up the strength to do was gaze into his former ally's silent, soulless eyes.

There was not even a semblance of the martian man he recognized - and the same could be said for Hawkman, Katar. He began to doubt that there was any chance that the people he remembered and missed were actually still present in any sense of the word.

Though he wanted to keep up the fight, the fact that it seemed as though all of who were once his friends wanted him dead - blaming him for their horrible fates even, proved enough to break him. Slowly he allowed his eyes to close, silently accepting his fate.

At the very least, he thought as blackness took over his vision, this will all be over soon.

And, fortunately for the Flash, it was.

With the sound of a single blast followed by a familiar screech of alien pain, Barry opened his eyes to find that he was released from J'onn's grasp, and now the Martian Manhunter seemed to be screaming and writhing in pain - the arm that had been strangling Barry having just been severed at the elbow, with the Martian himself primarily screaming from the fact that the part of that arm still connected him appeared to be now on fire.

Both Flash and Hawkman looked to see Shadow glaring in their direction. He had scratches, cuts and bruises all over him as well as blood on some parts of fur let alone the fact he was panting as though he was heavily exhausted, but the smoke from his hand revealed he had done a chaos spear in order to save Barry. Knowing this, Barry and Shadow exchanged nods to one another mere seconds before Barry had to evade a swing of Hawkman's nth hammer.

Shadow motioned to join in Barry's fight, but was distracted when he caught the sight of Superboy charging at him from the air. Having the time to anticipate this, he grabbed the 'Nega' Superboy just before impact and with a twirl tossed him directly at Wonder Girl before she could use her lasso on the hedgehog - the two nega titans collided with each other, with a strong enough impact to send both of them back into the blue fire wall that spawned them.

"It doesn't matter how many of them you defeat, you know" Mephiles mocked from his position as Shadow's literal shadow, "I'm still your shadow, you can't even touch me."

"Whatever it is you're trying to do, it's not working on me!" Shadow barked back at Mephiles, though he had hardly any time to confront the demon directly - as within a matter of seconds he was met with Superman.

Having been able to see Superman charging at him, he was able to block the man's fists from punching him by grabbing hold of them. However, the sheer power of Superman was enough to push Shadow back complete with a shockwave from the impact of their hands meeting - though he hissed and grunted, Shadow planted his feet hard onto the ground and with enough straining was able to actually hold his ground against the kryptonian.

Just as their hands were liked in trying to shove the other, so were their eyes - locked permanently in a glare directed at one another. Both of them standing their ground. Both of them seemingly testing their muscles to the limit.

Barry would have been astonished at Shadow's ability to hold his own against the full grown kryptonian if he didn't have a battle of his own to focus on.

As he waited for his healing factor to kick in regarding his injured knee, he had to worry about the Hawkman still being fixated on him. With this speed impaired by his wounded knee, he could just barely dodge Hawkman's several attempts at swinging the nth mace at him, having an easier time ducking his head and body than jumping or moving from side to side to evade each swing.

Eventually, Hawkman did attempt to stomp his foot down on Barry, taking advantage of the man still having a weakened knee by stomping down on that same leg's foot. With a pained groan, Barry fell to the ground. Having to look back on what looked like his former ally as Hawkman lifted his mace into the air, Barry could only mutter out but one phrase in an almost grieving tone of voice:

"Forgive me…"

With one well timed creation of a wind vertex, Barry was able to blast Hawkman into the air just moments before the mace made contact with his head - giving Barry a few moments to recover his breath.

Hawkman managed to break his forced ascent by extending his wings, before immediately diving down from the air directly at Barry - still brandishing his mace. Barry closed his eyes and prepared for impact - not with his friend, but rather with a charged up momentum-propelled punch to Hawkman's face just prior to impact. Combined with the force Hawkman was flying, it was enough to send the thanagarian flying into the wall of blue fire from once he spawned - his nega form seemingly defeated.

Barry took no pleasure in having to do this. In fact, as he saw Hawkman disappear into the ghostly blue flames a vision of the man's brutal demise from the previous timeline flashed before his eyes - as vivid as though he was witnessing it in life. It was only for half of a second, but was enough to make Barry grimace in pain as he struggled to stand him. His knee would heal, but it needed to heal faster than it was - as the remaining combatants had no intentions of showing the slightly limping speedster any mercy.

He was first approached by his nephews, who were yet again rushing him virtually in tandem with one another. Just as quickly as he finally stood up on both of his feet, Wally II jabbed him right in the wounded knee, forcing him back to the ground with a loud hiss. Before he could even comprehend that, he was struck in the face and nearly fully onto the ground by a punch in the face from Wally I.

Having to do this was going to hurt the most. He couldn't even spare the time to take in a deep breath.

Never in a million years did I picture myself doing this…

But you leave me no choice…

Once he saw that both Wallys were running in opposite directions to one another, Barry swiftly formulated a plan. He could feel that his knee was healing just enough so that he could properly run again, and with a determined face waited until the last possible second to rush - causing both of his nephews to punch each other in the face rather than collide with him. The momentum of their punches both sent the two back a good distance, and gave Barry enough time to get his proper speed going well before the two got back up to their feet and rushed to fight with him once more.

He first slowed down so that he could dodge a direct ramming attack from Wally I, though this left him vulnerable to a rear strike from Wally II. Seeing this coming though, Barry easily turned the tables on his darker skinned nephew by turning himself to the ground and grabbing the boys first before he could properly land the strike. Before Wally II even had the chance to vibrate his way out of his uncle's grip, the older male flipped him over onto the ground with as much strength as his upper body could muster.

It brought tears to Barry's eyes, but he wanted and needed this to end.

To his surprise though, he did not see Wally II when he opened his eyes. Only the black ground of the rock he stood on, surrounded by the roaring wall of blue flames. There was no sign of Wally II either in the form of a speedster blur or even a body - as though the boy had suddenly vanished the moment he made contact with the ground.

There was unfortunately little time for Barry to properly comprehend this, for within moments his other nephew punched him directly in the gut and yet again nearly to the ground before speeding off in an effort to make another hit-and-run strike.

Before the original Kid Flash could land his next strike though, Barry's quick thinking mind successfully deduced what direction he was charging from, and Barry charged in that same direction at his own top speed. Colliding with Wally I within a matter of moments, with all of his superior physical strength and maximum momentum, Wally grabbed his nephew by his upper arms, headbutted him and then proceeded to throw him towards the lone rock spire on the platform - Wally I letting out but a whimper of agony as his body made enough of impact on the rock to not only get him to cough up blood but also make a notable dent in the rock itself.

What stopped Barry in his tracks however was the fact that his body did not vanish as his cousins did. Instead, it appeared as though color had actually returned to it. His costume returned to its yellow-and-red coloring. His hair returned to it's light brown coloration. His eyes were closed, though likely regained their blue irises and black pupils.

Tears streamed Barry's face as he saw this - his nephew, returned to a normal, living state. Only to be coughing up blood and whimpering in pain before falling to the ground with scarcely any movement at all.

Barry feared the worst. The absolute worst.

No...no...no no no no no no...

He instinctively wanted to rush over to Wally to ensure he was okay, but was denied that act of compassion when he was suddenly trapped inside of a black sphere of pure energy - courtesy of the colorless, soulless Hal Jordan. With his emotionless face and soulless red eyes, he denied Barry the ability to investigate Wally's sudden 'rebirth' any further and instead swung him around in a circle multiple times before releasing him into the air as though he were a slingshot - only for John Steward to use his ring to form a massive baseball bat which promptly smacked Barry back down to the impromptu arena, an impact crater forming on the ground when Barry landed.

Barry got up, though was attacked by Hal from behind - kicked brutally in the back, causing him to slide into the knees of Shazam, only to be got by a bubble generated by John Stewart, and from there only transferred to to be smacked around by a giant hand crafted by Hal Jordan, with the speedster making groans, hisses and shouts of agony with each hit landed upon him until he was again tossed towards Shazam, who this time restrained him grappling both of his arms.

Seeing Cyborg approach him with intent of taking advantage of Barry's restrained status, Barry knew he had to break from Shazam's grasp quickly.

Barry vibrated his way out of Shazam's grasp the best that he could, at just the right time so that Cyborg blasted Shazam into the wall of blue flame instead of the speedster himself. Of course, Barry had to yet again keep his pace ahead of Cyborg's blasts afterwards, only this time he performed a turn directly towards the half-robotic man. Though he swayed from side to side in order to evade Cyborg's attempts to attack him, he ultimately did make a direct hit to Cyborg's chest with enough force to send Cyborg flying back into the blue wall of flame from which he came - seemingly defeating him for the time being.

Just Barry recovered his breath from his run-ins with the nega of versions of those previous three, he was met with several figures approaching him in order to challenge him to the most unfair of battles.

Lex Luthor, John Constantine, Zatanna, Mera and Aquaman now stood before him with Hal Jordan and John Steward circling the group overhead. With Shadow still preoccupied with both Superman and Wonder Woman - Barry seeing the three still violently tossing each other around - only Barry was there to deal with these individuals.

"John" Barry said to John, remembering that he was the one who told him to create the flashpoint in the first place, "John, I know you're in there! You were the one who told me to 'clear the board'! This was your idea! You should know that more than anyone! If you're in there, you should be able to fight this demonic asshole! What kind of occult investigator are you if you let a four foot tall hedgehog enslave you like this?! The real John Constantine would have broken free of his control by now!"

The sound of Mephiles' laughter echoed through the 'arena' in response to that, and even the minions smirked and smiled as though they found amusement in what Barry had yelled out.

"Choosing the pen rather than the sword?" Mephiles yet again mocked despite not being truly present on the field though speaking as if he were, "I must admit, I am impressed by your attempt at diplomacy. However, fighting fire with words is rather, shall I say, ineffective."

With any words being said, John Constantine did as his master suggested and conjured up balls of fire which he swiftly launched in Barry's direction. Barry could only gasp as he used his feet to swiftly avoid the balls of flame, though his evasion of Constantine's magic made him distracted enough to be struck by several small rocks from the ground that were telekinetically thrown at him by Zatanna.

It was within seconds afterwards that he was yet again struck by the lanterns, both of them spawning enlarged fists from their rings, punching Barry from the back to send him through the air towards the wall of room - only to be grabbed by a black tentacle, which proceeded to wrap around his body briefly before slamming him to the ground.

Barry didn't even have the time to recover before he had the black boot of a certain Batman crushing down on his neck, the darkly dressed caped crusader yet again looming over him with only the light of the flames around them illuminating him. Damian, Raven, Batgirl and Batwoman were there soon enough, with the others following suit.

"Bruce" Barry pleaded with what little ability to speak that he had, "Please...are….are you in there?"

He received no response, other than the dark knight's boot crushing down further on his throat - slowly cutting off the speedster's air supply and making it harder for him to speak. It was just like his battle with Shadow, only without the opponent holding back.

Barry had many things he wanted to say, but he couldn't. Instead he could only think.

Bruce...please…

I know, deep down, you're not just his slave.

You were able to free yourself from Darkseid, you can free yourself from this asshole!

Can't you?

Are….are you even there?

Batman did not speak. He only did. Once it was evident that Barry had effectively been worn out of energy for the time being, Batman lifted his foot off of the man's throat, picked him up by the neck of his uniform, and shoved him back to the ground so that he was properly facing the others. Or, more accurate, he for whom the others had parted.

Mephiles.

Mephiles had re-emerged from the ground at the front of two separate rows of his apparition minions. Shadow was still occupied with Superman and Wonder Woman, leaving the exhausted Barry without any allies as Mephiles looked upon him with his emotionless demonic face. Looking up at his newfound nemesis, Barry glared angrily. There were many choice words he had for the entity standing before him, but the only ones he could muster the power to speak out were:

"What...what are you?"

"What I am does not matter to you" Mephiles shook his head in a condescending manner, "Not only would you not be able to truly comprehend it, but you will not be around long enough for it to be relevant to your feeble mortal mind. Be grateful that I am giving you the mercy of oblivion, the least that I can do."

Barry bowed his head in defeat at that point, accepting his defeat. He was outnumbered, outmatched, and exhausted. It was a miracle he had even lasted as long as he did.

As Barry looked up only to see how Mephiles intended to kill him - he saw a horrifyingly familiar sight. Two bright, red lights were forming on Mephiles' eyes. Piercing red lights, matching with his pure red scleras. It was the same type of light that emitted from Darkseid's eyes:

He...he can use Omega Beams?...

He closed his eyes the second he realized what was about to befall him, bracing himself for the intense burning that was surely awaiting him.

He was not the only one seeing this however. Having seen Mephiles emerge from the ground, Shadow was just freeing himself from the grip of Wonder Woman's lasso through his sheer will alone, and once he saw what Mephiles was about to do to Barry he prepared to charge at the demon, though was briefly stopped by Superman attempting to grapple him from behind. Curling into his ball form and effectively uppercutting the nega kryptonian was enough to free himself from his grasp however, and the ultimate lifeform broke from his fight in an effort to interrupt the execution of the Flash.

All of this happened in a matter of mere seconds.

When Mephiles fired his piercing red omega beams directly at Barry, Shadow successfully intercepted them - jumping in front of Barry just before they could have made contact with the flash. Barry watched as Shadow took the full force of the Omega Beams, but instead of being incinerated like a lantern or singed like a boy wonder the ultimate lifeform only grunted - feeling some form of pain, though not a single part of him seemed burned at all.

Mephiles himself for once seemed shocked as he saw it with his own eyes. Shadow had managed to not only withstand the omega effect energy, but was absorbing it. No mortal being outside of Apokolips or evidently Mephiles himself could do such a thing, yet in a most defiant manner Shadow now had a deep red aura surrounding himself - the power of omega energy enhancing him.

Barry, even the nega minions for that matter, were all speechless. Shadow himself however was fixated solely on Mephiles, glaring at the demonic being with the full force of his rage.

Only one thought crossed Barry's mind as his mind processed all of this:

He wasn't kidding when he said he was the ultimate lifeform...

The first one to make a move was Batman. Several batarangs were thrown at Shadow from behind to prevent him from making a move on Mephiles - however the omega aura surrounding Shadow caused them all to explode before their sharp wings could even graze Shadow's skin. From the black smoke came Shadow, speeding through the air in his own black ball-like state, barreling through Batman's very own chest and out his back with enough speed so that the dark knight couldn't even properly respond.

Barry was mortified as he saw this, unable to comprehend the sight. There was no blood. No gore whatsoever. It looked as though a hole had been burned clear through the world's greatest detective, and on the inside was only pure darkness. Batman soon vanished afterwards, a cloud of darkness remaining of him for only a few seconds. As though he wasn't even a true living being at all.

Still, Barry was able to use this distraction to rush to his fallen nephew's side.

Shadow had no time to waste on sights however, as he immediately fixated himself on the opponents surrounding him - with all of Mephiles' minions wanting a piece of him. Hal Jordan and John Stewart attempted to trap him inside of a bubble shield, though with one concentrated pulse of energy it was shattered as though it were an incredibly weak glass. The hedgehog then sent himself into the air with his rocket shoes and grabbed hold of Hal Jordan's hand by the wrist - the omega energy coursing around him having an incinerating effect on the lantern which ultimately caused the hand to be burned clean off. As it was the hand with the ring on it, this caused Hal Jordan to be reduced to a powerless state and fall to the ground - vanishing just as Batman did upon hitting the ground.

John Stewart followed not long after. The large fists he desperately generated from his ring were repeatedly destroyed effortlessly as Shadow charged at him - eventually burning directly through the lantern's body, causing him to vanish in mid-air not long after his entire torso had been destroyed.

Shadow then returned to the ground, making short work of Batwoman with a kick directly to her chest and Batgirl by grabbing her by her shoulders and viciously headbutting her with a full force impact. Lex Luthor was handled by a solid punch directly through his heart, while Aquaman, Mera, Blue Beetle and Cyborg were finished off by four chaos spears being unleashed at once by Shadow merely extending his arm out. With the spears also being endowed with omega effect energy, their forms were easily destroyed with a single set of four small explosions, vaporizing their darkness.

Bumblebee changed to her insect size to charge at Shadow from the air, while Speedy supported her by firing a stream of explosives at the black hedgehog. However, a single shield forged from omega chaos energy made every single arrow prove meaningless. A well timed charge from Shadow's spin dash easily turned Bumblebee into a dissipating puff of darkness - and decapitated Speedy, with him meeting the same fate once he fell completely to the ground.

The next challenger for the ultimate lifeform was Damian, who charged at him with his sword. Only for said sword to be caught by a clap of Shadow's hands - the omega energy turning it to useless stub of melted metal within seconds. Damian managed to evade Shadow's first attempt to strike him, managing to jump over Shadow and get behind him. However, before he could even pull out another piece of equipment the boy was slapped across the face by the back of Shadow's hand - his face disintegrating to darkness as he fell, before his body followed afterwards.

"DAMIAN!" The 'nega' Raven screamed with as much horror and emotion as her colored counterpart, before charging at Shadow with pure absolute rage at what she had just witnessed. With Shadow's omega aura making him resistant to telekinesis, she restored to her other abilities. Conjuring massive boulders, tentacles and even sharp shards of darkness to throw at Shadow - though the hedgehog tore through every last one as though he was super heated enough cutting through a mere stick of butter.

Raven herself eventually lunged at him soon after, though the rage she felt towards him blinded her. Though she had a black mass of tentacles and great power accompanying her, Shadow's unleashed power tore through everything she tried - and even herself as well. With Shadow slicing through her in her ball form as she tried to envelop him in her own darkness, she was soon reduced to nothing but the latter before even that dissipated into absolute nothingness.

John Constantine and Zatanna stepped up to the task next - with their magic shields successfully deflecting Shadow's spin dashes, allowing Constantine to fire a series of fireballs at Shadow once he was briefly sent back. Zatanna attempted to use her telekinesis magic though she could only find rocks to throw at Shadow - to little effect. Unfortunately for the two magical minions, they were soon destroyed when Shadow unleashed two chaos spears at them - shattering the shields they put up and destroying their bodies entirely.

With all of those individuals vanquished, all that remained to surround Shadow as he stood on the volcanic ground were Superman, Wonder Woman, Shazam, Nightwing and Starfire. Though they were glaring and snarling angrily at Shadow, it was difficult to truly discern if they were mourning those whom Shadow had just defeated or not.

They wouldn't have enough time to do so anyway.

The moment that all of them charged Shadow at once, Shadow jumped himself into the air and curled himself up as energy pulsated and electrified around him. Just before impact could be made he let out one mighty battle cry as he extended his body back out:

"Chaos…..BLAST!"

With those two words, a massive blast of pure omega chaos energy was unleashed from the hedgehog's body - completely incinerating the five beings charging at him within a matter of seconds as it's radius soon encompassed the entire stone platform - even managing to disperse the wall of blue flame surrounding the platform.

Barry watched as this bright red light emitted from Shadow's body and the burning explosion came in his direction. Grabbing Wally's body he rushed to the other side of the rock spire and shielded Wally as tightly as he could. Though his body was spared certain incineration thanks to the energy primarily eating away at the rock, Barry still screamed and hissed due to the searing heat all around him. Parts of his clothes and even skin that just barely grazed the energy were still singed as though he had touched an extremely hot stove.

Thankfully, it was all over within seconds. Once Barry, carrying Wally in his arms, emerged from behind the rock all he could see was Shadow standing on the ground with stacks of smoke surrounding him. The chaos blast had released all of the omega energy from Shadow, meaning he was back to his usual form - though still panted heavily after exerting so much power.

Still amazed and horrified, Barry addressed what had just happened:

"Did...did you?"

"It wasn't them" Shadow swiftly reminded Barry, "Whatever those things were, they weren't the people you remember them to be."

Barry looked down at Wally whom he held in his arms, the only one who returned to his living from out of the group. He didn't know what that meant, if the others were really themselves or not, but all he knew was that at the very least he had one of his nephews back. Or at least he hoped so, as Wally still had his eyes closed. Shadow, seeing the boy in Barry's arms:

"Is he?"

"My nephew" Barry explained without looking away from the boy, "And he's alive...only barely.." looking back up at Shadow hee said to his ally, "We need to get out of here."

Shadow nodded in agreement to those words, though it was at that moment which they were greeted with the return of Mephiles' diabolical echoing laugh. As Shadow readied his battle stance and looked around the ghostly blue volcanic field for where the demon was, Barry made sure to place the vulnerable Wally down by the rock spire out of the way before doing the same.

"Where are you?!" Shadow exclaimed angrily to the laughing entity, "Show yourself!"

Mephiles coldly chuckled:

"Since you so cordially insist…"

Emerging from behind Shadow as though he had been there the entire time, Mephiles folded his arms and swiftly extended them back out - releasing in the process a powerful concussive blast that sent both Barry and Shadow into the air - Shadow's spine smashing into the rock spire and proceeding to slide down to the ground, while Barry slid painfully on the ground until being stopped by one of the various impact craters created from the previous battle.

As the two recovered from the blast, Mephiles promptly addressed them in as menacing a tone that he could muster:

"You two have not the faintest idea of the sheer power you are up against."

Before Mephiles could approach the two any further however, all three had their attention taken by a sudden stream of machine gun bullets that fired at the ground in a line between them. Turning to the direction of these bullets, Shadow was astonished at where the bullets had come from:

E-123 Omega, the bulky, 'muscular' robot of red, golden yellow and black that he had no choice but to abandon back in crisis city, as much as it pained him internally to abandon one of the only two beings he considers a true friend. Now he was standing before him, at last fully activated and without any dust on his glossy metallic body at all. One of his clawed hands had shifted into the form of a machine gun, which had of course been the weapon used to gain Mephiles, Shadow and Barry's attention.

As he turned the gun back into one of his clawed hands, his robotic voice explained his presence:

"Now is designated time" he said to Shadow, "I shall assist."

While Shadow came closer than ever to smiling, Mephiles was more amused than anything else as he coldly remarked:

"You are nothing but a nuisance, robot."

Mephiles' first attempted attack against Omega was to generate a large, piercing bright beam of pure, concentrated energy from the palm of one of his hands - though Omega was able to jump out of the way and retaliated by turning one of his hands into an RPG launcher, firing a missile directly at the demonic being.

The missile did not get to make impact however, as Mephiles had managed to grab it telekinetically, surrounding it in a black aura akin to Raven's own powers, and then promptly sent it back on course to Omega himself. However, Omega destroyed it with a second missile anyway.

This moment may have been small, but did distract Mephiles just enough so that Shadow was able to strike him in the back of the head with a sweeping mid-air kick. It managed to knock Mephiles to the ground, though only because Shadow was not holding back any of his physical strength against the demonic being. Landing in between Mephiles and Omega, Shadow readied his battle stance - not daring to break eye contact with the demon as he waited to see what he was going to unleash next.

Though his face was virtually emotionless, it could easily be inferred that Mephiles was not precisely amused with this battle any longer. Or, perhaps in his own sadistic way he actually still was. Without any expressive facial features, his emotions were hard to decipher.

"You are quite the persistent annoyance, Shadow" Mephiles remarked, "But no matter, sooner or later, you will fall!"

Mephiles did not hesitate. Extending out his arms he began to command the lava surrounding the platform release nigh endless streams of piercing hot blue flames into the air, before the demon showed complete control over them; with the sheer power of his mind these streams curved towards Shadow and Omega as though they were flaming tentacles of some creature, proceeding to come at the two as though they were burning whips.

As it was futile to fire weapons at fire, Shadow and Omega settled for dodging and evading the literal whips of flame, though while it was easy to dodge the initial strikes - eventually massive blasts of blue fire came at them from behind while other streams of it rained down on them from above - forcing Shadow to do various acrobatic moves in order to avoid being burned. Flips both front and back, somersaults, he even narrowly avoided a stream that nearly struck him in his groin area. Omega was durable enough to stand a single blast - though even he knew the metal compromising his body had a limit at some point and so made a point to avoid the flames as well. He attempted to fire his missiles and even machine gun fire at Mephiles, though the demon often just used a single wave of blue flame to either melt the bullets or destroy the missiles before they could strike him.

Watching the battle unfold from the sidelines, Barry was lucky to seemingly be getting no attention from the demon. He decided it was best to use that fact to his advantage, and naturally rushed at Mephiles with the full force of his speed.

It didn't last long, unfortunately.

It was as though his speed had just stopped. As though he was frozen in place, moments he could land a punch to Mephiles' demonic face. As though he was parlyzed. Looking down he could see that underneath him was a puddle of pure darkness extending out from Mephiles - with the darkness latching onto the speedster's feet as though it was engulfing him from the bottom-up, some of it looking as though black tentacles were wrapping around his muscular legs and thighs while moving slowly upwards to do the same with the rest of him.

The worst parts were both that he couldn't vibrate himself out of their grasp, and that whatever this was it made it feel as though whatever they touched was numb - not hot or cold, only numb as though the limbs were asleep yet forced to be standing upright.

Barry could only struggle with his upper body as the lower half was slowly taken over by the darkness. Try as he did, he seemingly was fully unable to break free.

Without breaking from his fight against Shadow and Omega, Mephiles turned to Barry solely to mock him for his evidently failed attempt:

"Foolish mortal" the entity chuckled, "Did you honestly think that was going to work?"

Barry did not give Mephiles the dignity of a response. He only gritted his teeth, scowling, practically snarling even, at the demon who has put him through far more mental and emotional torment than Darkseid himself ever could have accomplished.

"No matter" the being continued on, "Soon it will be as though you had never even existed. It's no use resisting, you can't fight eternal darkness forever."

With the darkness increasingly engulfing his body, now passing over his upper half, Barry only had one thing to tell the demonic entity:

"Go fuck yourself."

Mephiles only laughed in response to that petty insult.

No longer willing to give himself up to the evil being, Barry continued to do all he could to struggle and fight the darkness consuming him - even though it's continued engulfing of his body told him that it was in fact futile. Even as Mephiles' mocking laughter was about all his ears actually heard.

At least until two other voices entered the fray:

"Initiating Zeta Energy Cannons!"

"Chaos Spear!"

In an instant, a single chaos spear managed to cut off the darkness engulfing Barry from Mephiles' shadow, weakening it enough for Barry to finally break free of it as it dissipated from his body. Before Mephiles could even conjure up a counter-attack however, a duet of two massive, bright purple beams of weaponized energy fired onto him with enough force to actually send him back to the edge of the platform.

Once the beams stopped firing, Shadow and Omega rejoined Barry's side - having freed themselves from the onslaught of blue flames.

"Thanks, guys" Barry said to the two during this brief moment he had, "He almost had me there, for a moment."

"Sensors indicate the target has not yet been neutralized, now is not time for idle chatter." - Omega was swiftly proven rather correct.

Within an instant the ground shook in a line extending out from Mephiles as though a small earthquake was suddenly occurring before their eyes, making the three jump out of the way as tendrils made of darkness emerged from the cracks in the rock to violently attempt in grappling the three - though well timed chaos spears and missiles managed to keep the darkness at bay.

A large mass of darkness attempted to ensnarl Omega before long, though with a swipe of his arms with his flamethrowers initiated the robot was able to disperse the darkness before it could get a proper hold of him - he also continued supporting Shadow and Barry by using his missiles to disperse any of the black tentacles before they could grapple either of them.

As to be expected, that wasn't the only hazard that Mephiles conjured for the trio as before long he spawned before him a series of telekinetically levitating spiked rocks with each encased in an aura of darkness, sending it at the three within a matter of moments to emulate Omega's own missiles.

With Omega handling the stream of darkness, Barry and Shadow had to divert their attention to these rock missiles - Barry was fast enough to evade them, though Mephiles conjured a thick wall of piercing blue flame and would send violent streams of it towards the speedster if he dared to try anything with his speed. Shadow was strong enough to home in on each in his ball form and shatter them to pieces, though the stream of them seemed to be endless.

Eventually however, Barry's quick thinking mind came up with an idea: with Shadow taking the majority of the rock towers, he decided to use the wind vortexes created from his arm to blow away the blue fire protecting Mephiles. Just as Mephiles taken aback by this and hissed angrily at Barry upon being exposed, Barry shouted to his ally:

"Shadow! Opening! Now!"

Seeing as Mephiles was getting ready to unleash a stream of darkness on Barry, Shadow yet again no time to waste. He diverted his attention to diving from a mid-air position directly to Mephiles - who naturally realized what was going on and abandoned his attack on Barry to charge at Shadow, the two colliding in mid-air within a matter of seconds.

Mephiles quickly slashed at Shadow's chest with his claws, drawing blood as well as making Shadow actually hiss in pain, though his other hand was caught by Shadow's own before he could do the same to the ultimate lifeform's face. Holding said hand by the wrist, Shadow did not give Mephiles any time to retaliate before punching the demon in his own chest at maximum strength - enough to send Mephiles barreling back to the ground below them.

The fact that punching Mephiles felt nearly like slamming his fist into a steel wall was not lost on Shadow.

With the stream of darkness dissipating, all three allies were able to surround Mephiles as he stood up to face them. Ever difficult to read, Mephiles grunted as he got up to face his adversaries - though it was hard to know if he felt defeated by them or not. Nevertheless, he did generate from one of his hands a large orb of dark energy - swirling vortex of black, blue and purple. At first the three assumed it was a final attack, though without saying a single word Mephiles leaped himself into it and vanished, just as the area all around them began to shake.

With the ground cracking and crumbling apart at the seams, the light of the blued magma shining from underneath as it bubbled up to the surface, Omega's words were readily apparent well before he spoke them:

"I am indicating an eruption of this volcano is imminent, we must leave this area at once!"

Shadow nodded, and looking towards the portal Mephiles had generated he could see that as massive stacks of steam lava erupted from the floor that it was still there, yet diminishing in size quickly.

"INTO THE PORTAL, NOW!" he yelled, himself Omega charging for it immediately. Barry was about to, but swiftly remembered Wally.

Just as Shadow and Omega jumped into the portal to follow Mephiles and escape the impending eruption, Barry swiftly rushed to Wally's still unconscious body. Scooping his nephew up into his arms, he just as swiftly rushed into the portal mere moments before it vanished completely - just narrowly avoiding being caught in the volcano's eruption, hearing the first few seconds of the final roar as the white flash of travelling through the portal took over his eyes.

When the bright lights of portal travel left him, Barry could see that he, Shadow, Omega and Wally had been transported back to Soleanna's New City district, evidently the present time from which they left. They landed on a tiled plaza, with a large clock tower behind them and the various brick-and-mortar buildings that blended in with one another surrounding them. The solace in all of this was that the sky was yet again blue as they reflected the beauty of the ocean, and the clouds were white, joining the sun in the sky as it yet again shined down upon the world - though Barry did have to adjust to seeing sunlight again after spending so much time in darkness.

Speaking of which, there was no sign of Mephiles. Shadow looked around for the demon, but shook his head in frustration once it was apparent the dark entity was nowhere to be found. Omega summarized their situation as such:

"It appears that we have been transported back to the present, though Mephiles managed to transport himself to a different location. I will assist in pursuing him."

Shadow nodded in response to that, though Omega was not the only one desiring to join the quest:

"So will I." Barry proudly declared, wanting more than anything else to track down Mephiles and see him defeated. Though Shadow did not seem to disagree with the sentiment, he was swift to point out one glaring thing:

"First, you need to get your nephew proper medical treatment."

Looking down at the unconscious boy in his arms, Barry closed his eyes and yet again shed a small tear from his eyes. Seeing Wally like that, fighting for his life, and the guilt that he was potentially who caused it, was almost too much for him. Turning to Shadow and Omega, Barry said:

"Where's the nearest hospital?"

The voice Rouge descending into the conversation was ultimately what responded to that statement:

"Unfortunately, the Duke Arturo Memorial Hospital is already filled to maximum capacity" she stated as she landed with the rest of the group, "However, G.U.N. has finally been able to institute both a blockade and a no-fly-zone, thanks to a recent change in Soleanna's leadership. We can take him to a med-bay on one of the ships, hopefully that will be enough."

As Rouge talked to her communicator device to get G.U.N. clearance to one of the vessels now surrounding the border of Soleanna's waters, Barry looked down onto his nephew and spoke softly to him in the vain hope that the boy could hear what he was being told:

"It's alright Wally, we're gonna get you help. You're gonna be back up and running in no time, just trust me, alright bud? We're gonna get you back up faster than I can even run! Promise!"

Of course, Barry knew that Wally was not the only one who needed some form of medical help. Though, he wasn't sure if there was anything that could be done to fix all of his problems at this point.

Not after what he had just been through.

[dracoqueen22]

[CR] Refuge

Universe: Critical Role, Campaign Two Characters: Fjord, Caduceus Clay Rated: K+ Description: While shackled in the prison of the Iron Shepherds, Fjord dreams and his future reassures him. For FjorClay Week, Day Five, Dreams Jester's humming. Even in this dark and dirty and dank place, Jester's humming and babbling behind the gag, and generally doing her best to put on a brave face. Fjord tries to return the favor, but he's beaten all to hell, exhausted, barely able to keep his eyes open. Sleep isn't a refuge. Not with those dreams. Not with the eyes watching him. Multiple eyes. Yellow and luminous, the deep voice resonating words at him. Commands. Commands he can't follow. Consciousness is worse.

Consciousness is Jester trying to stay positive, and the sound of their captors trying to break Yasha, and failing. Every time, they leave her a bit more beaten, a bit more blooded, a bit more broken. Consciousness is their fellow prisoners, weeping and hungry and hurting. Consciousness is torture. The nightmares are something of a refuge. They, at least, aren't real. Until the being which gives him his power decides to visit, slipping into his dreams as it’s been doing as of late. Fjord’s on the open sea, pointed to the horizon where the sun is starting to set, turning the sky a brilliant rainbow array. The wind is in his eyes and in the sails, buffeting his tunic. It smells of wet and salt and the storm rolling in above, dark and angry, swallowing the red-orange sunset. The waves lift and toss him, but he rides out the motion, hand on a rope, the other on the steering, guiding the sloop with well-earned practice. A voice rumbles through the sky. WATCHING. Fjord shivers at the unexpected burst of chilly, damp air that wraps around him. The warmth of the sun baking his skin is gone. POTENTIAL. The storm roars, crashing over him like a tidal wave, tipping the tiny sloop and tossing him into the sea. Fjord smacks into the churning waters, and flails to keep his head above the pounding waves, but they are too strong. Down, down he goes. PROVOKE. Fjord’s breath runs out, and the cold, cold water rushes in. He thrashes, throat burning, surrounded by darkness. No, not darkness. There’s a single, bright yellow eye. A familiar eye. LEARN. Fjord flails. He’s choking. It’s getting darker. He panics, and would shout for someone to save him, if there was anyone to hear. He’s alone here, swallowed by the ocean, haunted by a voice he doesn’t understand. CONSUME. Fjord tries to scream. He chokes on saltwater. It burns in his nostrils, in his throat, and he thinks all he has to do is promise. Make a vow. Give himself over to the thing that granted him this magic, and it’ll all be over. A light pierces the dark, growing brighter and brighter, until the massive eye closes and is eclipsed by it. Warmth floods through the chill, like stepping toes first into a clean bath on a frigid winter’s day. Long, elegant fingers wrap around his, the hands soft and calloused, their grip firm. They pull, and wind roars through Fjord’s ears. He squeezes his eyes shut until his kicking feet touch something solid without the resistance of water around them. Fjord takes a deep, gasping breath as his eyes open to a white, sandy shore. The sea is blue, a brilliant blue, calm and welcoming. The waves lap gently; the sun warms his skin. “You’re going to be fine, Mr. Fjord. You just have to hold on a little longer.” He turns at the unexpected voice, the slow and easy drawl. There’s a person standing within a few feet of him -- long pink hair, pale gray skin, armor in a bright green, a long staff. He looks like Pumat Sol -- a firbolg -- but Fjord has never seen him before. “Who are you?” Fjord asks. The man smiles at him, and it’s such a gentle smile, like Fjord has nothing to fear from him ever. “A messenger,” he says. “And right now, Her voice. You haven’t met us yet, but you will. She’s sure of it.” The stranger speaks in riddles, but Fjord prefers these over the single word commands that come to him in the terrifying dreams. “What’s your name so I’ll know you?” Fjord asks. “It doesn’t matter. You won’t remember this when you wake up.” The man comes a step closer, and he’s tall, at least a head taller than Fjord. He rests a hand on Fjord’s shoulder, and where he touches, warmth blooms outward. Warmth and a growth of some kind of pink moss which chases away the last of the jitters. It smells sweet and earthy, like a field of fresh flowers after a heavy rain. “Hold on a little longer, Mr. Fjord. They’re coming for you. For all of you,” the stranger says as the wind rustles his hair, and he starts to look like he’s getting farther away, despite the hand on Fjord’s shoulder. “I’ll see you soon.” “Wait,” Fjord says, but it’s too late. The stranger’s hand leaves his shoulder. He starts to fade, and the beach fades, until Fjord opens his eyes again, and he’s back in the dark, dank cell, wrapped in chains. Jester is humming again. Fjord knows he had a dream. The wisps of it are still there, wisps of warmth and comfort and reassurance after the choking chill it started with. He can’t remember anything but a sense of safety. He doesn’t know why, but for a moment, he felt it was all going to be okay. There’s a bloom of pink on his spaulder. It’s starting to grey, dry up, flake off his armor. He can’t, for the life of him, remember how it got there. But far, far in the distance, he swears he hears the rumble of an explosion. ***

a/n: had a little trouble with this prompt, but I think I’m satisfied with how it came out. Would love to know what you think!

[unsettlingshortstories]

Onion

Caitlin R. Kiernan (2005)

Frank was seven years old when he found the fields of red grass growing behind the basement wall. The building on St. Mark’s where his parents lived after his father took a job in Manhattan and moved them from the New Jersey suburbs across the wide, gray Hudson. And of course he’d been told to stay out of the basement, no place for a child to play because there were rats down there, his mother said, and rats could give you tetanus and rabies. Rats might even be carrying plague, she said, but the sooty blackness at the foot of the stairs was too much temptation for any seven-year old, the long, long hallway past the door to the super’s apartment and sometimes a single naked bulb burned way down at the end of that hall. Dirty, white-yellow stain that only seemed to emphasize the gloom, drawing attention to just how very dark dark could be, and after school Frank would stand at the bottom of the stairs for an hour at a time, peering into the hall that led down to the basement.

     “Does your mama know you’re always hanging around down here?” Mr. Sweeney would ask whenever he came out and found Frank lurking in the shadows. Frank would squint at the flood of light from Mr. Sweeney’s open door, would shrug or mumble the most noncommittal response he could come up with.     “I bet you she don’t,” Mr. Sweeney would say. “I bet she don’t know.”     “Are there really rats down there?” Frank might ask and Mr. Sweeney would nod his head, point towards the long hall and say “You better believe there’s rats. Boy, there’s rats under this dump big as German shepherd puppies. They got eyes like acetylene blow torches and teeth like carving knives. Can chew straight through concrete, these rats we got.”     “They why don’t you get a cat?” Frank asked once and Mr. Sweeney laughed, phlegmy old man laugh, and “Oh, we had some cats, boy,” he said. “We had whole goddamn cat armies, but when these rats get done, ain’t never anything left but some gnawed-up bones and whiskers.”     “I don’t believe that,” Frank said. “Rats don’t get that big. Rats don’t eat cats.”     “You better get your skinny rump back upstairs, or they’re gonna eat you too,” and then Mr. Sweeney laughed again and slammed his door, left Frank alone in the dark, his heart thumping loud and his head filled with visions of the voracious, giant rats that tunneled through masonry and dined on any cat unlucky enough to get in their way.     And that’s the way it went, week after week, month after month, until one snowblind February afternoon, too cold and wet to go outside and his mother didn’t notice when he slipped quietly downstairs with the flashlight she kept in a kitchen drawer. Mr. Sweeney was busy with a busted radiator on the third floor, so nobody around this time to tell him scary stories and chase him home again, and Frank walked right on past the super’s door, stood shivering in the chilly, mildew-stinking air of the hallway. The unsteady beam of his flashlight to show narrow walls that might have been blue or green a long time ago, little black-and-white, six-sided ceramic tiles on the floor, but half of them missing and he could see the rotting boards underneath. There were doors along the length of the hall, some of them boarded up, nailed shut, one door frame without any door at all and he stepped very fast past that one.     Indiana Jones wouldn’t be afraid, he thought, counting his footsteps in case that might be important later on, listening to the winter wind yowling raw along the street as it swept past the building on its way to Tompkins Square Park and the East River. Twenty steps, twenty-five, thirty-three and then he was standing below the dangling bulb and for the first time Frank stopped and looked back the way he’d come. And maybe he’d counted wrong, because it seemed a lot farther than only thirty-three steps back to the dim and postage-stamp-sized splotch of day at the other end of the hall.     Only ten steps more down to the basement door, heavy, gray steel door with a rusted hasp and a Yale padlock, but standing wide open like it was waiting for him and maybe Mr. Sweeney only forgot to lock it the last time he came down to check the furnace or wrap the pipes. And later, Frank wouldn’t remember much about crossing the threshold into the deeper night of the basement, the soup-thick stench and taste of dust and rot and mushrooms, picking his way through the maze of sagging shelves and wooden crates, decaying heaps of rags and newspapers, past the ancient furnace crouched in one corner like a cast-iron octopus. Angry, orange-red glow from the furnace grate like the eyes of the super’s cat-eating rats—he would remember that—and then Frank heard the dry, rustling sound coming from one corner of the basement.     Years later, through high school and college and the slow purgatory of this twenties, this is where the bad dreams would always begin, the moment that he lifted the flashlight and saw the wide and jagged crack in the concrete wall. A faint draft from that corner that smelled of cinnamon and ammonia, and he knew better than to look, knew he should turn and run all the way back because it wasn’t ever really rats that he was supposed to be afraid of. The rats just a silly grown-up lie to keep him safe, smaller, kinder nightmare for his own good, and Run, boy, Mr. Sweeney whispered inside his head. Run fast while you still can, while you still don’t know.     But Frank didn’t run away, and when he pressed his face to the crack in the wall, he could see that the fields stretched away for miles and miles, crimson meadows beneath a sky the yellow-green of an old bruise. The white trees that writhed and rustled in the choking, spicy breeze, and far, far way, the black thing striding slowly through the grass on bandy, stilt-long legs.

Frank and Willa share the tiny apartment on Mott Street, roachy Chinatown hovel one floor above an apothecary so the place always stinks of ginseng and jasmine and the powdered husks of dried sea creatures. Four walls, a gas range, an ancient Frigidaire that only works when it feels like it, but together they can afford the rent, most of the time, and the month or two they’ve come up short Mrs. Wu has let them slide. His job at a copy shop and hers waiting tables and sometimes they talk about moving out of the city, packing up their raggedy-ass belongings and riding a Greyhound all the way to Florida, all the way to the Keys, and then it’ll be summer all year long. But not this sticky, sweltering new York summer, no, it would be clean ocean air and rum drinks, sun-warm sand and the lullaby roll and crash of waves at night.     Frank is still in bed when Willa comes out of the closet that passes as their bathroom, naked and dripping from the shower, her hair wrapped up in a towel that used to be white and he stops staring at the tattered Cézanne print thumbtacked over the television and stares at her instead. Willa is tall and her skin so pale he thought she might be sick the first time they met, so skinny that he can see intimations of her skeleton beneath that skin like milk and pearls. Can trace the blue-green network of veins and capillaries in her throat, between her small breasts, winding like hesitant, watercolor brush strokes down her arms. He’s pretty sure that one day Willa will finally figure out she can do a hell of a lot better than him and move on, but he tries not to let that ruin whatever it is they have now.     “It’s all yours,” she says, his turn even though the water won’t be hot again for at least half an hour, and Willa sits down in a chair near the foot of the bed. She leans forward and rubs vigorously at her hair trapped inside the dingy towel.     “We could both play hooky,” Frank says hopefully, watching her, imagining how much better sex would be than the chugging, headache drone of Xerox machines, the endless dissatisfaction of clients. “You could come back to bed and we could lie here all day. We could just lie here and sweat and watch television.”     “Jesus, Frank, how am I supposed to resist an offer like that?”     “Okay, so we could screw and sweat and watch television.”   She stops drying her hair and glares at him, shakes her head and frowns, but the sort of frown that says I wish I could more than it says anything else.     “That new girl isn’t working out,” she says.     “The fat chick from Kazakhstan?” Frank asks and he rolls over onto his back, easier to forget the fantasies of a lazy day alone with Willa if he isn’t looking at her sitting there naked.     “Fucking Kazakhstan. I mean, what the hell were Ted and Daniel thinking? She can’t even speak enough English to tell someone where the toilet is, much less take an order.”     “Maybe they felt sorry for her,” Frank says unhelpfully and now he’s staring up at his favorite crack on the water-stained ceiling, the one that always makes him think of a Viking orbiter photo of the Valles Marineris from one of his old astronomy books. “I’ve heard that people do that sometimes, feel sorry for people.”     “Well, they’d probably lose less money if they just sent the bitch to college, the way she’s been pissing off customers.”     ”Maybe you should suggest that today,” and a moment later Willa’s wet towel smacks him in the face, steamy-damp terry cloth that smells like her black hair dye and the cheap baby shampoo she uses. It covers his eyes, obscuring his view of the Martian rift valley overhead, but Frank doesn’t move the towel immediately, better to lie there a moment longer, breathing her in.     “Is it supposed to rain today?” Willa asks and he mumbles through the wet towel that he doesn’t know.     “They keep promising it’s going to rain and it keeps not raining.”    Frank sits up and the towel slides off his face and into his lap, lies there as the dampness begins to soak through his boxers.     ”I don’t know,” he says again; Willa has her back turned to him and she doesn’t reply or make any sign to show that she’s heard. She’s pulling a bright yellow T-shirt on over her head, the Curious George shirt he gave her for Christmas, has put on a pair of yellow panties, too.     “I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s the heat. The heat’s driving me crazy.”     Frank glances toward the window, the sash up but the chintzy curtains hanging limp and lifeless in the stagnant July air; he’d have to get out of bed, walk all the way across the room, lean over the sill and peer up past the walls and rooftops to see if there are any clouds. “It might rain today,” he says, instead.     “I don’t think it’s ever going to rain again as long as I live,” Willa says and steps into her jeans. “I think we’ve broken this goddamn planet and it’s never going to rain anywhere ever again.”     Frank rubs his fingers through his stiff, dirty hair and looks back at the Cézanne still life above the television—a tabletop, the absinthe bottle and a carafe of water, an empty glass, the fruit that might be peaches.     “You’ll be at the meeting tonight?” he asks and Frank keeps his eyes on the print because he doesn’t like the sullen, secretive expression Willa gets whenever they have to talk about the meetings.     “Yeah,” she says, sighs, and then there’s the cloth-metal sound of her zipper. “Of course I’ll be at the meeting. Where the hell else would I be?”     And then she goes back into the bedroom and shuts the door behind her, leaves Frank alone with the Cézanne and the exotic reek of the apothecary downstairs, Valles Marineris and the bright day spilling uninvited through the window above Mott Street.

Half past two and Frank sits on a plastic milk crate in the stockroom of Gotham Kwick Kopy, trying to decide whether or not to eat the peanut butter and honey sandwich he brought for lunch. The air conditioning’s on the blink again and he thinks it might actually be hotter inside the shop than out on the street; a few merciful degrees cooler in the stockroom, though, shadowy refuge stacked high with cardboard boxes of copy paper in a dozen shades of white and all the colors of the rainbow. He peels back the top of his sandwich, the doughy Millbrook bread that Willa likes, and frowns at the mess underneath. So hot out front that the peanut butter has melted, oily mess to leak straight through wax paper and the brown bag and he’s trying to remember if peanut butter and honey can spoil.     Both the stockroom doors swing open and Frank looks up, blinks and squints at the sun-framed silhouette, Joe Manske letting in the heat and “Hey, don’t do that,” Frank says as Joe switches on the lights. The fluorescents buzz and flicker uncertainly, chasing away the shadows, drenching the stockroom in their bland, indifferent glare.     “Dude, why are you sitting back here in the dark?” Joe asks and for a moment Frank considers throwing the sandwich at him.     “Why aren’t you working on that Mac?” Frank asks right back and “It’s fixed, good as new,” Joe says, grins his big, stupid grin, and sits down on a box of laser print paper near the door.     “That fucker won’t ever be good as new again.”     “Well, at least it’s stopped making that sound. That’s good enough for me,” and Joe takes out a pack of Camels, offers one to Frank and Frank shakes his head no. A month now since his last cigarette, quitting because Willa’s step-mother is dying of lung cancer, quitting because cigarettes cost too goddamn much, anyhow, and “Thanks, though,” he says.     “Whatever,” Joe Manske mumbles around the filter of his Camel, thumb on the strike wheel of his silver lighter and in a moment the air is filled with the pungent aroma of burning tobacco. Frank gives up on the dubious sandwich, drops it back into the brown bag and crumples the bag into a greasy ball.     “I fuckin’ hate this fuckin’ job,” Joe says, disgusted, smoky cloud of words about his head, and he points at the stockroom door with his cigarette. “You just missed a real peace of work, man.”     “Yeah?” and Frank tosses the sandwich ball towards the big plastic garbage can sitting a few feet away, misses and it rolls behind the busted Canon 2400 color copier that’s been sitting in the same spot since he started this job a year ago.     “Yeah,” Joe says. “I was trying to finish that pet store job and this dude comes in, little bitty old man looks like he just got off the boat from Poland or Armenia or some shit—“     “My grandmother was Polish,“ Frank says and Joe sighs loudly, long impatient sigh and he flicks ash onto the cement floor. “You know what I mean.”     “So what’d he want anyway?” Frank asks, not because he cares but the shortest way through any conversation with Joe Manske is usually right down the middle, just be quiet and listen and sooner or later he’ll probably come to the end and shut up.     “He had this old book with him. The damned thing must have been even older than him and was falling apart. I don’t think you could so much as look at it without the pages crumbling. Had it tied together with some string and he kept askin’ me all these questions, real technical shit about the machines, you know.”     “Yeah? Like what?”     “Dude, I don’t know. I can’t remember half of it, techie shit, like I was friggin’ Mr. Wizard or somethin’. I finally just told him we couldn’t be responsible if the copiers messed up his old book, but he still kept on askin’ these questions. Lucky for me, one of the self-service machines jammed and I told him I had to go fix it. By the time I was finished, he was gone.”     “You live to serve,” Frank says, wondering if Willa would be able to tell if he had just one cigarette. “The customer is always right.”     “Fuck that shit,” Joe Manske says. “I don’t get paid enough to have to listen to some senile old fart jabberin’ at me all day.”     “Yes sir, helpful is your middle name.”     “Fuck you.”     Frank laughs and gets up, pushes the milk crate towards the wall with the toe of one shoe so no one’s going to come along later and trip over it, break their neck and have him to blame. “I better get back to work,” he says and “You do that,” Joe grumbles and puffs his Camel.     Through the stockroom doors and back out into the stifling, noisy clutter of the shop, and it must be at least ten degrees warmer out here, he thinks. There’s a line at the register and the phone’s ringing, no one out front but Maggie and she glowers at him across the chaos. “I’m on it,” Frank says; she shakes her head doubtfully and turns to help a woman wearing a dark purple dress and matching beret. Frank’s reaching across the counter for the telephone receiver when he notices the business card lying near a display of Liquid Paper. Black sans serif print on an expensive, white cotton card stock and what appears to be an infinity symbol in the lower left-hand corner. FOUND: LOST WORLDS centered at the top, TERRAE NOVUM ET TERRA INDETERMINATA on the next line down in smaller letters. Then a name and an address—Dr. Solomon Monalisa, Ph.D., 43 W. 61st St., Manhattan—but no number or email, and Frank picks up the card, holds it so Maggie can see.     “Where’d this come from?” he asks but she only shrugs, annoyed but still smiling her strained and weary smile for the woman in the purple beret. “Beats me. Ask Joe, if he ever comes back. Now will you please answer the phone?”     He apologizes, lifts the receiver, “Gotham Kwick Kopy, Frank speaking. How may I help you?” and slips the white card into his back pocket.

The group meets in the basement of a synagogue on Eldridge Street. Once a month, eight o’clock until everyone who wants to talk has taken his or her turn, coffee and stale doughnuts before and afterwards. Metal folding chairs and a lectern down front, a microphone and crackly PA system even though the room isn’t really large enough to need one. Never more than fourteen or fifteen people, occasionally as few as six or seven, and Frank and Willa always sit at the very back, near the door. Sometimes Willa doesn’t make it all the way through a meeting and she says she hates the way they all watch her if she gets up to leave early, like she’s done something wrong, she says, like this is all her fault, somehow. So they sit by the door, which is fine with Frank; he’d rather not have everyone staring at the back of his head, anyway.     He’s sipping at a styrofoam cup of the bitter, black coffee, three sugars and it’s still bitter, watching the others, all their familiar, telltale quirks and peculiarities, their equivocal glances, when Willa comes in. First the sound of her clunky motorcycle boots on the concrete steps and then she stands in the doorway a moment, that expression like it’s always the first time for her and it can never be any other way.     “Hey,” Frank says quietly. “I made it,” she replies and sits down beside him. There’s a stain on the front of her Curious George T-shirt that looks like chocolate sauce.     “How was your day?” he asks her, talking so she doesn’t lock up before things even get started.       “Same as ever. It sucked. They didn’t fire Miss Kazakhstan.”     “That’s good, dear. Would you like a martini?” and he jabs a thumb toward the free-coffee-and-stale-doughnut table. “I think I’ll pass,” Willa says humorlessly, rubs her hands together and stares at the floor between her feet. “I think my stomach hurts enough already.”     “Would you rather just go home? We can miss one night. I sure as hell don’t care—“     “No,” she says, answering too fast, too emphatic, so he knows she means yes. “That would be silly. I’ll be fine when things get started.”     And then Mr. Zaroba stands, stocky man with skin like tea-stained muslin, salt-and-pepper hair and beard and his bushy, gray eyebrows. Kindly blue grandfather eyes and he raises one hand to get everyone’s attention, as if they aren’t all looking at him already, as if they haven’t all been waiting for him to open his mouth and break the tense, uncertain silence.     “Good evening, everyone,” he says, and Willa sits up a little straighter in her chair, expectant arch of her back as though she’s getting ready to run.     “Before we begin,” Mr. Zaroba continues, “there’s something I wanted to share. I came across this last week,” and he takes a piece of paper from his shirt pocket, unfolds it, and begins to read. An item from the New York Tribune, February 17th, 1901; reports by an Indian tribe in Alaska of a city in the sky that was seen sometimes, and a prospector named Willoughby who claimed to have witnessed the thing himself in 1897, claimed to have tried to photograph it on several occasions and succeeded, finally.     “And now this,” Zaroba says and he pulls a second folded sheet of paper from his shirt pocket, presto, bottomless bag of tricks, that pocket, and this time he reads from a book, Alaska by Miner Bruce, page 107, he says. Someone else who saw the city suspended in the arctic sky, a Mr. C.W. Thornton of Seattle, and “’It required no effort of the imagination to liken it to a city,’” Mr. Zaroba reads, “’but was so distinct that it required, instead, faith to believe that it was not in reality a city.’”     People shift nervously in their seats, scuff their feet, and someone whispers too loudly.     “I have the prospector’s photograph,” Zaroba says. “It’s only a Xerox from the book, of course. It isn’t very clear, but I thought some of you might like to see it.” And he hands one of the sheets of paper to the person sitting nearest him.     “Damn, I need a cigarette,” Willa whispers and “You and me both, Frank whispers back. It takes almost five minutes for the sheet of paper to make its way to the rear of the room, passed along from hand to hand while Zaroba stands patiently at the front, his head bowed solemn as if leading a prayer. Some hold onto it as long as they dare and others hardly seem to want to touch it. A man three rows in front of them gets up and brings it back to Willa.       ”I don’t see nothing but clouds,” he says, sounding disappointed.     And neither does Frank, fuzzy photograph of a mirage, deceit of sunlight in the collision of warm and freezing air high above a glacier, but Willa must see more. She holds the paper tight and chews at her lower lip, traces the distorted peaks and cumulonimbus towers with the tip of an index finger.     “My god,” she whispers.     In a moment Zaroba comes up the aisle and takes the picture away, leaves Willa staring at her empty hands, her eyes wet like she might start crying. Frank puts an arm around her bony shoulders, but she immediately wiggles free and scoots her chair a few inches farther away.     “So, who wants to get us started tonight?” Mr. Zaroba asks when he gets back to the lectern. At first no one moves or speaks or raises a hand, each looking at the others or trying hard to look nowhere at all. And then a young woman stands up, younger than Willa, filthy clothes and bruise-dark circles under her eyes, hair that hasn’t been combed or washed in ages. Her name is Janice and Frank thinks that she’s a junky, probably a heroin addict because she always wears long sleeves.     “Janice? Very good, then,” and Mr. Zaroba returns to his seat in the first row. Everyone watches Janice as she walks slowly to the front of the room, or they pretend not to watch her. There’s a small hole in the seat of her dirty, threadbare jeans and Frank can see that she isn’t wearing underwear. She stands behind the lectern, coughs once, twice, and brushes her shaggy bangs out of her face. She looks anxiously at Mr. Zaroba and “It’s all right, Janice,” he says. “Take all the time you need. No one’s going to rush you.”     “Bullshit,” Willa mutters, loud enough that the man sitting three rows in front of them turns and scowls. “What the hell are you staring at,” she growls and he turns back towards the lectern.     “It’s okay, baby,” Frank says and takes her hand, squeezes hard enough that she can’t shake him loose this time. “We can leave anytime you want.”     Janice coughs again and there’s a faint feedback whine from the mike. She wipes her nose with the back of her hand and “I was only fourteen years old,” she begins. “I still lived with my foster parents in Trenton and there was this old cemetery near our house, Riverview Cemetery. Me and my sister, my foster sister, we used to go there to smoke and talk, you know, just to get away from the house.”     Janice looks at the basement ceiling while she speaks, or down at the lectern, but never at the others. She pauses and wipes her nose again.     “We went there all the time. Wasn’t anything out there to be afraid of, not like at home. Just dead people, and me and Nadine weren’t afraid of dead people. Dead people don’t hurt anyone, right? We could sit there under the trees in the summer and it was almost like things weren’t so bad. Nadine was a year older than me.”     Willa tries to pull her hand free, digs her nails into Frank’s palm but he doesn’t let go. They both know where this is going, have both heard Janice’s story so many times that they could recite it backwards, same tired old horror story, and “It’s okay,” he says out loud, to Willa or to himself.     “Mostly it was just regular headstones, but there were a few bigger crypts set way back near the water. I didn’t like being around them. I told her that, over and over, but Nadine said they were like little castles, like something out of fairy tales.     “One day one of them was open, like maybe someone had busted into it, and Nadine had to see if there were still bones inside. I begged her not to, said whoever broke it open might still be hanging around somewhere and we ought to go home and come back later. But she wouldn’t listen to me.     “I didn’t want to look inside. I swear to God, I didn’t.”     “Liar.” Willa whispers, so low now that the man three rows in front of them doesn’t hear, but Frank does. Her nails are digging deeper into his palm, and his eyes are beginning to water from the pain. “You wanted to see,” she says. “Just like the rest of us, you wanted to see.”     “I said, ‘What if someone’s still in there?’ but she wouldn’t listen. She wasn’t ever afraid of anything. She used to lay down on train tracks just to piss me off.”     “What did you see in the crypt, Janice, when you and Nadine looked inside?” Mr. Zaroba asks, but no hint of impatience in his voice, not hurrying her or prompting, only helping her find a path across the words as though they were slippery rocks in a cold stream. “Can you tell us?”     Janice takes a very deep breath, swallows, and “Stairs,” she says. “Stairs going down into the ground. There was a light way down at the bottom, a blue light, like a cop car light. Only it wasn’t flashing. And we could hear something moving around down there, and something else that sounded like a dog panting. I tried to get Nadine to come back to the house with me then, but she wouldn’t. She said ‘Those stairs might go anywhere, Jan. Don’t you want to see? Don’t you want to know?”      Another pause and “I couldn’t stop her,” Janice says.     Willa mutters something Frank doesn’t understand, then, something vicious, and he lets go of her hand, rubs at the four crescent-shaped wounds her nails leave behind. Blood drawn, crimson tattoos to mark the wild and irreparable tear in her soul by marking him, and he presses his palm to his black work pants, no matter if it stains, no one will ever notice.     “I waited at the top of the stairs until dark,” Janice says. “I kept on calling her. I called her until my throat hurt.” When the sun started going down, the blue light at the bottom got brighter and brighter and once or twice I thought I could see someone moving around down there, someone standing between me and the light. Finally, yelled I was going to get the goddamn cops if she didn’t come back…” and Janice trails off, hugs herself like she’s cold and gazes straight ahead, but Frank knows she doesn’t see any of them sitting there, watching her, waiting for the next word, waiting for their turns at the lectern.     “You don’t have to say any more tonight,” Zaroba says. “You know we’ll all understand if you can’t.”     “No,” Janice says. “I can…I really need to,” and she squeezes her eyes shut tight. Mr. Zaroba stands, takes one reassuring step towards the lectern.     “We’re all right here,” he says, and “We’re listening,” Willa mumbles mockingly. “We’re listening,” Zaroba says a second later.     “I didn’t go to the police. I didn’t tell anyone anything until the next day. My foster parents, they just thought she’d run away again. No one would believe me when I told them about the crypt, when I told them where Nadine had really gone. Finally, they made me show them, though, the cops did, so I took them out to Riverview.”     “Why do we always have to fucking start with her?” Willa whispers. “I can’t remember a single time she didn’t go first.”     Someone sneezes and “It was sealed up again,” Janice says, her small and brittle voice made big and brittle by the PA speakers. “But they opened it.” The cemetery people didn’t want them to, but they did anyway. I swore I’d kill myself if they didn’t open it and get Nadine out of there.”     “Can you remember a time she didn’t go first?” Willa asks and Frank looks at her, but he doesn’t answer.     “All they found inside was a coffin. The cops even pulled up part of the marble floor, but there wasn’t anything under it, just dirt.”     A few more minutes, a few more details, and Janice is done. Mr. Zaroba hugs her and she goes back to her seat. “Who wants to be next?” he asks them and it’s the man who calls himself Charlie Jones, though they all know that’s not his real name. Every month he apologizes because he can’t use his real name at the meetings, too afraid someone at work might find out, and then he tells them about the time he opened a bedroom door in his house in Hartford and there was nothing on the other side but stars. When he’s done, Zaroba shakes his hand, pats him on the back, and now it’s time for the woman who got lost once on the subway, two hours to get from South Ferry to the Houston Street Station, alone in an empty train that rushed along through a darkness filled with the sound of children crying. Then a timid Colombian woman named Juanita Lazarte, the night she watched two moons cross the sky above Peekskill, the morning the sun rose in the south.     And all the others, each in his or her turn, as the big wall clock behind the lectern ticks and the night fills up with the weight and absurdity of their stories, glimpses of impossible geographies, entire worlds hidden in plain view if you’re unlucky enough to see them. “If you’re damned,” Juanita Lazarte once said and quickly crossed herself. Mr. Zaroba who was once an atmospheric scientist and pilot for the Navy. He’s seen something too, of course, the summer of 1969, flying supplies in a Hercules C-130 from Christchurch, New Zealand to McMurdo Station. A freak storm, whiteout conditions and instrument malfunction, and when they finally found a break in the clouds somewhere over the Transantarctic Mountains the entire crew saw the ruins of a vast city, glittering obsidian towers and shattered, crystal spires, crumbling walls carved from the mountains themselves. At least that’s what Zaroba says. He also says the Navy pressured the other men into signing papers agreeing never to talk about the flight and when he refused, he was pronounced mentally unsound by a military psychiatrist and discharged.     When Willa’s turn comes, she glances at Frank, not a word but all the terrible things right there in her eyes for him to see, unspoken resignation, surrender, and then she goes down the aisle and stands behind the lectern.

Frank wakes up from a dream of rain and thunder and Willa’s sitting cross-legged at the foot of their bed, nothing on but her pajama bottoms, watching television with the sound off and smoking a cigarette. “Where the hell’d you get that?” he asks, blinks sleepily and points at the cigarette.     “I bought a pack on my break today,” she replies, not taking her eyes off the screen. She takes a long drag and the smoke leaks slowly from her nostrils.     “I thought we had an agreement.”     ”I’m sorry,” but she doesn’t sound sorry at all, and Frank sits up and blinks at the TV screen, rubs his eyes, and now he can see it’s Jimmy Stewart and Katharine Hepburn, The Philadelphia Story.     ”You can turn the sound up, if you want to,” he says. “It won’t bother me.”     ”No, that’s okay. I know it by heart anyway.”     And then neither of them says anything else for a few minutes, sit watching the televisions, and when Willa has smoked the cigarette down to the filter she stubs it out in a saucer.     ”I don’t think I want to go to the meetings anymore,” she says. “I think they’re only making it worse for me.”     Frank waits a moment before he replies, waiting to be sure that she’s finished, and then, “That’s your decision, Willa. If that’s what you want.”     ”Of course it’s my decision.”     ”You know what I meant.”     ”I can’t keep reciting it over and over like the rest of you. There’s no fucking point. I could talk about it from now till doomsday and it still wouldn’t make sense and I’d still be afraid. Nothing Zaroba and that bunch of freaks has to say is going to change that, Frank.”     Willa picks up the pack of Camels off the bed, lights another cigarette with a disposable lighter that looks pink by the flickering, grainy light from the TV screen.     ”I’m sorry,” Frank says.     ”Does it help you?” she asks and now there’s an angry-sharp edge in her voice, Willa’s switchblade mood swings, sullen to pissed in the space between heartbeats. “Has it ever helped you at all?”     Frank doesn’t want to fight with her tonight, wants to close his eyes and slip back down to sleep, back to his raincool dreams. Too hot for an argument, and “I don’t know,” he says, and that’s almost not a lie.     ”Yeah, well, whatever,” Willa mumbles and takes another drag off her cigarette.     ”We’ll talk about it in the morning if you want,” Frank says and he lies back down, turns to face the open window and the noise of Mott Street at two A.M., the blinking orange neon from a noodle shop across the street.     ”I’m not going to change my mind, if that’s what you mean,” Willa says.     ”You can turn the sound up,” Frank tells her again and concentrates on the soothing rhythm of the noodle shop sign, orange pulse like campfire light, much, much better than counting imaginary sheep. In a moment he’s almost asleep again, scant inches from sleep and “Did you ever see Return to Oz?” Willa asks him.     ”What?”     ”Return to Oz, the one where Fairuza Balk plays Dorothy and Laurie Piper plays Auntie Em.”     ”No,” Frank replies. “I never did,” and he rolls over onto his back and stares at the ceiling instead of the neon sign. In the dark and the gray light from the television, his favorite crack looks even more like the Valles Marineris.     ”It wasn’t anything like The Wizard of Oz. I was just a little kid, but I remember it. It scared the hell out of me.”     ”Your mother let you see scary movies when you were a little kid?”     Willa ignores the question, her eyes still fixed on The Philadelphia Story if they’re fixed anywhere, and she exhales a cloud of smoke that swirls and drifts about above the bed.     ”When the film begins, Auntie Em and Uncle Henry think Dorothy’s sick,” she says. “They think she’s crazy, because she talks about Oz all the time, because she won’t believe it was only a nightmare. They finally send her off to a sanitarium for electric shock treatment—“     ”Jesus,” Frank says, not entirely sure that Willa isn’t making all this up. “That’s horrible.”     ”Yeah, but it’s true, isn’t it? It’s what really happens to little girls who see places that aren’t supposed to be there. People aren’t ever so glad you didn’t die in a twister that they want to listen to crazy shit about talking scarecrows and emerald cities.”     And Frank doesn’t answer because he knows he isn’t supposed to, knows that she would rather he didn’t even try, so he sweats and stares at his surrogate, plaster Mars instead, at the shadow play from the television screen; she doesn’t say anything else, and in a little while more, he’s asleep.

In this dream there is still thunder, no rain from the other sky but the crack and rumble of thunder so loud that the air shimmers and could splinter like ice. The tall red grass almost as high as his waist, rippling gently in the wind, and Frank wishes that Willa wouldn’t get so close to the fleshy, white trees. She thinks they might have fruit, peaches and she’s never eaten a white peach before, she said. Giants fighting in the sky and Willa picking up windfall fruit from the rocky ground beneath the trees; Frank looks over his shoulder, back towards the fissure in the basement wall, back the way they came, but it’s vanished.     I should be sacred, he thinks. No, I should be scared.     And now Willa is coming back towards him through the crimson waves of grass, her skirt for a linen basket to hold all the pale fruit she’s gathered. She’s smiling and he tries to remember the last time he saw her smile, really smile, not just a smirk or sneer. She smiles and steps through the murmuring grass that seems to part to let her pass, her bare arms and legs safe from the blades grown sharp as straight razors.     ”They are peaches,” she beams.     But the fruit is the color of school-room chalk, it’s skin smooth and slick and glistening with tiny, pinhead beads of nectar seeping out through minute pores. “Take one,” she says, but his stomach lurches and rolls at the thought, loath to even touch one of the things and then she sighs and dumps them all into the grass at his feet.     ”I used to know a story about peaches,” Willa says. “It was a Japanese story, I think. Or maybe it was Chinese.”     ”I’m pretty sure those aren’t peaches,” Frank says, and he takes a step backwards, away from the pile of sweating, albino fruit.     ”I heard the pits are poisonous,” she says. “Arsenic, or maybe it’s cyanide.”     A brilliant flash of chartreuse lightning then and the sky sizzles and smells like charred meat. Willa bends and retrieves a piece of the fruit, takes a bite before he can stop her; the sound of her teeth sinking through its skin, tearing through the colorless pulp inside, is louder than the thunder, and milky juice rolls down her chin and stains her Curious George T-shirt. Something wriggles from between her lips, falls to the grass, and when Willa opens her jaws wide to take another bite Frank can see that her mouth is filled with wriggling things.     ”They have to be careful you don’t swallow your tongue,” she says, mumbling around the white peach. “If you swallow your tongue you’ll choke to death.”     Frank snatches the fruit away from her, grabs it quick before she puts any more of it in her belly, and she frowns and wipes the juice staining her hands off onto her skirt. The half-eaten thing feels warm and he tosses it away.     ”Jesus, that was fucking silly, Frank. The harm’s already done, you know that. The harm was done the day you looked through that hole in the wall.”     And then the sky booms its symphony of gangrene and sepsis and lightning stabs down with electric claws, thunder then lightning but that’s only the wrong way round if he pretends Willa isn’t right, if he pretends that he’s seven again and this time he doesn’t take the flashlight from the kitchen drawer. This time he does what his mother says and doesn’t go sneaking off the minute she turns her back.     Frank stands alone beneath the restless trees, his aching, dizzy head too full of all the time that can’t be redeemed, now or then or ever, and he watches as Willa walks alone across the red fields towards the endless deserts of scrap iron and bone, towards the bloated, scarlet-purple sun. The black things have noticed her, and creep along close behind, stalking silent on ebony, mantis legs.     This time he wakes up before they catch her.

The long weekend, then, hotter and drier, the sky more white than blue and the air on Mott Street and everywhere else that Frank has any reason to go has grown so ripe, so redolent, that sometimes he pulls the collars of his T-shirts up over his mouth and nose, breathes through the cotton like a surgeon or a wild west bandit, but the smell always gets through anyway. On the news there are people dying of heat stroke and dehydration, people dying in the streets and ERs, but fresh-faced weathermen still promise that it will rain very soon. He’s stopped believing them and maybe that means Willa’s right and it never will rain again.     Frank hasn’t shown the white card—FOUND: LOST WORLDS—to Willa, keeps it hidden in his wallet, only taking it out when he’s alone and no one will see, no one to ask where or what or who. He’s read it over and over again, has each line committed to memory, and Monday morning he almost calls Mr. Zaroba about it. The half hour between Willa leaving for the café and the time that he has to leave for the copy shop if he isn’t going to be late, and he holds the telephone receiver and stares at Dr. Solomon Monalisa’s card lying there on the table in front of him. The sound of his heart, the dial-tone drone, and the traffic down on Mott Street, the spice-and-dried-fish odor of the apothecary leaking up through the floorboards, and a fat drop of sweat slides down his forehead and spreads itself painfully across his left eyeball. By the time he’s finished rubbing at his eye, calling Zaroba no longer seems like such a good idea after all, and Frank puts the white card back into his wallet, slips it in safe between his driver’s license and a dog-eared, expired MetroCard.     Instead he calls in sick, gets Maggie and she doesn’t believe for one moment that there’s anything wrong with him.     ”I fucking swear, I can’t even get up off the toilet long enough to make a phone call. I’m calling you from the head,” only half an effort at sounding sincere because they both know this is only going through the motions.     ”As we speak—“ he starts, but Maggie cuts him off.     ”That’s enough, Frank. But I’m telling you, man if you wanna keep this job, you better get your slacker ass down here tomorrow morning.”     ”Right,” Frank says. “I hear you,” and she hangs up first     And then Frank stares at the open window, the sun beating down like the Voice of God out there, and it takes him almost five minutes to remember where to find the next number he has to call.

Sidney McAvoy stopped coming to the meetings at the synagogue on Eldridge Street almost a year ago, not long after Frank’s first time. Small, hawk-nosed man with nervous, ferrety eyes, and he’s always reminded Frank a little of Dustin Hoffman in Papillon. Some sort of tension or wound between Sidney and Mr. Zaroba that Frank never fully understood, but he saw it from the start, the way their eyes never met and Sidney never took his turn at the lectern, sat silent, brooding, chewing at the stem of a cheap, unlit pipe. And then an argument after one of the meetings, the same night that Zaroba told Janice that she shouldn’t ever go back to the cemetery in Trenton, that she should never try to find the staircase and the blue light again. Both men speaking in urgent, angry whispers, Zaroba looking up occasionally to smile a sheepish, embarrassed, apologetic smile. Everyone pretending not to see or hear, talking among themselves, occupied with their stale doughnuts and tiny packets of non-dairy creamer, and then Sidney McAvoy left and never came back.     Frank would’ve forgotten all about him, almost had forgotten, and then one night he and Willa were coming home late from a bar where they drink sometimes, whenever they’re feeling irresponsible enough to spend money on booze. Cheap vodka or cheaper beer, a few hours wasted just trying to feel like everyone else, the way they imagined other, normal people might feel, and they ran into Sidney McAvoy a few blocks from their apartment. He was wearing a ratty green raincoat, even though it wasn’t raining, and chewing on one of his pipes, carrying a large box wrapped in white butcher’s paper, tied up tight and neat with twine.     ”Shit,” Willa whispered. “Make like you don’t see him,” but Sidney had already noticed them and he was busy clumsily trying to hide the big package behind his back.     ”I know you two,” he declared, talking loudly, a suspicious, accusatory glint to his quavering voice. “You’re both with Zaroba, aren’t you? You still go to his meetings.” That last word a sneer and he pointed a short, grubby finger at the center of Frank’s chest.     ”That’s really none of your goddamn business, is it?” Willa growled and Frank stepped quickly between them; she mumbled and spit curses behind his back and Sindey McAvoy glared up at Frank with his beady-dark eyes. A whole lifetime’s worth of bitterness and distrust trapped inside those eyes, eyes that have seen far too much or far too little, and “How have you been, Mr. McAvoy,” Frank said, straining to sound friendly, and he managed the sickly ghost of a smile.     Sidney grunted and almost dropped his carefully-wrapped package.     ”If you care about that girl there,” he said, speaking around the stem of the pipe clenched between his yellowed teeth, “you’ll keep her away from Zaroba. And you’ll both stop telling him things, if you know what’s good for you. There are more useful answers in a road atlas than you’re ever going to get out of that old phony.”     ”What makes you say that?” Frank asked. “What were you guys fighting about?” but Sidney was already scuttling away down Canal Street, his white package hugged close to his chest. He turned a corner without looking back and was gone.     ”Fucking nut job,” Willa mumbled. “What the hell’s his problem anyway?”       ”Maybe the less we know about him the better,” Frank said and he put an arm around Willa’s small waist, holding her close to him, trying hard not to think about what could have been in the box but unable to think of anything else.     And two weeks later, dim and snowy last day before Thanksgiving, Frank found Sidney McAvoy’s number in the phone book and called him.

A wet comb through his hair, cleaner shirt and socks, and Frank goes out into the sizzling day; across Columbus Park to the Canal Street Station and he takes the M to Grand Street, rides the B line all the way to the subway stop beneath the Museum of Natural History. Rumbling long through the honeycombed earth, the diesel and dust and garbage scented darkness and him swaddled inside steel and unsteady fluorescent light. Time to think that he’d rather not have, unwelcome luxury of second thoughts, and when the train finally reaches the museum he’s almost ready to turn right around and head back downtown. Almost, but Dr. Solomon Monalisa’s card is in his wallet to keep him moving, get him off the train and up the concrete steps to the museum entrance. Ten dollars he can’t spare to get inside, but Sidney McAvoy will never agree to meet him anywhere outside, too paranoid for a walk in Central Park or a quiet booth in a deli or a coffee shop somewhere.     ”People are always listening,” he says, whenever Frank has suggested or asked that they meet somewhere without an entrance fee. “You never know what they might overhear.”     So sometimes it’s the long marble bench in front of the Apatosaurus, or the abyssal, blue-black gloom of the Hall of Fishes, seats beneath a planetarium constellation sky, whichever spot happens to strike Sidney’s fancy that particular day. His fancy or his cabalistic fantasies, if there’s any difference, and today Frank finds him in the Hall of Asiatic Mammals, short and rumpled man in a threadbare tweed jacket and red tennis shoes standing alone before the Indian leopard diorama, gazing intently in at the pocket of counterfeit jungle and the taxidermied cats. Frank waits behind him for a minute or two, waiting to be noticed, and when Sidney looks up and speaks, he speaks to Frank’s reflection.     ”I’m very busy today,” he says, brusque, impatient. “I hope this isn’t going to take long.”     And no, Frank says, it won’t take long at all, I promise, but Sidney’s doubtful expression to show just how much he believes that. He sighs and looks back to the stuffed leopards, papier-mâché trees and wax leaves, a painted flock of peafowl rising to hang forever beneath a painted forest canopy. Snapshot moment of another world and the walls of the dimly-lit hall lined with a dozen or more such scenes.     ”You want to know about Monalisa,” Sidney says. “That’s why you came here, because you think I can tell you who he is.”     ”Yeah,” and Frank reaches into this pocket for his wallet. “He came into the place where I work last week and left this.” He takes out the card and Sidney turns around only long enough to get it from him.     ”So, you talked to him?”     ”No, I didn’t. I was eating my lunch in the stockroom. I didn’t actually see him for myself.”     Sidney stares at the card, seems to read it carefully three or four times and then he hands it back to Frank, goes back to staring at the leopards.     ”Why didn’t you show this to Zaroba?” he asks sarcastically, taunting, but Frank answers him anyway, not in the mood today for Sidney’s grudges and intrigues.     ”Because I didn’t think he’d tell me anything. You know he’s more interested in the mysteries than ever finding answers.” And Frank pauses, silent for a moment and Sidney’s silent, too, both men watching the big cats now—glass eyes, freeze-frame talons, and taut, spectacled haunches—as though the leopards might suddenly spring towards them, all this stillness just a clever ruse for the tourists and the kiddies; maybe dead leopards know the nervous, wary faces of men who have seen things that they never should have seen.     ”He knows the truth would swallow him whole,” Sidney says. The leopards don’t pounce and he adds, “He knows he’s a coward.”     ”So who is Dr. Monalisa?”     ”A bit of something the truth already swallowed and spat back up,” and Sidney chuckles sourly to himself and produces one of his pipes from a jacket pocket. “He’s a navigator, a pilot, a cartographer…”     Frank notices that one of the two leopards has captured a stuffed peacock, holds it fast between velvet, razored paws, and he can’t remember if it was that way only a moment before.     ”He draws maps,” Sidney says. “He catalogs doors and windows and culverts.”     ”That’s bullshit,” Frank whispers, his voice low now so the old woman staring in at the giant panda exhibit won’t hear him. “You’re trying to tell me he can find places?”     ”He isn’t a sane man, Frank,” Sidney says and now he holds up his left hand and presses his palm firmly against the glass, as if he’s testing the invisible barrier, gauging its integrity. “He has answers, but he has prices, too. You think this is Hell, you see how it feels to be in debt to Dr. Solomon Monalisa.”     ”It isn’t me. It’s Willa. I think she’s starting to lose it.”     ”We all lost ‘it’ a long time ago, Frank.”     ”I’m afraid she’s going to do something. I’m afraid she’ll hurt herself.”     And Sidney turns his back on the leopards then, takes the pipe from his mouth, and glares up at Frank.     But some of the anger, some of the bitterness, has gone from his eyes, and “He might keep her alive,” he says, “but you wouldn’t want her back when he was done. If she’d even come back. No, Frank. You two stay away from Monalisa. Look for your own answers. You don’t think you found that card by accident, do you? You don’t really think there are such things as coincidences? That’s not even his real address—“     ”She can’t sleep anymore,” Frank says, but now Sidney McAvoy isn’t listening, glances back over his shoulder at the Indian rain forest, incandescent daylight, illusory distances, and “I have to go now,” he says. “I’m very busy today.”     ”I think she’s fucking dying, man,” Frank says as Sidney straightens his tie and puts the pipe back into his pocket; the old woman looks up from the panda in its unreal bamboo thicket and frowns at them both.     ”I’m very busy today, Frank. Call me next week. I think I can meet you at the Guggenheim next week.”     And he walks quickly away towards the Roosevelt Rotunda, past the Siberian tiger and the Sumatran rhinoceros, leaving Frank alone with the frowning woman. When Sidney has vanished into the shadows behind a small herd of Indian elephants, Frank turns back to the leopards and the smudgy hand print Sidney McAvoy has left on their glass.

Hours and hours later, past sunset to the other side of the wasted day, the night that seems even hotter than the scorching afternoon, and Frank is dreaming that the crack in the basement wall on St. Mark’s place is much too narrow for him to squeeze through. Maybe the way it really happened after all, and then he hears a small, anguished sound from somewhere close behind him, something hurting or lost, and when he turns to see, Frank opens his eyes and there’s only the tangerine glow of the noodle shop sign outside the apartment window. He blinks once, twice, but this stubborn world doesn’t go away, doesn’t break apart into random kaleidoscopic shards to become some other place entirely. So he sits up, head full of the familiar disappointment, this incontestable solidity, and it takes him a moment to realize that Willa isn’t in bed. Faint outline of her body left in the wrinkled sheets and the bathroom light is burning, the door open, so she’s probably just taking a piss.     ”You okay in there?” he asks, but no reply. The soft drip, drip, drip of the kitchenette faucet, tick of the wind-up alarm clock on the table next to Willa’s side of the bed, street noise, but no answer. “Did you fall in or something?” he shouts. “Did you drown?”     And still no response, but his senses waking up, picking out more than the ordinary, every-night sounds, a trilling whine pitched so high he feels it more than hears it, and now he notices the way that the air in the apartment smells.     Go back to sleep, he thinks, but both legs already over the edge of the bed, both feet already on the dusty floor. When you wake up again it’ll be over.     The trill worming its way beneath his skin, soaking in, pricking gently at the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck, and all the silver fillings in his teeth have begun to hum along sympathetically. Where he’s standing, Frank can see into the bathroom, just barely, a narrow slice of linoleum, slice of porcelain toilet tank, a mildew and polyurethane fold of shower curtain. And he thinks that the air has started to shimmer, an almost imperceptible warping of the light escaping from the open door, but that might only be his imagination. He takes one small step towards the foot of the bed and there’s Willa, standing naked before the tiny mirror above the bathroom sink. The jut of her shoulder blades and hip bones, the anorexic swell of her rib cage, all the minute details of her painful thinness seem even more pronounced in the harsh and curving light.     ”Hey. Is something wrong? Are you sick?” and she turns her head slowly to look at him, or maybe only looking towards him because there’s nothing much like recognition on her face. Her wide, unblinking eyes, blind woman’s stare, and “Can’t you hear me, Willa?” he asks as she turns slowly back to the mirror. Her lips move, shaping rough, inaudible words.     The trilling grows infinitesimally louder, climbs another half-octave, and there’s a warm, wet trickle across Frank’s lips and he realizes that his nose is bleeding.     Behind Willa the bathroom wall, the shower, the low ceiling—everything—ripples and dissolves and there’s a sudden, staccato pop as the bulb above the sink blows. And after an instant of perfect darkness, perfect nothing, dull and yellow-green shafts of light from somewhere far, far above, flickering light from an alien sun shining down through the waters of an alien sea; dim, translucent shapes dart and flash through those depths, bodies more insubstantial than jellyfish, more sinuous than eels, and Willa rises to meet them, arms outstretched, her hair drifting about her face like a halo of seaweed and algae. In the ocean-filtered light, Willa’s pale skin seems sleek and smooth as dolphin-flesh. Air rushes from her lips, her nostrils, and flows eagerly away in a glassy swirl of bubbles.     The trilling has filled Frank’s head so full, and his aching skull, his brain, seem only an instant from merciful explosion, fragile, eggshell bone collapsed by the terrible, lonely sound and the weight of all that water stacked above him. He staggers, takes a step backwards, and now Willa’s face is turned up to meet the sunlight streaming down, and she’s more beautiful than anyone or anything he’s ever seen or dreamt.     Down on Mott Street, the screech of tires, the angry blat of a car horn and someone begins shouting very loudly in Chinese.     And now the bathroom is only a bathroom again, and Willa lies in a limp, strangling heap on the floor, her wet hair and skin glistening in the light from the bulb above the sink. The water rolls off her back, her thighs, spreads across the floor in a widening puddle, and Frank realizes that the trilling has finally stopped, only the memory of it left in his ringing ears and bleeding nose. When the dizziness has passed, he goes to her, sits down on the wet floor and holds her while she coughs and pukes up gouts of salt water and snotty strands of something the color of verdigris. Her skin so cold it hurts to touch, cold coming off her like a fever, and something small and chitinous slips from her hair and scuttles behind the toilet on long, jointed legs.     ”Did you see?” she asks him, desperate, rheumy words gurgling out with all the water that she’s swallowed. “Did you, Frank? Did you see it?”     ”Yes,” he tells her, just like every time before. “Yes, baby. I did. I saw it all,” and Willa smiles, closes her eyes, and in a little while she’s asleep. He carries her, dripping, back to their bed and holds her until the sun rises and she’s warm again.

The next day neither of them goes to work, and some small, niggling part of Frank manages to worry about what will happen to them if he loses the shit job at Gotham Kwick Kopy, if Willa gets fired from the café, obstinate shred of himself still capable of caring about such things. How the rent will be paid, how they’ll eat, everything that hasn’t really seemed to matter in more years than he wants to count. Half the morning in bed and his nosebleed keeps coming back, a roll of toilet paper and then one of their towels stained all the shades of dried and drying blood; Willa wearing her winter coat despite the heat, and she keeps trying to get him to go to a doctor, but no, he says. That might lead to questions, and besides, it’ll stop sooner or later. It’s always stopped before.     By twelve o’clock, Willa’s traded the coat for her pink cardigan, feels good enough that she makes them peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches, black coffee and stale potato chips, and after he eats Frank begins to feel better, too. But going to the park is Willa’s idea, because the apartment still smells faintly of silt and dead fish, muddy, low-tide stink that’ll take hours more to disappear completely. He knows the odor makes her nervous, so he agrees, even though he’d rather spend the afternoon sleeping off his headache. Maybe a cold shower, another cup of Willa’s bitter-strong coffee, and if he’s lucky he could doze for hours without dreaming     They take the subway up to Fifth, follow the eastern edge of the park north, past the zoo and East Green all the way to Pilgrim Hill and the Conservatory Pond. It’s not so very hot that there aren’t a few model sailing ships on the pond, just enough breeze to keep their miniature Bermuda sails standing tall and taut as shark fins. Frank and Willa sit in the shade near the Alice in Wonderland statue, her favorite spot in all of Central Park, rocky place near the tea party, granite and rustling leaves, the clean laughter of children climbing about on the huge, bronze mushrooms. A little girl with frizzy black hair and red and white peppermint-striped tights is petting the kitten in Alice’s lap, stroking its metal fur and meowling loudly, and “I can’t ever remember her name,” Willa says.     ”What?” Frank asks. “Whose name?” not sure if she means the little girl or the kitten or something else entirely.     ”Alice’s kitten. I know it had a name, but I never can remember it.”     Frank watches the little girl for a moment, and “Dinah,” he says. “I think the kitten’s name was Dinah.”     ”Oh, yeah, Dinah. That’s it,” and he knows that she’s just thinking out loud, whatever comes to mind so that she won’t have to talk about last night, so the conversation won’t accidentally find its own way back to those few drowning moments of chartreuse light and eel shadows. Trying so hard to pretend and he almost decides they’re both better off if he plays along and doesn’t show her Dr. Solomon Monalisa’s white calling card.     ”That’s a good name for a cat,” she says. “If we ever get a kitten, I think I’ll name it Dinah.”     ”Mrs. Wu doesn’t like cats.”     ”Well, we’re not going to spend the rest of our lives in that dump. Next time, we’ll get an apartment that allows cats.”     Frank takes the card out and lays his wallet on the grass, but Willa hasn’t even noticed, too busy watching the children clambering about on Alice, too busy dreaming about kittens. The card is creased and smudged from a week riding around in his back pocket and all the handling it’s suffered, the edges beginning to fray, and he gives it to her without any explanation.     ”What’s this?” she asks and he tells her to read it first, just read it, so she does. Reads it two or three times and then Willa returns the card, goes back to watching the children. But her expression has changed, the labored, make-believe smile gone now and she just looks like herself again, plain old Willa, the distance in her eyes, the hard angles at the corners of her mouth that aren’t quite a frown.     ”Sidney says he’s for real,” half the truth, at best, and Frank glances down at the card, reading it again for the hundredth or two-hundredth time     ”Sidney McAvoy’s a fucking lunatic.”     ”He says this guy has maps—“     ”Christ, Frank. What do you want me to say? You want me to give you permission to go talk to some crackpot? You don’t need my permission.”     ”I was hoping you’d come with me,” he says so softly that he’s almost whispering, and he puts the card back into his wallet where neither of them will have to look at it, stuffs the wallet back into his jeans pocket.     ”Well, I won’t. I go to your goddamn meetings. I already have to listen to that asshole Zaroba. That’s enough for me, thank you very much. That’s more than enough.”     The little girl petting Dinah slips, loses her footing and almost slides backwards off the edge of the sculpture, but her mother catches her and sets her safely on the ground.     ””I see what it’s doing to you,” Frank says. “I have to watch. How much longer do you think you can go on like this?”     She doesn’t answer him, opens her purse and takes out a pack of cigarettes, only one left and she crumbles the empty package and tosses it over her shoulder into the bushes.     ”What if this guy really can help you? What if he can make it stop?”     Willa is digging noisily around in her purse, trying to find her lighter or a book of matches, and she turns and stares at Frank, the cigarette hanging unlit from her lips. Her eyes shining bright as broken gemstones, shattered crystal eyes, furious, resentful, and he knows that she could hate him, that she could leave him here and never look back. She takes the cigarette from her mouth, licks her upper lip, and for a long moment Willa holds the tip of her tongue trapped tight between her teeth.     ”What the hell makes you think I want it to stop?”     And silence as what she’s said sinks in and he begins to understand that he’s never understood her at all. “It’s killing you,” he says, finally, the only thing he can think to say, and Willa’s eyes seem to flash and grow brighter, more broken, more eager to slice.     ”No, Frank, it’s the only thing keeping me alive. Knowing that it’s out there, that I’ll see it again, and someday maybe it won’t make me come back here.”     And then she gets up and walks quickly away towards the pond, brisk, determined steps to put more distance between them. She stops long enough to bum a light from an old black man with a dachshund, then ducks around one corner of the boathouse and he can’t see her anymore. Frank doesn’t follow, sits watching the tiny sailboats and yachts gliding gracefully across the moss-dark surface of the water, their silent choreography of wakes and ripples. He decides maybe it’s better not to worry about Willa for now, plenty of time for that later and he wonders what he’ll say to Monalisa when he finds him.

We shall be less apt to admire what this World calls great, shall nobly despise those Trifles the generality of Men set their Affections on, when we know that there are a multitude of such Earths inhabited and adorn’d as well as our own.                                                                       CHRISTIAAN HUYGENS (c. 1690)

[happybeeme0514]

Pure Chap 9

Chapter 9

The Heavens

 “These goldfish are getting worse by the day,”

Scorpio, who is sitting across from Ichthys and I in the parlor, growls as he flips through work documents. I frown. There’s that nickname again.

“What does ‘goldfish’ mean?” I ask Ichthys.

“Hm? Oh. Well, ah…you know how humans take care of pets like fish?” He says. I nod. “Well, we gods think of humans in the way that you think of fish. Like…”

“Like tiny, insignificant little hindrances.” Scorpio completes, his voice like ice.

I stare at him. Hindrances, huh? I wonder if that’s how Zyglavis sees me. As a hindrance, an annoyance.

“Do all gods see us that way?” I mumble, more to myself than to either of them.

“Yup.” Scorpio answers curtly. I flinch.

“Hey, now,” Ichthys says. “I don’t see you that way. Dui doesn’t either. We think humans are very interesting.”

“But you two are weird.”

“Scorpio!”

Ichthys slaps his legs and shoots Scorpio a look, but he just rolls his eyes and goes back to his paperwork.

Sighing inwardly, I slump back against the couch, looking down at my hands.

“Eden, do you wanna do something?” Ichthys asks me, gently elbowing my side. I look at him.

“Like what?” He purses his lips for a moment, then looks off to the side, stumped. I sigh again. Zyglavis doesn’t want me to leave the mansion without him, and I doubt he’d feel any better if I were with the Problem Child.

“Let’s go ask Dui. Come on.”

He pulls me off the couch and leads me down to Dui’s room.

“Hey, Gemini!” Ichthys smacks open the door to Dui’s room, causing the poor god to jump half a foot into the air and drop the small package he was holding.

“Ah! Dammit, Ichthys, my cherries!”

Dui laments the loss of the pack of cherries he had been eating and kneels down on the floor, hurrying to pick them all up. “Oh…sorry, Dui,” Ichthys begins helping Dui.

“No you’re not, you butt-head.” I smile as I watch them go back and forth.

As Ichthys helps Dui pick up his cherries, he says, “I want to take Eden to do something fun today while Minister Uptight is doing the paperwork Altair sent down, but I can’t think of anything. Got any ideas?”

“Hm…” Dui drops the last cherry into the pack and closes its flimsy lid, cocking his head to the side. “Well…why don’t we take her to the Heavens?” Ichthys blinks.

“The Heavens? Is that allowed?”

“I don’t see why not. And if we get questioned we can just say we felt it was safer than Earth, especially since Zyglavis is too busy to watch her.”

“Stop talking like I’m a baby.” I grumble.

Dui smiles brightly at me. “Sorry. Well, what do you think? You want a tour of the Heavens? They’ve got lots of cherry groves.”

“We’re not going to go cherry-picking,” Ichthys says, bumping Dui. He rolls his eyes. “Besides that, there’s this cool forest that no one has ever fully explored. You wanna do that?” I look back from Dui to Ichthys, and the happy, bright looks on their faces leave me with no other option but to say,

“Let’s go.”

 When I step through the door linking the mansion to the Heavens, a warm breeze washes over me, as if cleansing me of all Earthly impurities, and a bright wave of white light comes over me. When it passes…

“Wow!”

I can’t help but cry out at the sight I’m greeted with.    

The ground under my feet is golden, as if the grass is made with pure gold, and the sky is a pure, impossible shade of blue, not a cloud marring it. The trees surrounding this area are a species I’ve never seen before, rising up higher than I have ever seen trees on Earth go. The air is sweet, but not unpleasantly so, and so…easy, to breathe in. Easier than the air on Earth.

“Come on, come on!” Ichthys grabs my hand and yanks me to the right, where a rather imposing, dark patch of forest is.

“Oh, wait, hold on. Those woods?” I gasp, yanking back.

“Oh, relax. Nothing bad can happen here. This is the Heavens, after all.”

“Yeah, Eden, don’t worry,” Dui laughs as he closes the door.

Even though I’m hesitant, Ichthys practically drags me into the mouth of the woods, Dui trailing behind us while laughing at my useless attempts at pulling back.

Once the entrance to the woods is well behind us, Ichthys loosens his grip on my wrist, but keeps ahold of it in case I freak out. Dui takes my other wrist.

“You know, Eden, if you were a little smaller, Ichthys and I could lift you off the ground and swing you like parents do with their children,” Dui says with a bright smile, contrasting the darkness of the woods. I try my best to return that smile, but this place is so…not necessarily scary, but…grim.

“So, do people not come in here because it’s so dark and dim?” I ask. Ichthys nods.

“Everyone says these woods are sad, too dark, and that means that most of it is largely unexplored. There could be species of animals and plants in here no one knows about! How cool is that?”

I don’t answer, and look around as best I can. The light of the sun that was seemingly endlessly bright barely breaks through the leaves of the trees, though small slivers of light somehow manage to reach the ground here and there. I take a deep breath. The air here is different than out in the bright, open space just a few yards away. It’s clean, but smells like wet soil after a heavy rain, not so sweet like before. I hear a bird call that I’m not familiar with; it sounds high but at the same time deep, and it’s not cheerful like most bird songs. It seems somehow melancholy, like a requiem. A few more birds join in, a chorus of sweet, high sounds like peeling bells, and low, brassy sounds like thunder. It’s strange. It seems as if they’re all singing the same song. I wonder if the animals in the Heavens are more intelligent than the animals on Earth.

“Hey, Dui, look over here!” Suddenly Ichthys lets go of my wrist and darts to the left, quickly disappearing from my view.

“Ichthys, wait! We can’t leave Eden!” Dui cries, but it seems like Ichthys can’t hear him. “Ugh…”

“It’s okay, Dui,” I say. “I’ll wait here. You go get him.” He looks down at me apologetically.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

And he hurries toward where Ichthys ran.

I stare uselessly in the direction my two tour guides are for a long time before I take a deep breath and look around me.

All around me, it’s dark and grey. I can tell there are shades of green, yellow, and brown, but they don’t appear as vivid to me as they might to a god. I wonder just how much more enhanced god’s senses are.

As I’m staring at nothing, a sliver of bright white light shoots down from the sky in front of me, making me jump. “Ha…” I gasp. I berate myself for being so jumpy, but then, several more thin rays of light appear a few paces from the first, seeming to go farther and farther into the forest. My eyebrows scrunch together as I stare at them, the tips of my fingers like ice. I curl them into my palms.

Something in my mind is telling me I need to follow these rays of light. I take a step, but then stop myself.

Wait. The rest of my mind says. This may be the Heavens, but bad things can still happen, especially when you’re in a strange, dark place and don’t know where you’re going.

I hesitate for a few moments, my body tensed and ready to start following the light as I have an internal battle with myself. Going back and forth for what feels like forever, I force the logical part of my mind to shut up, and my feet start moving.

The wind blows gently through the underbrush, rustling the leaves above my head and the tall grass and flowers at my feet. My hair sways around my head. The rays of light keep appearing, occasionally making me turn left then right, but only a few minutes after I started walking, I come to a small, brighter clearing.

My breath is thoroughly stolen from me when I see what is in this clearing.

A medium-sized pond sits at the center, and tiny lights of blue, pink, orange, and purple float about in the air, seeming to be alive, moving like jellyfish in the ocean. My feet move on their own, taking small, tentative steps further into the clearing.

Flowers I’ve never seen before grow in thick patches all around the perimeter of the clearing all the way to the mouth of the pond. Shades of gold, crimson, royal blue, champagne, and emerald painting the ground. I can smell their delicate scents as the air picks up and lets down.

The water of the pond glows a pretty pale blue, crystal clear, and I can see fish swimming around, even all the way down to the bottom, where colorful rocks are decorating it, glowing like those cheap bracelets you give little kids at birthday parties. The fish swirl gracefully around each other, almost like they’re playing. They all vary in size, from the size of a tube of chapstick to the size of my head, and are shades of scarlet, violet, indigo, and pure white.

A cool breeze, like that of an early autumn morning blows around me, dancing across my cheeks and making me shiver pleasantly.

When I lift my eyes, I can see that on the east side of the pond, there’s a path of sorts, made of grass, leading to a statue I hadn’t noticed until now. Curiously, I round the pond and look at the statue; it’s made not of granite or marble or onyx or any kind of stone I’ve seen, but a type of shiny, silver, crystal-like stone that reflects the rays of light that still shine down from the sky. I notice that clouds are thick over my head. The statue gives off the vibe of being a gravestone, intricate designs swirling up the sides and covering the top.

I cautiously approach the statue, and once I’m only a foot from it, I can see writing in the center of it. I squint my eyes and am able to make out,

       Their absence is a silent grief; their lives a beautiful memory—                                                                     Evgenís & Mala

At the front of the grave is a fresh bouquet of flowers, all marigolds, shades of red, yellow, and orange. Marigolds…isn’t that the flower of the month of October? And, October is the month of Libra…is this…

“Zyglavis’ parents…” I whisper.

I slowly sink to the ground in front of the grave, my eyes glued onto the words engraved into the stone. Zyglavis didn’t just let them go. He mourned them, just as humans mourn the deaths of their loved ones. Maybe even more so. It hits me again just how much he feels, just how sensitive he is when compared to other gods or even humans.      

“I didn’t have any reason to mourn them.”

His words echo in my mind, but now I know he was lying through his teeth to me. Zyglavis loved his parents, and it’s clear to see from the flowers that he still does, and that he misses them. I reach out and run my fingers over their delicate petals, tears stinging in my eyes.

I don’t understand why he lies about his emotions, why he puts on the mask and acts like nothing bothers him. How many times has he sat alone in his room, thinking about what he could have done differently for the humans all those years ago and wondering about what it would be like if his parents were still alive? How many times has he cried, brushed it off, then went about his business like nothing happened?

I swallow, but my throat hurts.

“Eden…James?”

 I jump, a wild gasp hitching in my throat, and I spin around to the voice I didn’t expect to hear.

“Zig…lavis…” I whisper, my voice hoarse. He stands at the line that divides the thick of the forest and the clearing, his eyes wide in shock at seeing me here.

“What are you…doing here?” He approaches me, eyeing me cautiously, and when he comes to be right in front of me, he cocks his head. “And why are you crying?”

“This is…your parent’s grave, isn’t it?” I ask him. His eyes widen just a bit, and silence falls heavy on us. All I can hear for a moment is my own heartbeat and the gentle rippling of the water surrounding us. Then, Zyglavis sighs.

“How is it you’re always find out things I don’t want you to know?” However irritated he looks, his voice is very soft as he lowers himself to the ground beside me, looking at the grave in front of us. “How did you even get here?”

“Ichthys and Dui wanted to explore this forest,” I reply. “And brought me with them.”

“Those two…” He sighs heavily and shakes his head. “Why did they drag you along with them?”

“Well…Dui and Ichthys are my friends. Is it bad to hang out together?” Zyglavis makes a noise in his throat and cocks his head.

“I suppose not.”

Two birds fly low to the ground a few feet away, twirling with each other and chirping merrily before shooting back into the trees.“You lied to me before,” I whisper, turning my gaze to look at him. He glances at me, then looks down at his knees.

“About what?”

“You know exactly what about. About…them,” I reach out my fingers and gently stroke the strange crystal in front of me. “You said you had no reason to mourn them. That you didn’t. But you lied.”

“Eden…”

“I want us to be honest with each other from now on,” I say, looking back at him. “I don’t want you to suffer in silence anymore, okay?”

Zyglavis winces. It’s just a tiny movement, but it doesn’t escape my gaze. Still, he insists, “I don’t suffer—”

“Zyglavis.”

I reach out to him and wrap my arms around his shoulders, leaning my head against him. His body tenses against me, and he doesn’t move to hug me back, but I don’t mind. “There’s nothing wrong with having emotions,” I whisper into his ear.

“There’s nothing wrong with feeling sad, or lost, or frustrated… there’s nothing wrong with any of it. So if you’re trying to be strong for the other gods or for the humans, or even for yourself, you don’t have to be. You don’t always have to be the rock. It’s okay, Zyglavis.”

 He shakes his head, his hair blending with mine.

We remain like that in silence for a moment, until Zyglavis whispers, “It’s not okay. It’s my fault the dark king is after you.

[planetcallisto]

— palette

pairing: jungkook x reader

genre: angst and a tiny tiny tiny bit of fluff

warnings: swearing, just a day of bad luck

word count: 4831

A/N: this was a request from anon, I took a lot of artistic liberties with the “accident” part because I didn’t want it to turn out to be too typical, I hope you still enjoy it.  Also there are quite a few perspective changes but hopefully they’re obvious enough, I tried to make them clear.

“Is there someone you need to tell us about?”

“No.”

"Thank you," you call out to the bus driver. They muster up a simple smile before shutting the doors and driving off. Even inside the warm, insulated bus, somehow the sharp fall breeze still made the people inside, lethargic.

Lethargic in the way that the petal of a shrivelling flower would snap and take it's time before hitting the ground to join the rest of it's discoloured colony. But to you it was anything but.

As it breezed by your uncovered legs and picked up bunches of your skirt, it also pulled back the edges of your lips. But you weren't cold. It almost felt like the wind was warming you, despite it being the complete opposite.

A smile washed over your face just as you saw the oh-so-familiar park bench. It was a little faded since the last time you saw it. It's usual coffee brown was now but a mere caramel. Though the nostalgia it held was as strong as ever.

"Hey, um, are you cold?"

"Yeah just a little though-"

"Why did you wear a skirt knowing it was chilly?"

"I thought you'd like it. You did buy it for me."

"Ah, you're right."

"Here take this back you're gonna get cold without it."

"No, please just keep it."

"But Jungkook-"

"If I kiss you will you stop complaining?"

"Mhm."

"Oh, how you play with my emotions."

"Just shut up, I'm taking you up on that offer right now."

"Only because I love you."

"Whatever you say Jeon."

The last few birds who could still withstand the cold chirped by and flew off with dizzying determination. And with that you were left alone in the city's only park. There were no children running around and throwing sand at each other. No older couples taking their daily walk. Nothing but the sound of leaves falling the cars speeding past you.

He sat on the edge if the couch, ready to jump up the second the phone rang. He'd been waiting for wait felt like hours but it had all been worth it when it's tones filled the small apartment.

"Hey." He breathed happily. His heart was pounding and he couldn't seem to wipe the smile off his face.

"Hey Jungkook. How've you been?"

Her voice was as soft as ever. Like if you had pulled apart a cone and watched the honey string between it. Or the stroke that the paint brush left on the canvas. Smooth and unforgettable.

"Are you free today?"

Hesitation ran through him. The only thing he could think of in that moment was you, sitting in your cute skirt, waiting for him on the familiar brown bench.

"Jungkook?"

"Ah, yeah sorry."

"So are you free today?"

A breath pushed past his lips.

"Yeah, I'm not busy."

You wouldn't mind, right?

‘Jungkook-ah, where are you?’

It was the third text you sent in the last 10 minutes. The sun was slowly descending painting the sky in oranges and yellows. Clouds were pushed out of the way, almost as if the sun wanted to be in the spotlight. November was a month of rain and cloudy days. It was the month of warm coffees and strolls in the park. The month of holding hands in pockets and sharing scarves.

Where was he?

Approaching the hour mark since the time you promised to meet him, it was probably best if you went home. According to your philosophy, if you have to call him to ask where he is then it's already too late.

The wind had picked up and it was no longer comforting. It was pinching at your skin, sure to leave it red and irritated. Whispers were laced throughout reminding you that 'hey he forgot about you'.

It was becoming hard the keep your tears from pouring over your cheeks, and especially so when the bus you'd taken to get here shows up with the same bus driver. He looked at you with sympathy and also some kind of judgement. The wind followed you into the bus but not before whisking your skirt well over your thighs, revealing  only other layer you had underneath them.

Quickly you held the fabric down and ran to an empty seat near the front so that you wouldn't have to lock eyes with anyone there.

'Jungkook-ah are you okay?'

Another desperate text.

If someone had been looking over your shoulder they would've noticed the onslaught of texts you'd sent the man with a heart beside his name with absolutely no reply. It had been years since you've been to that park with him and in that time you moved from your previous studio, which happened to be very close, to somewhere much farther. The bus ride from the park back to the station alone was almost an hour on good days, but noticing the traffic and cars filled with those more distressed than you, it was going to be a long ride.

"It's been so long."

He couldn't help but break out into an uncontrollable smile. She was sat in front of him in her signature baggy sweater and large doey eyes. Since the time they'd been away from each other he'd moved on and found you, the absolute love of his life. But now, as he sat in her presence, it reminded him of the fire she lit inside him all those years ago.

"I've missed you."

Her lips were tinted a dark pink and they coaxed him.

"I missed you more."

11pm.

Back at the station.

The wind was significantly crisper and your mind had long ago been whisked away with it.

It wasn't a long walk to your car but it might as well have been. Your skirt was continuously caught in the wind but after the embarrassment you were through today, you did not care to fix it. And besides it was too dark for anyone to notice.

Never once did you think Jungkook would stand you up like he did. The bright red car finally made it's way into view and you pulled out the keys from your bag. Your body fell into the, unlock the car, open the door, get in routine. Although this time there was an extra step. It consisted of sitting in the seat with your stare set to somewhere outside the windshield as every decision you've made thus far comes into question.

'Jungkook-ah I'm going home. Don't wait for me.'

With the boiling anger slowly building in the pit of your stomach you twist the keys in the ignition and make your way home, dignity already trailing far behind you.

"It was nice seeing you again Jungkook." She smelled of roses.

Roses whom are beautiful from afar, but once you tried to pick them up their thorns would puncture your skin and send a deadly venom into your veins. Their beauty unmatched and hers alike.

His blood had finally cured itself of the toxic she had once set in his body. But it was fall and flowers were holding onto what little life they had left, sprouting seeds and wisps in hopes of living till the next spring.

The moment her voice shot through the phone in the morning he knew that she was taking her last chance to sink her thorns into him to try and coax him back to her. And it seems like she's succeeded.

"I can't believe you actually came out to see me today."

"I told you I was free didn't I?"

Free.

That he was not.

Because you'd been waiting for him.

And he did not show up.

Fuck.

"I'M GOING RELAX, THERE'S PEOPLE IN FRONT OF ME."

You shout out the window before quickly closing it and focusing on the road in front of you. The rain began to fall and everyone decided that right at this moment they needed to get home. Whether it was because it's 12am on a Friday or because the world had officially made the decision to work against you, no one had time for patience, certainly not you.

It's been 10 minutes since you put the car in park, probably amongst other people who've done the same. There seemed to be something going on ahead of the traffic leaving hundreds of people trapped in their cars and waiting. The worst combination one could produce.

The ringtone Jungkook had set for himself on your phone rang for the umpteenth time since you got into the car and there was no way you were going to answer it. He wanted to play this way? Then so be it.

Just as the streetlight shone green your foot tapped down on the gas. It wasn't until a few seconds too late that you realized that your car was still in park and it was the impact from the car behind which sent the thought through your head. The car jerked forward bringing you with it for sure to leave burn marks across your uncovered skin from the seat belt. Almost immediately the motor choked up and died down and every light inside the car dimmed to nothing.

All at once the cuts on your hand and your eyes poured. Blood from your palms and salted tears from the corners of your eyes. If no one had seen the accident they would have thought you’d just gotten into a fight, one you definitely did not win.

Right on cue lightning struck and thunder sounded. If you were to step outside it would become hard to distinguish your tears from the rain as both were falling in heavily now.

You were stuck alone with a middle aged man knocking on your window, asking you for an explanation on, "WHY THE FUCK DID YOU NOT GO," and how "IF YOU DIDN'T LOOK SO FEEBLE I WOULD'VE KICKED YOUR ASS."

Fuck you Jeon Jungkook.

No matter how much you love him, he still throws you through the depths of hell to come back out half dead begging for him to hold you in his arms.

But now it seemed like the only arms yearning for you were those of the middle aged man outside your car. And he was not looking for a kind confrontation.

The tow truck drove away with you car, the back end almost completely destroyed, scratched and the paint worn off. Metal shone through the large gauges revealing the interior body. How incidental. Today was the day that Jungkook had finally ripped his last scar in you. This ploy was what turned you transparent, into simply a bundle of bones.

For the third time you climbed onto the bus with what little energy you had left and luckily it was a different driver. The disparity must’ve been emanating off of you because the driver along with everyone else on the bus gave you the same pitying expression you’d seen at least 5 other times today. One filled with forced melancholy just to make it seem like ‘hey you aren’t the only one’.

Whether it was genuine or passive aggressive was besides you. You could use any empathy you could get.

Not even 5 minutes would go by without that familiar ringtone would climb through your pocket and startle all the passengers. You made it a mission not to answer, even if the screen on the phone read,

‘53 missed calls from: Jungkook♡’

A sigh was all that you could muster up, and apparently it had been so filled with wistful gloom that it even made the wind outside dismal, if that was even possible at this point.

You were this close to asking the driver to stop the bus and get off wherever here was. The scenery outside was much clearer than that near the park but was also terrifyingly unfamiliar,

Next stop: Port Hope.

Was this all a crazy dream that you couldn’t seem to wake up from? Because that’s what it was starting to feel like.

Immediately you turned to the woman next to you, dressed in a simple dress pant and a blouse, most likely a school teacher who had to stay after school a little too long for that special staff meeting.

“Excuse me ma’am?”

Her students must’ve been a handful today, younger children, because her reaction time was slower than you’d expect from an elementary school teacher, hypothetically anyways.

“Yes?”

“What bus number is this?”

When someone asks ‘what ____’ about anything automatically means that they are lost and did on accident. It was the universal signal for ‘help me because I’m already worried as it is’. Though it might also be bright green flashing go sing to whoever was feeling in the mood of kidnapping some stupidly hopeful youngster.

“89.”

Oh.

Oh.

Not only did you get on the wrong bus but you also waited until it’s very last stop to ask. All the people rushed passed you and you envied the knowing look in their eyes. They knew what they were doing, where they were going and more importantly that they did not half to stand outside in the cold with a skirt on.

Your best option at this point? Ask the driver if you could ride all the way back to the station and just walk, or maybe if the earth wasn’t planning to turn it's ‘Satan mode’ on you, as if it hadn’t already, you’d find a taxi driver willing to take you back on what little change you had left.

‘67 Message from: don’t answer’

The wait at the edge of the road only grew longer and longer especially after seeing a dozens taxis with people already in them.

Though Jungkook was still just as persistent. And what you hated about yourself was that you knew the moment you saw his face you would descend into his oh-so-familiar embrace. No one knew that more than yourself; you were way to forgiving. His little stunt sent you on the wildest goose chase of your lifetime. Usually people would aspire to find something precious; love, money, gold, but you were in need of a trip home.

“Excuse me! EXCUSE ME?”

A man wearing a large winters hat ripped you from your thoughts. The bright light that sat atop his car read “TAXI” and then a string of number which, if you would have known them, could have been helpful.

“Did you hail a taxi or not?”

He was quite irritated and you were in no place to be offended. You stood there like the soles of your shoes had spiked that puncture through the solid cement.

“Yes.”

It sounded more desperate than you had hoped, but at this point anything would do.

Just as you bent to climb into the back seat of the car something in your knee cracked and shot electricity through your whole body. Once again your were frozen in your place.

How pathetic did you look? Ripped up, teary eyed, bleeding and with burn marks on your skin. 

What a mess.

“Are you okay?”

Knowing that he couldn’t see you, you still nodded and flopped down onto the seat to try and alleviate the growing pain.

“Please sir, just drive me home.”

Even if it was the loud DING of the elevator and seeing such a familiar face on the other side of the doors that tore the breath from your lungs, it was something you were going to ignore. Anything that was remotely sudden startled you now. On the way home, the taxi driver had decided that It’s still beautiful was an appropriate song to play. The irony of seeing him smile and sing along really brought the painting to a finish. All you could see was colour and it overwhelmed you. Vibrant shades of greens and oranges emanated from him and wrapped themselves around you, passive aggressively. They yelled and shouted in delight, more than ready to pass it onto you, but the somber blue hues that seeped from your body was enough to scare them off. And you saw the same in him too.

Easily forgiving was something you were ready to rid yourself of, especially in a moment like this. Yet, Jungkook knew you too well. The words ‘don’t answer’ flashed on the screen of your phone and his stupidly cute picture accompanied it. Hesitantly you ran your finger over the red button.

‘The caller you are trying to reach is not available at this moment, please try again later.’

Shock was floating in the air, though in two very different forms.

“Y/N-”

“So now you want to give an explanation?”

Usually, people would say that the first person to cry in a fight was the loser, that you were weak and so emotionally driven that you couldn't even stay composed enough to have a civil conversation. Oddly enough, it empowered you. It was like a landed hit on the opposer, you were torn apart emotionally, physically and mentally, yet you still had enough in you to tear him apart. The personification of I fall, you’re coming with me’.

“I really didn’t think you’d mind. You’re always so nonchalant about everything, Y/N please I’m so sorry-”

“Jungkook, you need to move out of the way.”

“Will you listen to me?”

“No.”

For the second time in a matter of minutes you managed to fix his face into the same shocked expression, “Why not?”

“Do you not understand? It’s a only a matter of days before my parents marry me off to Mr.I’m-financially-stable-and-friends-of-your-parents. They’ve been planning this since the moment they met him. Free to make your own decision? Isn’t that such a joke?”

Who was Jungkook to them? A random boy with ‘long shot dreams of becoming a musician’. In the prime of company growth and the media playing such a large role in everything, something as ambitious as a musician was laughable. And after the way you’d seen the life with one was like, you began to attain the same suspicion.

“This is what’s best for you, we promise honey.”

Never have they been more wrong about something. You respected them, they raised you into who you are today, yet could they be this naive? More time in the world comes with intellect; isn’t that what you’ve been told your entire life?

“But what if I love someone else?”

A light scent of fear brushed over their faces but was quickly replaced with some form of pity, but not the kind some people seek. It was more of a ‘you really think that’s a choice?’ kind of expression.

Out of feigned interest they asked, “Is there someone else?”

Was this the earth’s way of giving you a second chance? Mother nature herself was begging you to tell the truth; the sky cleared of the rain and the sun shone straight through the glass of the apartment. All this time you felt like your parents hand been forcing your brush strokes. They let you choose the colours yet they ultimately decided what to do with them and this was the first time you felt in control. Baby blues were all you could see, the colour of wishful thinking. The tip of your brush was millimeters from the canvas but something held you back.

“Honey, we don’t want you to end up like us. Please, we’re trying to push you away from that. We want you to be successful and not under the thousands of dollars of debt. You want you to live a happy life.”

It was your dad who spoke up next, “Is there someone you need to tell us about?’

“No.”

He did not speak a word. From the time you’d been together he found that you fell into your own word a lot and it was best for him to sit back and wait it out.

“Y/N...just look at you, at least let us go inside and here take my jacket. You idiot, you’re skin is basically blue from the cold. I’ll help you with it-”

“Now I’m the idiot?”

“What?”

“Today was potentially the last day for us to relive the days where things were less complicated and yet you still choose to go out without me?”

“How many times do you want me to tell you I’m sorry? Huh?”

Your fingers wrap around the collar of the jacket he’d thrusted your way and shove it back to his chest, “That’s not going to cut it anymore.”

“ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME? I. AM. SORRY. WHAT DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND?”

You wished it hadn’t taken you aback as much as it did, but his voice was loud enough to boom through the doors of the apartments nearby.

“I think you’re the one who doesn’t understand. Jungkook, after Sunday, this, is not something that can happen anymore. I’ve told you this a million times and you always brush it off like I’m joking. Why do you think that after the 2 years we’ve been together that you still haven't met my parents?”

This time, it was his turn to fall into realization, “I didn’t think you were serious.”

A scoff pushed it's way past your lips, “Why would I lie to you?”

You've never given him any reason to ever think that you were lying. In fact, he was the one who insisted on telling the truth no matter what.

“Move Jungkook, I’m tired and beat up and hungry. I don’t need this from you.”

“Let’s go eat. I’ll buy you something. What about some fries? Or maybe pizza, you were craving that earlier right? Or we could go to that new burger place you wanted to eat at-”

“NO. PLEASE I’M BEGGING JUST MOVE.”

The silence quickly grew as you caught yourself before you spoke any more.

“Why are you being so stubborn, I told you I was sorry. What the fuck do you want from me?”

“Nothing Jungkook, absolutely nothing.”

“So?”

The thought had been on your mind for a while now. Was this all really worth it anymore? Three nights from now you were probably gonna be in the bed of another man with a obscenely large ring on your finger, replacing the one there now. A simple silver band with a heart engraved into it.

“Ah...Uh...Y/N?”

“Mhm?”

“Are you busy?”

“Uh no just finishing my essay.”

He hadn’t even gotten up from his spot and his cheeks were already faded pink. Light from the lamp next to him cascaded over the silver ring; a cheesy hollow heart carved into it. No one had ever seen him so defeated and vulnerable but this is the way you made him feel. Weakly, he stands up and makes his way to the bar stool you sat on. Your hair was messy and lined papers scattered the table ahead of you.

“Y/N?”

“Yes Kook?”

Pet names. There to remind him that he meant something to someone. And he loved them.

“Give me your hand.”

It was almost a demand. You spun around on the chair and his trembling fingers gripped yours. Warmth radiated from him and his oversized red sweater, where he could hide all his nerves, though they were finally creeping up on him.

The ring slid onto your finger with ease and fit next to perfectly. Just as his lips turned up into a smile you leaned in and kissed him like it was the first time in years.

“I love you so much.”

Chocolate from the earlier cake pig-out lingered on his lips and it made you laugh, “You taste like chocolate.”

“You love chocolate.”

“I know.”

Just as easy as it sat around your finger, it slid off. Although it had worn down over the years and the heart was becoming shallower. Ironic isn’t it? As time went on the ring wore down until the heart was barely visible, yours alike. Each day the two of you were apart began to feel more normal than when you were together. It had become regular to not talk to him for a few days before reuniting for a whole week and back again. The metal around your finger was a physical reminder of your attachment to him. Everyday it stared back at you with it's luster and nostalgia, almost as if it was begging to return to that time. To the time when it was new and whole: unscratched and un-tattered. When your parents were to busy with their own lives to care about what you were doing with your time and if all that ‘homework’ was actually getting done. When the two of you went on midnight convenience store runs in the middle of the night because you were craving one of those spicy cups of ramen.

“I think you need to take this.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Jungkook just take it. I swear to fucking god-”

“WHY ARE YOU ACTING LIKE THIS? DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I FUCKING LOVE YOU? I WILL GET ON MY KNEES AND BEG YOUR PARENTS IF I HAVE TOO.”

Your fingers tightened around the ring and heat ran through your veins. There was absolutely no other action to be taken. None of this is exactly how you wanted it to be but did you have a choice? Not really.

“I DON’T HAVE A FUCKING CHOICE ANYMORE JUNGKOOK. JUST TAKE THE FUCKING RING BEFORE-” and you stop yourself.

Before? Before what exactly?

Before you fall in love with him all over again? Before you decide that your parents aren't allowed to dictate your major life choices? Before you say something you’re going to regret for the rest of your life?

“THERE I TOOK THE RING FROM YOU. IS THAT BETTER? WHAT. ARE YOU GOING TO TELL ME YOU DON’T LOVE ME ANYMORE AS THE ICING ON THE FUCKING CAKE? HUH?”

Definitely the latter. That was one thing you hated about yourself: saying things you didn’t mean just to cut the argument short because you hated confrontation.

“I’m sorry Jungkook,”

“I WAS KIDDING YOU DON'T HAVE TO ACTUALLY FUCKING DO IT.”

With that, you said the words that you desperately tried to hold back. Maybe it was the smell of iron from the dried blood on your lips. Or the fact that your knee was being impaled by satan’s actual spear. You regretted it before you even spoke; it hurt you just as much as it hurt him, maybe even more. But by the look on his face it was arrogant of you to even assume that.

“I don’t love you anymore.”

Everything around you might as well have faded into black and white. ‘Life was not single dimensioned’ they told you. ‘It was a multifaceted and full of colours everyone could see, but some would ignore’, they said. Though, from the way it’s been treating you was like an old painting: ready to cover you up with a clean layer of gesso and begin to paint the starts of someone else's life. You’ve done it before. A picture of a boy with the softest brown hair with an even softer pair of brown eyes hung itself on your wall and refused to be moved. In time, you began painting over him, creating a new story for him in which you were a part of. Where instead of his doe eyes fixated up they were stuck on you. And when you thought that all it needed was a few last strokes the familiar scent of gesso brought it’s way back into your life. Just like your parents had forced your hand with Jungkook before, it had happened again, but this time it was permanent.

“Do you, Y/N, take _____ as your lawfully wedded husband?”

The gesso has dried and once again you were painting the beginnings of a new life. One where your parents kept a firm grip on the brush and sent it only in straight clean lines. There was absolutely no experimentation with colour, leaving you with the dull greys they left in your palette. Even the tears it had collected over the many sleepless nights was not enough to wash away the white mask. If you tried to scrape it off the canvas would tear ruining the painting on the top and the other one you had covered.

What do they say? Beauty is in the eye if the beholder?

To you, it was an array of clouded skies with tears pouring down from the skies itself. But everyone else seemed to look at it through a completely different lens. Some with shades of purple as deep as envy itself and others with the blues of wishful thinking - thoughts that had come true - more specific to your parents.

Mother nature was not done with you either. If the letters that formed his name could be written in the sky as an obvious plead then they would have been there if you looked up. But instead you were met with drops of rain, greyer than you remember them to be.

“I do.”

[jupiters-club]

Origin of Love

Icarus spent the next few hours tending to this man. It's something he'd learned to do: sometimes he'd find washed up Pokemon on the beach and did whatever he could to help them. A lifeguard, he supposed, if that was the proper wording. He had gained enough information about cuts and bruises and even taken mortal classes on CPR and all sorts of things in order to be able to properly help.

But something he noticed as he worked on this man was that ever so slowly the wounds were beginning to heal. Of course, he knew that almost all wounds could heal. A Pokemon's body was amazing in the things each unique one could do. But this healing was much faster than anything he'd ever seen, even if over the past few hours the wounds had simply crusted over and began to close.

He still cleaned the wounds for infection and found some nicer clothes to put him in. It didn't embarrass Icarus. The sights he'd seen throughout his life were numerous. This man wasn't anything he hadn't seen before, but he did notice something peculiar.

Across the man's abdomen was a large red circle. It glowed softly, with red lines flowing down his legs and ending at the tips of his middle toes. Icarus raised an eyebrow, tracing the lines with his fingers. Even after numerous years of studying the ocean Pokemon, he'd never seen anything like this. Truly. Nothing was coming to mind, and he struggled to think. Wailord? Lumineon?

Icarus' hand was grabbed suddenly and with a thunderclap from outside, he started, instinctively pulsing his power out. The mysterious man snarled, flipped Icarus across the table, and held him down by his throat. They locked eyes—silver against flaming orange, eyes which held such an ancient power that Icarus feared for his life. He didn't struggle, didn't move, didn't say a word as the mysterious man's hands clasped around him harder and harder.

When Icarus thought he wasn't going to make it, that he was going to poof again like he did as a child, the grip loosened. He took a huge gasping breath. He tried to look away from this man but his piercing gaze was too strong. Icarus felt like something was calling to him.

Finally the man leaned down toward his ear. “Don't. Touch me,” he snarled in a voice deeper than Icarus had expected. It was rich and smooth, with the hint of a throaty growl. Something he didn't want to hear up close. “Do you hear me? Don't fucking touch me.” Icarus pulled himself away from the man as he was let go, and connected his thumb and index finger in a circle to mean 'okay!' He didn't look at the man, didn't say anything, and only pulled himself across the table and onto the ground on the other side to catch his breath. He could already feel bruises across his neck from where he'd grabbed Icarus.

“Are you going to speak to me?” the man snarled as another thunderclap happened outside. “Explain your business!” Suddenly Icarus felt...angry. He scowled, bared his teeth, and slammed his hands on the surface of the coffee table to haul himself to his feet. Briefly he could see the man sway, his eyes unfocused. “My children found you washed up on the beach,” Icarus said a bit too loud. “As with all Pokemon who wash up on my beach I bring them here and mend their wounds. Most Pokemon don't usually ATTACK ME.” The blue-haired man snarled, eyes flashing. “Me? Attack YOU? You're the one who—you're the one who--!” He breathed heavily through his nose and pulled the clothes on the arm rest of the couch on over his head and legs. He ignored every attempt Icarus gave to talk to him and when he was content, he spun around to speak to him again. “YOU are the one who was touching me.” “Because you were dying!” Icarus pinched the bridge of his nose. He knew just based on the aura this man was giving out that he should never attempt to fight him. “You were hurt! When I found you on the beach you were bruised and bloodied.” Taken aback, the man huffed. His eyes tried to focus but he couldn't, and Icarus watched him hold his hands to his face and collapse on the couch. Upon his back making contact with the seat, he cried out and flopped onto his side. Confused, Icarus didn't move. Didn't say a word. He tensed up, readying for another attack that never came.

The rain outside fell harder. It battered his roof harder than it ever had before, and for the first time ever he was afraid that something would damage his home. He needed to get outside and disperse this rain before it flooded his city—

From between his fingers, the other man glanced at Icarus. The orange flaming rage in his eyes had subsided into a gentle yellow. Icarus' guard fell as the man broke out into a sweat, his whole body shaking and trembling. “I—I...” It took him a moment to find his words. “I didn't mean to,” he mumbled. “I'm sorry--” He closed his eyes. The rain didn't let up. It pelted down harder now, and Icarus' hair stuck up as excess energy and tension filled his body. “Tell me it later,” he spat, turning to walk to his room. He gritted his teeth, reaching out to jam his sunglasses onto his face, pull on his shirt, and wrap his scarf around his neck. Once it was settled it seemed to come to life on its own, both ends patting Icarus down before he turned to leave the room again.

The odd man now stood up, staring out the window at the ocean. He looked to be hard in thought, but Icarus didn't bother to say anything as he left. He trotted down the steps to the beach and spun to face the house. The clouds above were pitch black. Every crash of lightning brought with it earth shattering thunder. Icarus couldn't stand by as the storm ravaged his city.

He took a deep breath. His form started to glow a soft white. His scarf melded with his arms and his form gradually changed until there on the sea shore he was in his original form. Long, white, and sleek, the Lugia raised his head and roared at the storm. Sand from the beach kicked up in a cloud as he took off into the air.

Icarus looked left and right. There was no source of this storm. He roared again. With a flap of his wings gusts of wind tore through the air, pushing the storm back from where it came. But the storm was strong, and it bore back harder than before, knocking Icarus aside with gusts of wind as strong as he could create. It threw him off balance, plummeting toward the sea, but another gust caught his wings and thrust him up again. Looking closely, he could see a large green flash zipping around. When it stopped, he saw purple. And a long white mane flowing down its back. The Pokemon looked like a combination of a bird and a dinosaur--

“Tornadus!” Icarus cried. No, screamed in frustration. “This is your doing!” From behind came a flash of blue. It intercepted a lightning bolt, absorbing it, only to shoot it right back at one aimed straight for Icarus' house. The Lugia shook his head, baring his fangs. “Thundurus! Why are you here.” “Half the world is covered in drought,” Tornadus began, flapping his wings in large motions. Clouds began to move away. ��The other in rain!” cried Thundurus. “The titans have returned.” Icarus spun away from a thunder bolt. He turned toward the Forces of Nature and scooted toward them, trying to think of a plan. “The titans?” Where'd he heard that before? “The king of the sea? Queen of the land? Come on you dumbass, did no one really tell you?” Thundurus spat. Icarus rolled his eyes. A sudden gust of wind knocked him off balance. In a fit of anger he roared at the storm, flapping his wings to kick up a breeze. Together with Tornadus he moved a whole area of clouds, pushing them back toward the horizon. They pushed the ocean back, creating huge waves of uncertainty that tried to reach the shore but couldn't. For a brief moment Icarus forgot why he was there, focused only on two of the Forces of Nature were there. They'd never help him.

Baring his teeth, Icarus swooped down toward the sea. He raced along the surface, dipping below, and came out in what he presumed to be the center of the storm. The wind was so bad he couldn't hear. The wind so cold it chilled him to the bone, as if he'd just reached the bottom of the ocean. In his long life, he'd never seen a storm as bad as this one. And while he was wondering how to fix it, hoping that his city and everyone in the ocean and on the beaches were okay, another flash of green passed him by.

If Tornadus was capable of dealing with this, so could he. Icarus rose higher and higher.

“Why are you helping?” Icarus asked, more out of curiosity now than anger. Upon reaching the bird, he spun around, the two back to back. Tornadus scoffed. Their wings beat in synch. “As assistants of the great Titan of the Sky, it is our obligation to settle the fighting between Land and Sea.” “This is not that.” “Are you dumb?” Tornadus snapped. He growled. “As we said, the titans have awoken! And you know what the titans do.”

Icarus had to think. The titans...the titans of Land, Sea, and Sky. The World Shapers, alongside Regigigas. He was created to spread the rain that the titan of the sea created subconsciously, but never given much more information than that. His heart almost stopped.

His boss.

If the titans had arisen, he'd be able to meet his boss, finally. After so many years of wonder who he was working for, and why…

The Forces of Nature, of course, had met theirs before. A lady, they said, of green and terror. She'd created them herself, while Icarus and his sibling were created by Arceus. That he knew. He remembered the shining face of the Creator as he hatched, and then being sent off...for...this. To spread the storms.

Icarus gritted his teeth and let out one final push. The storm on his side let up, being pushed back farther than he'd ever pushed a storm before. The wind that battered his body slowed. Tornadus hooted, chirped, and maneuvered in the air to appear in front of Icarus. “Listen. Diablo will be here shortly with dry weather. The entire west side of the world is under such a bad drought buildings are catching fire.” Tornadus scooted closer to Icarus as Thundurus approached. “You will take some of this storm to the other side.”

“I can't leave my home,” Icarus said too fast, stumbling over his words. Who was this Pokemon to tell him what to do? The storm was picking up again. “I have children there. There's an injured man who washed up on the beach that I'm taking care of.” Though in all honesty, he couldn't care less about the man. It was his children he was more worried about.

The Forces of Nature looked at each other. They seemed to share some sort of mutual understanding and Tornadus raised his head. What a snob. “Then I will take the storm. I'll fulfill whatever role I need to--” “Just do it!” Icarus snapped. Tornadus raised his eyebrows, lips pursed. The Lugia snorted deeply, mist coming out of his nose, and dove down toward the ocean. From there he flapped his wings, over and over. Behind him he could feel a dissipating wind and rain, and though it didn't get any quieter, the storm got easier to handle as Tornadus and Thundurus left.

He was left to his own thoughts. The storm was definitely a part of his thoughts, but he was worried about all the Pokemon who would be injured by this. He'd have to set up his spare bedrooms to possibly accommodate other Pokemon should they wash up on his beach—this man he'd encountered earlier must have only been the beginning.