Archive of Our Own

Release, it slithers softly

between atoms of blood-thick air

cloying and cloying

like the touch of a lover spurned

gone angry and bruising-fingered.

Sliding wax-paced and lazy,

fluttering on edgeshine

like the glint of sun through clouds

the shadow on horizons.

Lives saved, lives lost, lives traded

a heart weighed against a feather

breath shuddering to a stop

while the scales tip slow, slow.

The two of them sit on top of his shitty, beat-up van in the middle of nowhere, Oregon, and eat scrambled eggs cooked on a camp stove at four in the morning. The moon hangs imposing in the night sky, towering over conifers and redwoods as if a proud warrior, standing defiant against millions of green-needled spears. She sits with her legs carefully folded underneath her, bowl of unseasoned eggs on her lap and steel-tipped cane resting on the metal, cold wood felt through a hole in her thrift-store jeans. His legs dangle in front of the windshield at a sixteen-inch distance, kicking absentmindedly. She stares down at the hood of the van, down at the road before them, dirt and old, broken-up pavement and the body of a pheasant with tire tracks banding its midsection fifty feet away. He’s looking up at the sky, at the slivers of moonlight through the trees. They’ve been in Oregon for a month, surviving off of the money that became legally hers once she turned eighteen-and-change, though she’s hardly been keeping track of the days. A month of sitting around aimlessly, wanting for nothing, unable to cope with the horror of the realization that she can't keep doing this forever. A month of wandering out into the woods for hours on end, dreaming about dead bodies and tripping over rocks. Standing at the precipices of cliffs and wondering, for a moment, whether it’s worth risking it just, for once, to feel unburdened, weightless, completely free. She’s gotten lost twice, gone to bed hungry and woke up so starving she waded into a stream in her shoes and socks and blasted a fish charred, turned the water boiling. Torn into it with her teeth alone, perched on a mossy log a thousand feet up on the side of a mountain. Coughed and heaved through bones and organs and acrid, burnt flesh–of course she’s never learned to gut a fish, of course she barely knows how to cook anything that doesn’t have instructions on it. Both times she took to casting streaks of fire into the air, flames brushing and coiling around the tips of branches, smoke ascending high into the clouds, where they roiled and merged. And both times he found her–maybe from the smoke signals, but maybe just a bone-deep sense of terror driving him across mountains and underbrush until he knew where she was. He shouted at her, the first time he’s ever done it, worse than their last trip to Oregon alongside the others. Real, terrified, hoarse-voiced yells. He’d asked her if she was stupid, if she wanted to get herself killed, why she thought it was a good idea to stumble into the wilderness with a bag leg and a cane and no supplies but a few little bags of granola and an old jacket and a book she’d started reading in boarding school but never finished. The Well of Loneliness. It had been banned. He’d shouted at her until the sound of his voice started to resemble that of worn-out catgut strings, and then stared at her with those eyes like he couldn’t figure out who, or what, he was looking at. She didn’t have any answers.

The eggs have gone cold by the time she finishes them, sets the bowl down on the van’s roof with a metallic clink. It’s barely September, but here there’s a chill in the air, winds already picking up, drawing a few stray curls out of the bun she keeps her inner-flame red hair in, fluttering them in front of her eyes. It threatens to steal his hat from his head, too, but he catches it and folds it in his lap. The moonlight touches on the dark sheen of his short hair, the little flecks of silver running through it, silver like the fancy belt-buckle she knows he polishes daily and the gunmetal shine of the pistol he keeps tucked inside his trenchcoat. The contrast makes the lines of his face look sharper, more severe. She’s no longer afraid of him, hasn’t been for a while, that emotion replaced with a foreign sense of grief which rushes over her whenever she thinks too clearly about all that they and the others have done. She has no idea where they are now. Gone, like stones eroded into crushed silt, present only in the outlines of the spaces they left behind them. Right now it’s just the two of them, alone together on this night, an evening between months, between seasons, autumn slowly escaping the clutches of late summer.

“We should get going,” he says. Plants a hand and slides down the side of the car with ease, catches himself on stable legs. 

“Yeah,” she replies, watching him as he stands there expectantly, as if studying his movements. “I don’t actually think I can get down from here,” she says, voice a little too strained, a little too afraid of herself to be casual. 

“Oh”, he breathes out, strides quickly around the car so that she’s facing him. “C’mere, kid,” he says. She scoots herself to the edge of the van, uncoils her legs and lowers herself on her good one first. “I’ll help you,” he says. He catches her by the shoulder as she’s resting the tip of her shoe doe-footed on the ground, swaying slightly like a baby giraffe, unable to put any weight on it. He reaches up past her and grabs her cane, slots it into her hand. Helps her down and onto the ground foot-first, cane-second. 

“Probably shouldn’t do that again,” she mumbles. 

“Sure, kid," he says, though this wasn’t the first time and won’t be the last time–there’s really nowhere else to sit. They climb into the van, her with help, reaching down to pull her bad leg close to her body again once she gets back into the passenger seat. She used to sit here because it was the easiest place for her to get down from, because if she doesn’t have someone there to catch her she might end up sprawled on the ground. Now she has the seat because it’s only the two of them anymore. It feels wrong how quiet it is in the van, without arguments about the existence of alien black sites–before they actually went to an alien black site–or the stilted chatter of awkward flirting coming from the backseat. 

“We should find a hotel,” he says. "I know you haven’t slept since the weekend,” he says. They both know it’s hours to a town with even the barest simulacra of a hotel. They both know the sun will rise before they get there.

They do find one, eventually, at six-thirty in the morning. He pays for two rooms. She’s fallen asleep to the bump and shudder of the van on the broken-stone backroads, and so he takes her cane and the backpacks that make up all of their earthly possessions and carries her inside like she’s actually his kid, like the way he refers to her isn’t just pantomime.

The Grand Canyon, he says, is simply one of those things a person should see in their life, and she’s never gotten close–before the supernatural disaster that glued the five of them together and then split them apart, she’d barely left New England. So they go. They drive southwest from Oregon, and she spends the trip watching birds disappear into black specks on the skyline and mountains and forests all blur together in her head until she can’t really tell the days apart anymore. Most days they drive and drive until they feel like the van’s going to fly off the road if they keep it up any longer and so they find a hotel or a motel or bed-and-breakfast or a hostel or whatever the world’s put in front of them and they buy two rooms–as often as that’s possible–with her money. And eventually they make it to the Grand Canyon, the wound of the world.

This time, they’re camping for real, in a way that seems almost like playacting. They buy a tent and camp food and cook hot dogs a hundred and fifty feet away from the edge of the canyon. He builds a fire and she lights it with a spark of magic from her fingertips, and they watch the flames curl into the night sky. It’s getting dark earlier now, a week or so into September. Coils of smoke float lazily upward, upward as if trying to stretch their fingertips and reach out and touch the black between the stars. And there are so many of them, out here. The only light is from their fire, from the glow of magic that burns in her, and they lay down on sleeping bags and stare up into space. In this land, in this middle of nowhere as opposed to the last one and the ones upcoming, it feels like they are truly in some alien place, some far-flung escape unbeknownst to the rest of the world. It’s like dreaming, staring into the night–one tends to forget there’s anything else. Just the light of a billion glittering stars and nebulas and galaxies pasted to the roof of the universe, like she used to have on the ceiling of her childhood bedroom. It’s so captivating she forgets to breathe. For a moment, she swears she sees something crawl across the sky, and it strikes such an intense cut of fear into her that she curls up on her side and shakes for a few minutes, unresponsive, firelight flickering at the split ends of her curls as the breath in her chest trembles and contorts. There’s nothing there, not really. But that’s not exactly a comfort.

He drapes a blanket over her, and puts out the fire, pours sand over it. Some of it sprays, gets in her hair and on her clothes. It doesn’t extinguish her. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t wish differently.

In the morning, he insists they hike the edge of the canyon, just for a little bit. Just so she can see it. She grumbles all the way, sand and crumbled rock in her hair and on her skin and dirtying her grandfather’s cane. They walk only a few hundred feet, don’t leave visible distance from their campsite, but her steps get achy and unsteady and tired, putting too much weight on her bad leg and struggling with how the metal tip of the cane scrapes and quivers against the stone. She trips on an outcrop of million-year-old shale and falls on her good leg with a cry of pain and, in her thrashing as she takes her cane and fails to pull herself up one, two times, lets off a burst of heat that melts everything in a small circle around her into a smooth, black pane of glass.

“Jesus, kid,” he says, taking her upper arm on the side of her bad leg and holding her upright, watching her stab the cane into the glass, cracking it and giving her enough leverage to force herself to her feet. Her legs shake slightly as she steadies herself, and then she quickly wrenches her arm out of his grasp and takes several abrupt steps forward, getting herself to a safe distance. The skin on his hand is cooked-pink, singed, and he shakes the pain out of it as she stands completely still, breathing frantic. Little wisps of flame curl off the split ends of her hair, locks flowing in the wind, having slipped free of the tight, braided bun she keeps it in. She takes a breath in, out. Imagines herself as a furnace, a machine, her lungs a bellows, and manually slows the pound of her heart in her chest, taking in desperate lungfulls of air until the fire blows away in smoke. She feels a tightness at the corners of her eyes, a slight throb in her forehead, the kind of prophetic pain that suggests you’re a few difficult moments away from tears. Her chest shakes, and he’s at her side again, uninjured hand a few inches away from her arm but not touching. Finally, she turns her head to him, expecting anguish, or fear, or anger, and gets instead concern. She straightens her torso, pulling herself together like a flame dram back from a vacuum. 

“I’m sorry,” she says. He just shakes his head, but not, seemingly, in a way that suggests any sort of admonition. 

“C’mon, kid," he says, rubbing the flame-pink skin of his palm gently with his thumb. “Let’s go get something for this,” he says. “It was my fault,” he says. He begins walking briskly back towards their campsite. 

They don’t talk about it that evening. Hand dabbed in aloe and wrapped with convenience-store bandages, he cooks their remaining hot dogs over an open flame. She sits on a sun-warmed rock with her bad leg straight out and her good one tucked to her chest. She doesn’t want to talk about it, and he feels they should, but it’s not either of their choices’, really. She reaches out and jolts life into the fire, watches it flicker high and powerful, heat soaring into the air, pyramidal, casting a deep shadow on her face. There’s barely any light out here. Aside from the glow, the darkness surrounding them is absolute, pinpricks of stars the only thing in abundance. She could walk a hundred feet and take a wrong step and end up shattered into a wasteful pile of flesh at the bottom of the canyon, dribbling blood into a river that’s been carving out the earth since the beginning of the world. Contribute to its flow with the essence of her life. That, at least, would be something. 

He hands her a hot dog–they don’t actually have buns, having used them all for toast this morning. She holds it in her bare hand and takes a bite, tastes char and meat, and thinks of nothing. Up in the sky the universe is open for view, twisting nebulaic clouds and the glimmer of far-off stars. It’s so open out here, a hundred feet up from the center of the world. The blackness yawns and stretches itself lazily across everything she can see. There are so many stars above it’s almost enough to see by, and there’s a full moon hanging mightily in the air, immense and bright with the light of a forgotten sun. Out here, it almost seems like night is the natural state of the world, daylight an aberration, the glow of a billion burning motes the only thing anyone ever needs to see. 

They leave in the morning, silently.

They stop to watch the sunset at a rest point in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico, a hundred miles or so from Roswell. Completely and utterly alone, nothing but hilly plains and plateaus for miles and miles, sprawling in red-yellow-orange emptiness. The sky is titanically large, open enough it takes up most of the plane of one’s vision. It’s six-thirty in the evening in late September, and the sun is going down with a vengeance. It’s halfway to the horizon now, casting brilliant tendrils of light across the landscape as the blue above deepens to oceanic black. Clouds fluttering puffily in the sky are painted in incredible, vibrant colors, turning their pale shapes gold and orange. Sitting on top of the van, they watch as the sun lazily falls towards the peak of a far-off mountain. The colors of the world around them–deep tan and gold of the sand, the red and black of mesa and rock–begin to match those of the sky above, merging the two planes of the world into one masterpiece. Pink-flushed clouds waft in midair like brushstrokes, capturing the world’s colors and hanging them, framelike, for all to see. It is hard to tell where the land ends and the sky begins, or perhaps there is no true separation at all.

As the evening bears on, they gather up what’s left from the last town they came across–sandwiches, shredded pork and green chili on crispy, flaky buns squished slightly at the bottom of an old cooler and warmed by arcane heat. They sit down for dinner and watch where the sun begins to merge with the horizon, begins to drag the sky and the colors of the land down with it. Above the sphere is a black, tartarian emptiness, light not yet gone long enough for stars to breach through. Below it is shadowed desert, the skyline receding slowly as darkness begins to nudge at the corners of their vision. In the middle, where the rocky edge of a mountain like a colossal snake begins to swallow the sun, there is a band of sky thin as a knife’s-edge, painted such a deep, intense red one feels it in the shock of sensation as the light folds into the back of one’s retina. It drips into the landscape in a rush of crimson, and she finds herself thinking of flesh parted by a blade, leaving a line of seeping lifeblood behind. She thinks of tearing her sword across the throat of her best friend to save the lives of people she met barely a few weeks before, how her body crumpled to the ground, how the thrum of magic around her extinguished like a star disappearing from the sky. She thinks of doing the same to a much-newer friend, all the others huddled around a bathtub as she prepared to cradle a woman’s life in her hands, to squeeze it out and then stoke it like a flame. She had looked Mary-Katherine in the eyes as she pressed the edge of her sword into her throat, held the back of her head to keep her from falling as blood gurgled and sputtered from her neck, had seen how the fear never left her eyes, how it swelled as she began to die, how she had never been able to bring out that intense of an emotion after she came back, her pupils glazed over, inanimate even while alive once more.

The sun falls, and the band of red closes to a black sky, and all thoughts are purged from her mind. 

They get back to driving the next morning. It’s not so hot anymore, even in the desert, the frost-laced grip of the night digging in its claws and remaining for longer and longer as the days roll on. The next evening they’re still limping their way through Texas. They haven’t been in a town of more than a thousand people for nearly a week, surviving off granola and instant noodles. It’s midday, and they’ve both been in the van for seven or so hours, the monotony of it sinking into their bodies, hardening them, leaving them unsettled and fossilized. 

“Where are we going,” she asks, non-committedly. She isn’t quite sure what sort of answer she’s looking for. She turns her head slightly, and he’s looking at her, watching her expression in the drawn lines of her face.

“I don’t know,” he answers. It’s less of a lie and more of a mutually obvious untruth. They both know where they’re going, at least for now. She just hates it.

She mumbles back something incomprehensible, and turns her head away to watch the landscape roll on outside her window. They’re making their way through the Texas panhandle, and the hills and plateaus and mesas are slowly giving up their ground to farms and patches of green and dried-up riverbeds as they get closer to Oklahoma and after that, the woodlands. 

When she was younger, and driving in nice, old-fashioned cars with her brother–and only occasionally their parents–she used to imagine a creature loping through the neighborhoods and city streets and forests alongside them, a sort of shadowy, lithe, lupine figure that navigated trees and sidewalk crowds and long stretches of identical, grotesquely valuable residential homes with ease, slipping in between them and leaping over them, athletic enough to match any speed. She used to imagine it turning its head to see her watching it, meeting its eyes and finding something of kinship in its monstrosity. 

She’s been chased by a few too many actual monsters to find that fantasy easy anymore, but, staring out the window, there’s something of that little waking dream’s ghost in the back of her mind, a little sliver of pleasurable animal fear sliding down her spine as she thinks back on everything that was just inches away from reaching out and snagging its claws into her skin. 

There isn’t anything out there, not that she can see. But she knows far too well now that the things of the night stalk and hunt with skill that no human being–even her, even though she hasn’t been entirely human since she was eight years old–is capable of matching. Some monsters creep through the forests, and some monsters walk the streets in human clothes and prey upon the ones they know have little recourse but grieving acceptance. Sometimes you watch the treeline in the dark, and forget to keep an eye upon the person a few feet away. She’s one of those ones, now. Even with the ancient, unfathomable things locked behind the void of nonexistence, what they engendered in her has festered and grown like mold, made her like them from the inside out. She’ll never be human–never be quite like him–but the rot in her has left the bones behind. She is still herself, even if she no longer knows what that is anymore.

Kansas, or at least this part of the state, is, as she had expected, full of cornfields. Cornfields and dried-up riverbeds. It is empty, empty in a way that feels more pronounced even than she had felt in the vacantness of the wide, open deserts of the Southwest. It is not a vastness of space, but a lack of life, of presence. It is a place that feels like nowhere, that feels like not anywhere a person should be, a strange fold in the fabric of the universe subducted below the rest of existence, shunted off into its little sliver of the world where no human being should reasonably be able to reach. However, she is there, and running through a cornfield–or moving fast as close to it as she gets, unstable on her feet and missing steps with her cane. The handle, which unclicks and detaches when she removes the blade from its perfectly molded space in the shaft, sits on her body several inches higher than would normally be comfortable on a cane. This is so that when she removes the blade–straight, double-edged, thick-spined, sliding smoothly into a stiletto-point which parts flesh as easily in the cut as it does in the thrust–the shaft of the cane, which acts as a scabbard, is itself a comfortable height at which to move around with.

He’s anywhere from ten to fifty feet away from her, and she can hear him pushing his way past stalks of corn, gun in hand, shouting every few seconds so that she can triangulate his location, which is not in itself very accurate but good enough so that she isn’t completely losing her mind–and they are both on the chase, because it is in Kansas, in an innocuous field of corn adjacent to one of soybeans and a barn which looks as if it has not had the slightest degree of maintenance for at least the past seventy-five years, that they encounter the first monsters since they had faced down dark gods in the empty salt flats of Utah and somehow made it out with most of them alive. They are on the chase, and from some unidentifiable distance in front of her she can hear the tittering and off-tone laughter of the strange, cannibalistic black-eyed children, and all of the sudden she can no longer identify his voice at any regular intervals. She begins to slow, which for her is a gradual process so as to not pitch over into a crevice and die by bashing her head upon a rock left by an inattentive farmer. Her breath is fast and heavy in her chest, heaving as she brings herself to a stable stop, arm locked in front of her, point forward.

And, see, it had all started out quite simple. A tiny collection of buildings in the Middle Of Fucking Nowhere, Kansas, occupied by a few families who might as well be speaking some sort of Kansas Basque for all she knows. Charlie, however, whose accent has been identifiably, almost comically facetious since he had spoken his first word to her, and who seems to understand them perfectly, relays a series of admittedly tragic and concerning events as they had been explained to him by the poor people of this place, which certainly cannot be any real sort of town, which she guesses is on no map or municipal record. 

It goes like this: for the past few weeks chickens and cows and then dogs have all been attacked, their bodies found the next morning torn to nearly unrecognizable pieces, covered with the impressions of human teeth and looking like they had been ripped apart by primate hands. After eleven days a child had gone missing, a little boy who has been singularly identified as “Bo”, and when they had recovered him there were barely more than a few fingers and desiccated organs to recover. By the time the two of them had arrived, four more children had been slaughtered.

This was their purview, they had decided. This was what they knew how to do. So they had proceeded with a very classic method: a stakeout, the two of them in his shitty van, watching with binoculars and lit only by whatever glow she could produce with a certain degree of plausible deniability, waiting for some creature of the night to slink out of the corn and go stalking for flesh. So they set up on the side of a dirt road, a small patch of woods behind them, watching the line of corn across the way.

At two in the morning, which they are now about half an hour past, there was a distinct rustling, and, with seemingly no effortful movement, a small, childlike figure pushed its way into the five-foot-wide empty stretch of dirt between the road and the corn. He had directed at it a flashlight, and revealed what looked like a little girl in a dust-bowl styled dress, hair impeccably curled, with eyes like swirling pits of black oil, so dark they did not even reflect the beam, but absorbed it, sucking it in.

Then the girl had giggled joyfully and smiled with long, thin, knifelike teeth, two more voices resounding from behind her, chittering in the air like cicadas. The girl melted back into the corn, gracefully turning and sliding off, and both of them had broken out into a sprint. 

Adelaide bends over and rests her right palm–still clutching her sword–on the ball of her knee, and makes a valiant effort not to hyperventilate. This fails on most counts, and she begins to feel her higher cognitive functions slowly overcome by animal fear of multiple provenances. First, that she is lost in a perhaps-magical cornfield full of black-eyed cannibal elementary schoolers, and second, that Charlie is too, and she does not know where he is. This is, she decides, the worst part of this situation. He has barely been out of her sight for the past three-quarters-month of this trip, and she thinks that she is gradually losing her ability to function properly without accounting for his presence first. She straightens her back, and curses. Who does she think she is? She’s fucking better than this. Seven months ago she killed her own best friend and barely had time to cry, and now what? Breaking down in a cornfield over someone who she’s barely known for a year, who likely thinks about her only in the sense that a social worker thinks about their charges, whose trust and confidence she’s betrayed over and over since they met, her, with hands soaked in blood just like his, so that they cannot touch without smearing each other in the rotting mess of both of their pasts? She’s not so pathetic yet.

The sound of childish misbehavior snaps her out of her fugue, and her arm snaps back to attention, slipping easily into a fencing stance. She can’t actually fence very well, she’s not mobile enough, but she’s had a decade of practice compensating for herself, and a great deal more humanoid monsters have made the fatal error of assuming she can’t actually fight. 

It’s an oddly unsettling noise, almost too high-pitched, off-key in a way that comes out as just human enough to fool someone but a little too much like an animal screech to trust. It comes from all directions around her, and she plants her cane on the ground and puts all her weight on it and and her good leg and swivels from side to side, point out and wrist turned in a position that she could easily lunge from, but could also intercept any attack that came from a direction she could reach.

The chittering and laughing grew louder and louder, and sweat beaded on her forehead and slipped down her face, her hair, in small wisps, beginning to come free from the tightly wound bun she normally kept it in. Her hips and thighs ached in her low stance from lack of practice, but the position itself had been drilled into her body over years and years, and so her muscles did not make more than a passing protest. Her face and the exposed skin of her arms was covered with tiny little cuts from the edges of corn husks, some of which dripped in miniscule pricks of blood. The pain sat in the back of her mind, prodding at irregular motions.

The corn behind her back rustled, and she swiveled with her arm slashing outward to deliver a blind cut, severing a few stalks of corn and embedding itself with disquieting ease into the skull of a hissing black-eyed child knocked half over as it had been prevented in lunging at her. The child's thrashing unstuck the thick blade, and out of the wound flowed not blood but a dark, oily substance. The ends of her hair flared with fire, and the light cast shadows on the face of the little girl, which earlier had seemed round and cherubic, but was now angular, sallow, predatory. The girl’s lips were pulled back in a thin-fanged display of fury as it pressed a hand to the side of its head and scrambled back up onto its feet, hunched over in an animalistic prowl. 

The crack of several gunshots resonated from somewhere northwest, and Adelaide’s head snapped almost unconsciously in the direction of the sound. Her sword hand dipped in its position, and the little girl launched herself at her body, the surprise and the unexpected density of the creature’s body sent the both of them sprawling onto the ground, crushing several stalks of corn. The girl quickly skittered atop Adelaide’s body and began clawing at her face and chest, causing her to bring her arms up in defense, without room to maneuver her sword into an advantageous position. The girl’s sharp, pointed fingernails dug into her arms, and then she leaned forward and snapped her jaws around Adelaide’s forearm, sinking her teeth deep. Adelaide screamed, grabbed the blade of her sword with the hand not occupied by the hilt, and pressed it into the creature’s torso, rolling them over and executing an awkward grapple to pin her down. The black-eyed girl continued to yowl and claw at her, but Adelaide took her hand off the hilt, reared back, and punched her in her fanged mouth. She had a brief, but intense, spike of remorse at beating a child, but its inhuman scream quickly cured her of the notion. Yelling herself, Adelaide grabbed the little girl by the forehead, gripping her scalp with her fingers, and slammed her head into the dirt. She was no longer operating on any sort of training or martial expertise, but pure instinct, her body telling her to fight like prey. The sound of more gunshots tore a feral shout from her chest. And she held the girl down and let magical flare inside of her and flow through her arm. Out of her palm she cast an intense blast of heat, and the girl’s howl was cut off as her entire body, and several feet of the surrounding area, was nearly incinerated by the fire. Running on adrenaline. Adelaide poured more magic out of her in a blast of flame that scorched the area surrounding her and sent arcs of fire coiling upwards into the air, a spiral of heat surging up and out.

When the magic subsided, and she doubled over, clutching the two parts of her cane, the little girl’s body was nothing more than a pile of ashes, and she was kneeling atop a circle of black glass twenty feet wide, the corn around it scorched and flattened for another fifty.

She knelt there for more than a minute before the sound of incoming footpads jolted her to attention. She leaned backward and held out her sword, breathing heavily. However, the figure bursting out of the intact corn and into the charred circle she had created was a familiar one–silver-flecked brown hair messy from running, coat rumbled and distinctly stained with a black oily liquid, gun in hand. He quickly held his arms up, staring at her with wide, worried eyes. 

He began to approach gradually, and only after a few seconds did she realize she was still holding her sword out, her arms dropping immediately, the blade clinking on the glass. His steps picked up, and he slipped his gun back into his off-the-shoulder holster and dropped to his knees in front of her, his hands coming to gently rest on her shoulders.

“Fucking hell, Addie,” he drawled, frantically looking her over, his eyes catching on her assortment of small cuts and the bites and gashes covering her arms. She immediately looked away from his gaze, which was horribly worried and paternal. Unbearable.

“I’m sorry–” she choked out, and he shook his head.

“Don't apologize,” he said. “Don’t apologize, kid,” and his voice was tired and hoarse, and he looked profoundly exhausted and unhappy.  He tightened his grip on both her shoulders and rose, bringing her up alongside him. Throwing an arm over her shoulder, he waited as she slid the sword back into its place in the cane and clicked it shut with a flick of her wrist. 

They set off, both of them stumbling and bleeding, back towards their van. It takes them about twenty minutes to triangulate the proper direction, and another fifteen to actually get there. By then she’s lost a good bit of blood, and he practically has to lift her completely off her feet to get her into the equipment-stocked back of the van and bandage her up carefully, gently, with a great deal of practice in the muscles of his gnarled, scarred hands. 

Their second tourist destination, as he calls it, is one she picks out almost entirely on a whim. While he seems to be inordinately, unexplainably amused by every single world’s-largest-rubber-band-ball and giant tyrannosaurus statue and thirty-foot stack of hay bales they come across as they traverse the backroads of the country, her tastes, because as a child she was significantly more obsessive and maladjusted, have always tended a bit more towards the obscure and occult and ancient. Whether this is the influence her best friend, who had literally dealt with a dark and inexplicable entity beyond mortal comprehension and resistance when she was about nine years old, has had on her, she will never know.

So, murdered best friend, notwithstanding, this is how the two of them find themselves having a picnic on top of a millennia-old earthen temple, looking out upon the surrounding trees and houses and the collection of similar, geometrically arranged mounds and wondering what the fuck happened to this place. Or, at least, she is, because she can feel the thrum of magic residual to the earth which construes the structure, feel the ancient edge of jubilation and violence and sacrifice. People died here, she guesses. Lots of them. Though she’s not nearly as adept a medium as Mary-Katherine, she’s been an inhuman sorcerer empowered by malignant gods for most of her life, and so she has some degree of competence in this territory of the arcane. If she concentrates hard enough, she can just barely sense the blurred edges of hundreds of ghosts, many of them with an essence that reflects her own. They died violent deaths, she sees, feeling their anguish but also their excitement, their honor, the celebration with which their deaths were attended. Not exactly an uncontroversial celebration, seemingly, 

But she is not Mary-Katherine, and she has never been able to reach very far into this world–where Mary, a tall, slightly unsettlingly pretty Southern belle of a woman, could swim like a natural, walk easily on the ocean floor of the astral sea, Adelaide can only dunk her face into the stream of consciousness and let it wash over her. She cannot truly see these men and women, cannot feel their souls as intimately as her own and see them as the people they once were, but can only glimpse through frosted glass the ghosts of their ghosts, the ancient slivers of their selves preserved in the moment of their deaths, like imprints of bone fossilized into sedimentary rock. 

“Communing with the spirit world, eh?” Charlie says, and it’s so sudden she actively yelps and falls over on the blanket, springing him into action to keep her upright, leading to a frankly humiliating situation in which he’s got both of his arms wrapped around her own and she’s half slumped over, legs pointed in three different directions, cane completely dropped at her side.

“Jesus, Charlie–” she very nearly shouts, hoisting herself back upright and grabbing her cane from the soft grass covering the plateau on top of the mound. 

“Hey, there’s kids here, maybe I’ll make you start putting money into a jar,” He says jokingly, eyes already glimmering. There are, in fact, kids here: this is a public park, and it is currently occupied by several other families on very similar outings, except those other families are much more normal than the two of them are.

“With what jar, Charlie, with what jar? You barely have a plastic cup in that old piece of garbage–”

“Hey, we killed Cthulhu in that piece of garbage, I won’t have you maligning my baby after the fact,” he retorts, and both of them are smiling, and somehow she feels more relaxed than she has in several entire months.

“It was not Cthulhu, and we didn’t kill it, you pedant, you can’t kill Cthulhu, we just, made it go away, I don’t know,” she says indignantly, reaching over with her free hand to give him a little lighthearted shove, as if they were actually, as if they could do something so awfully mundane as touch each other casually, unremarkably, like parents do their children.

“You’re the pedant, that’s what that damn private school does to you, makes you all pretentious–”

“Charlie,” she complains, high-pitched and whining, and she feels like an actual teenage girl for the first time since her inaugural murder. He laughs and stops, because he really is kind to her, because he really doesn’t actually want to belittle or demean her. Because they’ve both killed people and they’ve both seen things nobody should and she thinks she cares about him more than anyone else she’s ever known, almost more than anyone she’s truthfully related to, and she hopes he reciprocates even the most minuscule granule of that feeling. 

Her parents probably think she’s missing, not dead, and she didn’t give her brother a straight answer when he asked her whether or not he should dissuade them of that impression, but in this moment, sitting next to him on a blanket on a sunny day having let him prepare a picnic for the both of them, she finds herself wishing in the back of her mind that she had been pronounced dead when she first ran away, so that there was no shadow behind her, and the two of them could be the only thing that she would eventually remember having.

But she’s still a missing person, and they can’t ever have that, and so they have to keep running toward the end of whatever this is, in one way or another. 

The Smoky Mountains are technically a little bit out of the way, but they’ve been going down backroads and avoiding police the entire trip because, of course, Addie is still a missing teenage girl whose parents have more money than the GDP of some small countries, and even though she’s been gone for a year or more, they’re still actively looking for her. Since she’s been telling people her real name this whole time and hasn’t exactly been subtle in the places that she goes, they’ve been in danger of being caught for quite a long while. And, of course, if they are caught, despite whatever testimony she might give, the police will probably decide that Charlie must have kidnapped her for unscrupulous and unthinkable purposes, which, while false, is probably sensational enough that the kinds of lawyers her parents could buy could send him to the firing squad for it. They, obviously, would rather that not happen for both of their sakes, and so they’ve been trying to take the most nonsensical and idiotic route a person could possibly use to drive across the entire US in order to shake off the authorities. This, of course, leads them to middle of nowhere fields in Kansas and tiny county roads throughout the Great Plains and the Eastern Woodlands and eventually, to traveling through the mountains on dirt trails and roads which haven’t seen a re-pavement in twenty to forty years. This is, ostensibly, good for them, as they avoid the worst of the situations they could have faced, but it also means that sometimes both of them go days or weeks without speaking to another human being that’s not each other, or without a proper place to sleep for days at a time. Thankfully, both of them are used to sleeping on the run now, they’re well-trained by their previous continent-trotting, and it isn’t as hard as it used to be. 

Being in the middle of nowhere does allow them a bit more freedom than they would have on interstate highways, though. And there’s also no real deadline to this trip, in fact, she can tell that both of them dread its ending more and more with every passing day and each mile they draw closer to home–her actual home and his fabricated one–and so throughout the journey, they’ve also made ample time to stop and spend time not in a car, for her to stretch her legs and walk, and for him to do the same and complain about his aging back, to which she always retorts that at least both his legs actually work, and, of course, she always wins. 

Today they’re hiking on a mountain trail rated at a fairly middling level of difficulty, because he’s old and she can’t maneuver on anything intolerable of brass-tipped canes carved in the late 1890s. This means that they never actually go very far up a mountain, which is generally not an issue for either of them.

It’s getting closer to winter, and they’re both in thick jackets and thin gloves, taking a walk in the woods like a father and daughter, and not talking about the ways in which it seems like that. 

The trail they’re on is a little less than ten feet across, giving them plenty of space to walk side by side. It’s dirt and gravel, the former of which is mostly fine for her, the latter a bit less so, and so he’s standing at a distance which is polite and respectful but also close enough that he could easily close it and catch her if she falls. It’s not something she asked him to do, but one he simply fell into, because he knows her, knows that being treated as if she’s incapable of getting herself around drives her furious like nothing else, and so is inclined to position himself optimally so as to be able to aid her at a moment’s notice but also so that she would never notice now intentionally he’s doing it.

The trail is bordered on either side by a thick breadth of trees, Frasier Fir and cedar and maple and birch and hickory, all except the pine colored pink and crimson and orange and gold in the autumnal afternoon sunlight. She hasn’t been able to walk in an actual forest for the sole purpose of enjoying it for years, and so has spent this entire week absolutely elated, dragging him on trail after trail at a might greater rate and intensity than they probably should be doing, but she can’t help herself and he has been graciously indulging her. There is the faint chirping of birdsong in the air, and a soft, cool autumn breeze tugging at her hair, which she has, for the first time in a significant period, worn down, long red locks in loose natural curls spilling over her shoulders, down to just below the bottom points of her shoulder blades. She’s wearing a mid-thickness turtleneck underneath her brother’s Catholic-private-school varsity jacket, the sleeves and collar a bit too wide on her. The red and muted brown and ginger and the still-tan skin and faintly evident freckles which colors her matches the ink-shades of the world around them, harmonizing. She’s a few feet in front of him on the trail, demonstrating an ease and comfort in her movements that he rarely sees and which she normally only achieves in familiar environments with long-held knowledge of paths and textures, almost prancing as she walks along the trail. His hands are folded in the pockets of his old trenchcoat, and he’s watching when she turns back to him in a casual swivel and smiles wide, quickly flicking back to continue trying to track the locations of birds in the trees.

She looks younger like this, he thinks. He’s only known her for a small portion of her life, but when he met her she was truly on the run, terrified, stressed out of her mind, working a dead-end job which hurt her constantly and which barely paid enough to keep her housed in a shitty hostel, and her eyes were always tired and afraid and never, never as carefree and happy as she looks now. She looks like someone her age, who would perhaps in normal circumstances be going to college and getting away from the people who denounced and jailed her when they should have protected her, maybe who would be somewhere far from the place she grew up in, with no one she knew, somewhere safe where she could do what she wanted, could love who she wanted, could kiss a girl without worrying about whether she’d have to leave her behind or end up slitting her throat. That’s not what she’s had, and in his wildest, most absentminded dreams, that’s something he’d give her, and the moment he had the chance, he would jump on it and hold on like he’s held onto nothing else in his life, not even his own name.

Eventually, they get tired of hiking, and run out of excuses to keep stalling, and so they pack up their things and she ties up her hair and they keep going, onward and onward.

They’re in the next mountain range for fairly similar reasons to the previous one, and like Tennessee, they’ve elected to stay in the Blue Ridge for a few days, not so much to keep a low profile as to give themselves a fucking break. They’ve been traveling at this point for over a month and a half, and the leaves are turning and at the very edges of the branches falling off the trees, and they both know they’re running out of time. Maybe with one another, maybe with themselves, maybe both. There’s no way they can keep this up forever, but neither of them really wants it to end. So they’re compromising, and have stuck themselves up in a cabin high in the mountains for most of the past week. Their cabin is a nice one, because these are the kinds of things she’s willing to spend her money on, with running water and some basic electricity and, even a very small television–for them, who’ve been sleeping in their van for most of the trip, this is practically the lap of luxury. However, the only television, or news, really, that either of them have seen in this past year has been mostly on similarly tiny televisions in shitty motels which advertise themselves as having Color TV! and then oftentimes don’t, so neither of them really knows what’s going on in the world. Being overly focused on preventing the corruption and destruction of the earth by an unfathomable and unimaginably evil god will do that to you, she thinks.

Nevertheless, they’re set up in two tiny beds in the singular bedroom the cabin has, eating food that he cooked for the both of them and watching Jeopardy! on the small, grainy screen when the loudest noise she’s ever heard booms in the background.

Now associating unexplained loud noises with bloodthirsty monsters trying to devour her and all her friends, she immediately jumps out of bed, magic alight in her hand, and rushes out of the small bedroom of the posh cabin and out into the main room, where out the windows the sky is black and heavy with clouds, and it is pouring rain harder than she has ever seen in her life.

Boston gets storms, certainly, but in a skyscraper or an inner-city brownstone or an outer-city mansion, one doesn’t tend to notice them all that much. It’s rain and noise, but the world has made it no longer immediate, no longer a threat. They’ve blanketed themselves in steel and concrete and so they no longer feel the wrath of the open sky as they used to, no longer understand or expect its malice and indifference to be so profound and contracting to the human spirit.

Out here, it is not like that. Out here, the mountains will swallow you whole and the sky will open itself up upon you, and if one is not careful they will find themself at the mercy of a thing which does not know they exist, nor does it care, nor did it have any in the first place. A storm has no mind. A storm cannot help itself. If a storm destroys, it does so in the way that a person might breathe, as an unconscious mechanism of its existence, unnoticed, unremarkable for the being itself, but awesome and notable for anything else.

The storm seems to envelop and conquer the whole breadth of the sky. It is black and gray and deep purple and dark blue, and the world is black and shadowed in its wake. It hangs over the mountains like a hammer and casts its judgement down upon all it can claim.

The landscape feels as if it is holding its breath in anticipation, cringing, preparing itself for the inevitable resounding boom of thunder which ripples through the air for miles and miles. At regular intervals the sky crackles and splits apart in resounding flashes of lightning, splinters of white-hot fury shot from above, lancing through trees and scorching wherever they land. 

She finds herself transfixed, and stands and stares out the window, wide-eyed, for an indeterminate period of time. He followed her shortly after she fled the room, and now he stands a few feet behind, watching her. Struck by the immensity of it, her magic has long fizzled out, leaving her to seem small and vulnerable in comparison, a scarred eighteen-year-old girl who has had very few people in her life who have loved her. She is captivated, and he thinks that she looks like a pillar at the edge of the world. A final beacon, a monument to herself. 

He takes several small steps forward across the dark wooden floor and old-fashioned carpet, approaching her carefully and somewhat noisily, so as not to frighten her. This does not necessarily succeed, because everything outside is very loud, so loud that when lightning strikes across the landscape it renders most speech inaudible.

He sets a hand gently on her shoulder, over the old high-school-orchestra shirt she wears to sleep, and she yelps and flickers more than an inch into the air in shock. He winces, but her eyes lose their frenzy as soon as she sees him.

“C’mon, kid,” he says, rubbing her shoulder lightly and gesturing back towards the door with his other hand. “You should get some sleep. The rain’ll help.”

She mumbles something in vague affirmation, and fidgets with her hands, and follows behind him like his child as he directs them back towards the room they’ve been sleeping in.

While she climbs back into bed, he turns the knob on the television to shut it off, leaving them both in darkness, except for a nightlight across the cabin and the faint, distinctly arcane glow to her body that’s only really visible like this. Their last trip changed her, he knows. Made her into something more than she used to be, left her sense of humanity and morality hanging by a frayed thread. She deserves better than to feel like an abomination, he thinks to himself. For what she is, for who she loves, for what she’s done. She’s killed four people and brought some of them back, she’s hurt plenty more, she’s tried to give up her own life to save them when their only other hope couldn’t bring himself to. Now he feels like all he’s got to hold onto her is a desperately thin rope, and the two of them are holding it taught, preparing for it to be cut. He lays down in bed and pulls the covers over himself. On the other bed, she’s facing away from him, and her chest rises and falls slowly, consistently, comfortingly. He’s been keeping people farther than arm’s length for a decade or so. He’s lost too much, and in the depths of his very soul he knows that losing this, too, would break him in ways from which he could never hope to recover. He wants to let the rope go slack. He wants to drop it, and gather her in his arms, and make her feel safe. He wants to be there for her. He wants to keep her.

He resolves that he will never let her know this. He resolves that he will let her go.

 A week or so later, after practically two months of procrastinating in their crawl across the country, they end up where they always knew they would. The place that is her home, that he lied and said was his. The voice he wears as a disguise. For the last few hours of their trip, they do not exchange a single word between them. He has known the address for days, and as he travels through the city, every fiber of his being screams at him to turn around, to keep going, to never look back at this fucking city, to leave it all behind and engage in his wildest, most delusional hopes as to how this would always end. But he knows to do so would be to lose her, perhaps even more profoundly than how he will when he carries this through. To deny her the decision she has made, to exercise the authority she has given him in such a wholly selfish way, what would that make him? Everything she hates about where she is going, likely. She does not often speak about her childhood, does not tell him about her family other than her brother. He knows what he knows secondhand, and perhaps that means he does not know it at all, because he does not know it from her. He has received small glimpses of herself as she truly is–in the freedom she found traveling with him, in the way she had been enchanted by that vile bloodsucker in Oregon, in how she always seemed quite awkward around Mary-Katherine in ways which differed from the ones in which everyone else was uncomfortable around Mary-Katherine. He’s spent his life as a lowlife, with other lowlives and outcasts and migrant workers and people who turned to dark things to get by when they had no other choices. He knows what drives a person to run away from a family with everything hung over their heads. But he cares about her so much he does not even want to contemplate the ways in which the people she should have been able to love have hurt her. And so he does not. He sits and does not watch her with concern as she slumps further and further into her seat as they drive across the city and get closer and closer to their destination.

They have not been in a large city in months, and as it is Boston, she finds herself missing it, in an estranged sort of way. The attachment to the city feels as if it is being experienced by a completely separate person whose mind she is looking in on, whose thoughts are viewed through an opaque pane of glass. 

They travel down familiar streets and she watches out for familiar buildings, and feels a spike of painful love in her heart when she sees places she recognizes. She has not been back at home in over a year now. She does not know whether she ever wanted to go back, really. But now she is here, and now she has to reconcile the different versions of herself which have existed in this place and far from it.

Two years ago, she was miserable, and half-mad from isolation, and the beginnings of her magic made her feel as if she truly was going insane, if her parents were going to send her to a doctor like Rosemary Kennedy and have her made docile and incapable of existing independently, excised the parts of her that were intolerable to them. When she realized that she could use this new madness for rather explosive purposes, she jumped at the opportunity, and in the process of her escape she stole several thousand dollars of her father’s money, and tore apart her room, and blasted the padlocked door off its hinges, and eventually was forced to blow up a car. But eventually, she was free.

Fuck, she thinks, she probably is going to end up like Rosemary Kennedy. She thinks of this as basically analogous to dying, and finds that she does not care all that much. She has been too close to death far too many times in the recent past for it to have any great effect on her. If they try to take her away, she thinks, she will have to kill again, until someone finally puts her out of her fucking misery.

No, on second thought, she doesn’t want that. She’s not even sure why they came here, what satisfaction she intends to gain from having this confrontation, or whatever it’s going to be. But she’s already had so much that she loves stripped from her, and so she wants to cling onto what she has with the strength of a tree pinning itself into the earth by its roots, only removable by drastic measures. She will not let her family take this too, she decides. She’s let that happen for a too fucking long time.

Eventually, they travel outside of the sprawl of old, classical homes pushed up against one another, far past the reach of skyscrapers, into carefully manicured hills and forests situated between the city and the surrounding towns, within which are the oldest and wealthiest and most isolationist neighborhoods in New England. Eventually, they pull beside a vast house she once would have recognized as home. For a long moment, she does not speak. She breathes manually, taking long, deep breaths. Her knuckles whiten on her cane. She cannot bring himself to look at him. If she sees what is in his eyes she thinks she will collapse. 

Turning her head in the opposite direction from him, she forces open the car door. Carefully, without aid, she slides out. She can sense him twitch as if he wants to move to help her but hesitates at the last moment. The air between them is almost opaque, just a few feet apart and yet a vast and boundless chasm. Her body feels as if it is polarized towards fundamentally opposed ends. She wants to be done with this–she does not want to leave him. She wants to have herself back again–she never wants to see the faces of her mother and father for as long as she lives. She will do anything and everything to have back what she cannot. If she could hunt down the girl whose face she keeps in the locket around her neck, she would. If she could bring her best friend back from the grave, she would. If she could break reality over her knee and force Mary-Katherine’s soul back into her body, she would. If she could burn this city to the ground, she would. If she could keep him–.

She would.

She steps out of the car, and waves to the watchman by the gate, who gawks at her with abject horror and also a great deal of jubilation. She forces a smile onto her face. She tenses every muscle and every atom in her body to keep herself from turning around and looking back at him. She walks forward, posture upright. Holding her cane regally. She lets magic glimmer around her, lets it create a shift and wobble in the air, feels the power of an ancient god’s thumbprint on her soul flow through and out from her. She feels as if she could remake the world in the image of her liking. She knows how she would construct it if she really could.

She walks through the gate, and up the path, and through the door that opens in her wake. She does not look back. It will break her: and for this, she needs to be whole. Or at least to feel like she is.

He is waiting for five minutes, then ten, then twenty, then thirty. His heart and stomach begin to sink in his chest, and he realizes what he has done. This is going to destroy him, he knows. He cannot imagine a world in which he keeps going afterwards. He will never see her again. And if by some miracle or by some sort of tortuous machination of an evil God, he does, he will not know her. She will be something different, something smaller, and it will have been his fault. He will have done this to her, and she will have a rightful reason to blame him. After all, if he digs deep, isn’t this what he wanted? A reason to give up? To be put in a situation where he’s not the one who broke it off, but it’s still his fault. Another fucking reason to hate himself–isn’t that what he was hoping for? Isn’t this exactly how he knew this was going to end? Didn’t he string himself along anyway? Didn’t he string her along, just so he could pretend he wasn’t really abandoning her? That he had no other choice? That this world was never one in which he can have the things he wants so desperately, with his entire mind and body, it seems that the amalgamation of all that he is can be focused into one single point, one single burning mote of guilt and fucking what could have been?

He leans back against the metal of the car in front of which he stands on the grass barrier before one reaches the actual sidewalk, and doubles over, and buries his face in his hands, and howls.

No, he thinks, no, fuck this, fuck Boston and fuck New England and New Orleans and fuck rich people and fuck Warren Lee Addison and Charles Campbell and everyone else he is and everyone else in this entire piece of shit world. He has spent the past fifteen years running and hiding and lying and he has managed to find one thing that he has been able to love and care for with his entire soul and which makes him feel like a person again and which he would give his very life to protect is he has to, and this has been the worst mistake of his life, and he will never forgive himself for the rest of his miserable days if he does not correct himself this singular instant. 

He adjusts his coat and starts walking forward, and he is prepared to kill a man if he has to, he is prepared to kill multiple people, because he knows he is a horrible person but she does not believe it and that is the only sliver of hope that it might not actually be true which he has.

And then–

And then Adelaide walks out of the building, shoulders slightly more hunched than when she came in and her eyes red and her face streaked with tears, and he stops in his tracks.

God, he thinks, I don’t actually think you exist, but if this is a trick, I’ve watched a god die in all the ways that matter once, and by every dark thing on this earth I will watch it happen again.

It is not a trick. She slips out of the gate, and smiles and waves goodbye to the watchman, and stops six feet away from him. He looks at her as if she is the Archangel Gabriel manifest in human form.

“Hey,” she says. Her voice is raw, hoarse–she sounds as if she has been screaming. She reaches up with her free hand and wipes at her reddened eyes with her sleeve. 

“Adelaide,” he chokes out. He does not actually know what he means by this.

“Get in the car?” she asks. He does not actually know what she means by this.

“Addie,” he whines. His heart feels like it is going to shatter all of his ribs. 

“Charlie, I–”

“You shouldn’t do this,” he says.

“Do not,” she breathes, and suddenly her voice is hard and sharp, and he gets a glimpse of what she must have just said. “Do not tell me what I should or should not do, Charlie.”

“I don’t–I can’t–kid, I have nothing. Fucking nothing, all right? Absolute jack shit. I cannot. I cannot give you. A life. Anything.”

“Charlie,” she says, and her voice is beyond her years, regal, composed, commanding, arcane. “I have my money. It belongs to me when I become an adult. By right. It is mine, I have it, no one else keeps it, it is mine.”

“Charlie, it’s fucking mine, it’s mine, I have twenty million dollars, you don’t have to provide shit for me, I just–”

She runs her fingers through her hair, several locks of which have come undone from the bun she carefully coils them into every morning. A reoccurrence. She thinks she is finally losing control. She thinks she is finally free of whatever hold is over her. 

She steps forward a foot or so, and now she’s so close, and he wonders if this is what pure torment of the soul feels like. 

“I think,” she begins, and then hesitates, as if reconsidering what she’s about to say. She steels herself, takes a long breath, and continues onward. “Charlie, I think, after everything, if you left me too, Charles, I’m pretty sure I would go crazy. I think I might actually kill somebody. Or myself.”

She steadies herself and her cane against a tree so that she can reach to the back of her neck and unclasp her locket. She gently pulls it off of her neck and reclasps it, cradles it gently in her palm. She opens it gingerly. Situated inside and pinned there is a photo of two teenage girls taken in a photo booth. One of them is clearly Adelaide, with faint freckles and brown eyes and carefully kept, vibrant red hair, and the other is a bit taller, and blond, and dressed less modest, and kissing the former on the cheek. Adelaide-in-the-photo is blushing, caught unawares but not upset, in a way that suggests a bond, a relationship, deeper than they were ever allowed to have. They can not be older than sixteen.

“My parents,” she said, and her voice is colder, shakier, more incensed, but also much more passionate, “locked me in a tiny room for two years because the fact that I wanted to kiss a girl I was in love with wasn’t something they could tolerate in their only daughter, and Charlie, I don’t think I ever want to see them again as long as I live. I can’t possibly find the words to express how fucking furious I was with them, how close they were to having parts of my brain cut out, if I don’t get away from them right now there’s a significant chance I’m going to turn this whole neighborhood to glass.”

“So,” she says, stepping forward and brushing him aside to open the passenger door, “I would like you to kidnap me. I would like to–to leave, and to go wherever you want, wherever we want, to Canada or Oregon or–or Spain, or something, anywhere but here. There is nowhere I would not want to be with you and nowhere I would want to be without you. I want to find Elizabeth and I want to kiss her and I want to buy you a house and make you happy for once in your fucking life, because if you do this for me than you deserve it more than anything else in the world.”

The world feels as if it is turning on its head. He could never have possibly imagined this, imagined a world in which he does not eventually lose everything he has, including her. He had not wanted to imagine that world, so that he would not have the painful ache of it in his heart when it, as all things do, did not turn out his way.

Maybe he died in the salt flats, and all of this is some sort of odd hallucination before his mind slips into oblivion. Maybe Nyarlathotep is playing its tricks on him. Maybe–

Maybe it is real. Maybe he can have this. Many he has finally won, maybe he and his friends have killed a god and broken their world in the theoretically perfect way, that reality has shifted imperceptibly and remade his fate in its entirety. Maybe–maybe he really does trust her. Maybe he really does love her.

He thinks, upon this sudden reflection, that this is true.

“Okay,” he says, voice shaking, unsteady on his feet, looking her straight in the eye. “Okay.”