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Realistic or Modern Phantom Voices | ellarose & Syntra

They really shouldn't run and leave Snow to the zombies either. Clara thought they were gross (and rightfully so) but leaving an unconscious (poisoned) woman behind to potentially be turned into a princess zombie wasn't going to do anything help Cinderella's love life. Because nothing said 'true love' quite like abandoning your girl to get turned into zombie food. (...Which was presumably what they'd have to do to proceed? It was too bad that these places didn't come with a handy instruction manual. Who was to say that ignoring all of this and move onto the next thing without looking back wouldn't solve their problems right away?) Anyway, she was going to propose hitting him with the shovel they'd used to dig the grave in the first place... when suddenly the character from that cursed video game appeared and threw instructions to craft at them. (While also digging at her poor gaming performance. She was still a newbie, okay!? She didn't game much as it was, so getting chucked right into the heart of something like Resident Evil wasn't necessarily fair-- her area of expertise revolved around dress up games and those games where you owned a virtual dog that you brushed them, played with them, and took them for walks. Branching out for her involved maybe trying Spy Fox and the Nancy Drew games. The sorts of things that would cause neck beards to roll their eyes and inform her that she did not qualify as a real gamer.) So... it was sort of close to getting a manual? Sort of. But not really. The shrug and and subsequent 'it's just guesswork' part didn't necessarily inspire any confidence from her. When Thea asked if they knew what to do she shot her girlfriend an incredulous side-eye. Cinderella, meanwhile, scratched her head.

"Not-Cinderella? You can just call me Ella, Thea." Cinderella informed her, as if that was the tidbit that had caused her to hesitate. "Less of a mouthful."

"Aren't you supposed to be the video games expert here?" Clara pursed her lips. "We're in the middle of a graveyard. I have no idea what could--" When she noticed what had caught Thea's eye, though, her face fell and her blood ran cold. No! That was where she drew a firm line in the sand.

There crawling out of the bushes was a fox with a bomb attached where the tail was supposed to be. Nuh uh. Clara's heart couldn't take this. (Did animals in these ghost worlds even count as animals? Well, either way, she was not inclined to kill animals in any capacity-- fictional or otherwise.) The weird cultist wolf had been an exception to that rule by nature of the fact that the bastard was a cultist using an animal's skin as a disguise. (...To eat her, in fact, the way the prince would they weren't careful.) Normally she was cold as ice-- but she always cried when animals died in movies, okay? That was one of her no-gos.

"Not the fox!" Raoul articulated her sentiments exactly. It was only natural. They rushed to change the channel whenever those commercials with the sad shelter animals came on tv. They fostered kittens every summer and rescued strays. And since Spooks was still 'missing', it was particularly harsh on her conscience to consider--

"...Flamethrowers?" Detective Parker had his own grievances about these developments, apparently. Given that he was still grappling with the fact that he was more or less in a realm of his dead daughter's making and everything. "Mike wasn't supposed to play this game when Brianna was in the room!" He looked torn about this, though. And then distraught. After all, this 'Mike' had to be grown by now. If Brianna herself were still around, she'd likely have been in her early twenties by now-- like Clara and Thea. Did it really matter what she was exposed to in the world of video games all those years ago when she'd experienced horrors no child ought to experience at all? The poor kid lost both of her arms. Who even knew what kind of fucked up, ritualistic death the cult had subjected her to?

"You didn't notice because you were always too busy to play with her. Always working... just like you are now! And when you're not working, you're talking to Clara and Thea instead. But why should they get to talk to you when princess Brianna can't? It's not fair." The fox spoke. This was not particularly unusual. The bomb began to sizzle. "You couldn't even stick around long enough to play one game!"

Clara bit her lip, shoving down the guilt that began to rise in her for breaking the rules and ending it. That 'game' was rigged to keep them trapped there forever and she knew it well. That was why they had to break free of it before they wasted any more time. Brianna wasn't coming from a place of malice, necessarily... she was just clinging to that childlike desire to want to spend some time with her father. It was obvious, considering what she'd said right before they got whisked off into this world. There was also the fact that she was meant to symbolize the Justice arcana. A fair game was what they needed. Something simple, something that would take them to a conclusion.

There was a lot going on all at once. Cinderella was busy searching for... something, apparently... and Raoul made admirable attempts to keep the prince away from them with the shovel while they figured out the confusing 'crafting' situation.

Clara found it difficult to act on any of her potential solutions when more 'zombies' crawled out of the ground. Multiplying as they scrambled to figure things out, just like the character said. It was as if this place was digging for her specific fears... given that these ones weren't human. Namely they consisted of the one-eyed Spooks (she was still 'missing'-- but that bloody collar that she thought she saw in Ivy's place was a morbid, stomach-sinking indicator) and... oh. Selene. Her bunny. With her black fur matted in gore indicative of a gruesome, bloody death. She stood as if frozen solid, feeling nothing but a crawling sensation (it had to be her imagination) and the ache in her back. Now she really wanted to cover her eyes. This wasn't a game anymore. Covering her eyes would do her little good as the suppressed memory tore through her mind with sharp, sharp claws.

"Shit. Spooks. And-- shit. Is that supposed to be Selene?" Raoul was taken aback. "What the fuck..." He shook his head rapidly. "Clara, you never told me what happened to Selene--"

Protective brother mode was activated once again when he saw Clara's expression. Only this time it didn't revolve around ripping off zombie heads. Instantly, his questions were dropped just like the shovel as he abandoned the fight altogether. He was at her side in an instant, putting his hands on her shoulders. Coaching her through a panic attack the way he always had. Great. That was exactly what they needed on top of the rest of this chaos. 'Burden. You've always been a burden.' The demon whispered. His voice was close. Too close. Her back ached again... a repeated stabbing, like some invisible creature had latched onto her from behind.

Now that Raoul wasn't keeping him busy, the prince began to creep towards Snow's glass coffin, deciding in prince-like fashion that the defenseless princess was the one he should target in this situation.

Meanwhile, Cinderella shot at the fox with a sling shot she had produced from... somewhere? No one had really been paying attention to her through all of this, but apparently she was an excellent shot. When she hit the fox, rather than displaying any heart wrenching gore, it instead scattered into a convenient bundle of 'ingredients' in a fashion befitting of a video game. She gathered them and then shrugged nonchalantly. "I happen to be a great cook. Give me just a sec." Having produced the gunpowder, she held out her hands towards Thea to accept the flamethrower for herself. "I know what I need to do now. I've got to save her myself. I've got to save Snow."
 
Attempts on their lives? Sure, that was fair enough game. Supernatural bullshittery? Par for the fucking course. Tormenting Clara with the visions of her dead pets, though? Over the goddamn line! So far over the line that it could... uh, win a championship for crossing lines? Whatever. Within seconds, Thea was at her gf's (!!!) side, grabbing her hand protectively. (Squeezing it, as if to say 'I'm here for you. You can lean on me.' Shitty romance movies had ruined those phrases forever, but they couldn't destroy the sentiment, okay? And Thea was, uh, very much sentimenting it.) "Oi, Clara. Can you hear me? That shit isn't fucking real." Yeah, a great thing to say! Kind of like the eternal nugget of wisdom so often bestowed upon the depression sufferers all over the world-- 'iT'S juST In YOuR hEad.' Like, no shit, Sherlock. No fucking shit! Alright, so what could Thea do here if she didn't want her 'supportive gf' card revoked? "Clara, focus on me. Thea here, the resident clown, and it's the clown hour. Oh yeah, baby, give me the delicious attention. Wheee!" she made a face and stuck out her tongue, balancing on one leg in a way that looked... uh, pretty fucking imbalanced. Imbalanced enough for her to fall on her ass, actually. "Man, gymnasts make this shit look easy," the brunette giggled. "You think I'd be a good gymnast? Once I get rid of the sack of potatoes tendencies, that is."

While Thea was fighting the good fight on the psychological warfare front, Snow was contributing in her own way. "Alright," she nodded, not even bothering to rise from the ground. (The flamethrower was easier to hold that way, y'know? She could, like, lean against a rock or something. Tip top military tactics!) "Follow your heart, Ella. I got your fucking back."

"Ah, geez. Do you have to make it harder for me? You make it sound like such a big deal." Not-Cinderella's cheeks were straight up burning, to the point the shade almost rivaled her hair, and Thea had to chuckle.

"I mean, it is a big deal! The greatest fucking victory for the fairytale-starved lesbians since... forever, I guess. We haven't had a lot of success. Now, go forth and bear the torch of hope for us." Ella cringed, in a way that spelled out pretty clearly that she was going to try and kill her later, but, you know, the problem of her future self. That she ran towards the coffin was the most important thing! "Fairytale characters," Thea sighed. "They grow up so fast. In one moment, they are swooning over the mediocre prince, and in the other, they realize they've been gay all along. You think that they're like, brainwashed by the government? Maybe that's why they all think they're fucking straight." Indeed, the straight agenda was the most insidious one! Thanks to it, all the promising girls were--

"Helloooo?" Claire Redfield rolled her eyes. "I'm still here, in case you haven't noticed. Can you explain to the idiot why he shouldn't eat a girl before their first date?"

"Sure, sure!" And, no, Thea Holloway hadn't actually held a flamethrower before, much less fired from it. It couldn't be that hard, though, now could it? Like, soldiers generally weren't fucking Mensa candidates-- the brainpower needed to pull the trigger at the right time was the equivalent of switching on the fucking TV, she wagered. So, you know what Thea did? Yep, she squeezed it! The resulting burst of flames was rather satisfying, in that whooshy whoosh, murderous way. (10/10 if you wanted to remove someone from existence, really. 'Kill it with fire' wasn't an empty fucking slogan, as it turned out! ...except that it maybe was, considering that the prince refused to drop dead. Like, he was burning, but it seemed to bother him about as much as a Black Friday Sale would-- which it wouldn't, because a) those were a good thing, b) he didn't have the cognitive capacity to know what percentages were! Ugh, Thea wanted all of her fucking money back.)

"Well, what now, Miss Protagonist?" she shouted at Redfield. "Any other brilliant zombie removal recipes?"

To her credit, Claire didn't even try to hide her own bewilderment. "Shit, he's one resilient fucker. I don't know? For some reason, the usual rules don't seem to apply here. Maybe the fire is contaminated by some less-than-fiery substance? Something like a water spirit. Yeah, I bet a water spirit possessed it!" ...to the game's credit, it had never claimed that Claire was an intellectual. At the same time, though? Thea put two and two together, seeing for the first time what the real problem was. And, no, for once, it wasn't the fucking capitalism! It was Brianna herself, who a vested interest in never letting them go from this fairytale-like nightmare. Shit, shit, shit! How the fuck did you beat someone who not only saw which cards you held, but who also controlled what hand you got? Literally everything bent to Brianna's whims here, and--

That was when, with the corner of her eye, Thea noticed... well, something. When Ella lifted the lid of the coffin, didn't the reality sort of flicker? In and out, in and out, as if a different set of images was trying to take over. Hmm. The visual glitch also seemed to be oddly confined to a specific place, which, by the way, appeared totally empty at a glance. Double hmm. "Alright," Thea bit her lip, "I will eat my fucking shoes if I cannot solve this problem with violence. Watch me." Then, of course, she did what any reasonable person in that situation would do-- pointed her flamethrower at exactly that spot. Dramatically, her finger was getting closer and closer to the trigger, and...

"Eeek!" Brianna chose that moment to step out of her invisibility zone, shooting Thea an accusatory glare. "That wasn't very nice of you, Thea. Don't you know that children and flamethrowers don't pair well together?"

"Maybe, but it also wasn't fucking nice of you to try and imprison us here forever. What will you say to that, hmm?"

Brianna looked at her shoes shamefully, most likely contemplating her poor choices. "I know. I know, I shouldn't have done that. It's just that nobody ever plays with me, okay? Daddy doesn't even visit my grave." She wasn't looking at detective Parker, in a way that felt super intentional. (It reminded Thea of a kid not looking at their cheat sheet during a test, but like, in a manner that totally gave its existence away! Of course, this was an infinitely more tragic version of that.) "He used to at the beginning, but then he kind of stopped. I suppose it wasn't fun? I get it, I wouldn't want to go there, either, but I'm just so bored. Is it because I'm dead, or because I have no arms? I guess you might not want to hang out with me due to that. Being what I am, you can't really do a lot of things. I don't think I could even ride a bike. Daddy just taught me, and now... now all that effort is wasted."
 
The world quickly devolved into a deeper layer of full-blown chaos as zombies sprouted out of the ground, fairytale princesses cooked up ingredients to use flamethrowers, and video game characters started applying their logic to the already nonsensical scene they were trapped within. And Clara stood still amidst it, unable to contribute in any meaningful way while she was locked up in a panic. But it just... took her back. The smell, the shock, the retching that followed the moment she'd found poor Selene. A stringy mess of gore and tufts of fur on her bedroom floor instead of the sweet bunny she doted on as a beloved pet. (The bunny was recommended when she wouldn't speak, when she seemed to have lost interest in everything. Perhaps if she had a pet that it was 'her responsibility' to look after, it might do her some good, the school guidance counselor had suggested.) The memory is on par with finding the gun beneath the couch. When papa's violent threats took on a tangibility when she confirmed for herself just how badly it could get. Selene was a clear forewarning of what was going to happen to her.

And then someone took hold of Clara's hand, guiding her back into the present moment. The world was chaotic and her mind even more so. But through it all, the only one that she could see was Thea. She was talking, too, but sounds still sounded like cotton to her. Breathe. The reminder always helped. She consciously relaxed her tensed jaw and took a deep breath in, held it for seven seconds, and then released it again. She kept this up until she could hear what Thea was saying to her. (An excellent motivator if ever there was one to be certain. Even when she's sticking her tongue out and standing on one leg, she wanted to hear what she had to say.) Clara winced with sympathy for Thea when she fell, but immediately softened when her girlfriend laughed off her landing.

There was little that Clara could say by the time that flamethrowers and their current objective were being brought back into focus, but she did manage the smallest, grateful smile for Thea's attempt.

"...You good?" Raoul asked, watching Thea proceed to help out with unspoken respect. He was giving Clara that look and she quickly rolled her eyes in a lame attempt to save face. "Do you want to talk about it? When we get out of here, I mean."

"I don't know." Clara shrugged. It wasn't that she didn't trust her brother. It was never that. She didn't know what she'd say. She hadn't told anyone, after all. Why drag all of those painful memories back up to the surface when they caused her to react like that? Not only that, but... touching on all the shit that happened after he left might just cause him to feel more guilty about all of it than he already does. And if there's anything Raoul doesn't need, it's more of that. (Burden, burden, burden. The demon's voice echoed. She shuddered, unnerved. The hair rose on the back of her neck.) "Let's just focus on getting out of here."

Then Thea managed to sniff out where Brianna was hiding all that time. When the armless girl appeared and made her confession, all of chaotic characters and confrontations flattened down like a scene in a pop-up book. While that was a relief to some degree, there was a layer of tension added to the air when it came to the, uh, impromptu family reunion. It almost felt too personal for them to be present to see all of this? Detective Parker was rubbing his hands over his eyes. (Needless to say, most father's didn't typically expect to reunite with their dead daughters this way.) It was evident from the way he sniffed that he was crying. He obviously loved her and never stopped. His dedication to his work had a way of saying that as well. He was busting his ass to catch the cultists who did this to her. But she could see why Brianna felt the way she did as well. She was just a kid. Just wanted some acknowledgment, to be played with. Ah. Tragic as it all was, it was also kind of awkward to bear witness to. Clara wasn't sure if it was just her, but she got the distinct feeling that she shouldn't be around to intrude on this moment between father and daughter.

"...Your dad is working so hard to find the people who did this to you. He's thinking of you every day." Clara was surprised that she was intervening-- it was almost like she'd been possessed. (Ooof. Okay. Maybe not the best metaphor.) She knew what it was to be in the detective's position, she guessed, lost in grief and at a loss for words. That and, well, despite his penchant for working too hard, he was actually a good dad. Not perfect-- because who is-- but at least he tried, right? It was clear from the way he spoke that he loved her and would love her no matter what form she took. "You just want to spend some time with him, right? I bet he'd love to stay a while longer and spend time with you. We can leave you two alone to do that if you want." She paused. The fox had a point, after all. Why should they intrude on the family's father daughter time? Brianna was hurting enough as it was, watching all of them interact without her.

"Of course." Detective Parker breathed, his voice a shallow wisp of grief. He walked forward and embraced her. "Of course. I will always make time for you, Brianna. As much as you need. I just... I didn't think we had any time left."

"Just promise to let him come back, okay? We need him to get justice for you and the rest of those kids." Raoul chimed in.

Brianna nodded as she leaned against her father's embrace. The world itself was swallowed in golden light and...

Clara, Thea and Raoul found themselves safely in the sitting room they were in before they got whisked into Brianna's ghost realm.

There was a lot to unpack about everything that just happened to be sure. But Clara grappled with the terror that, not too long ago, she had heard the demon's voice again for the first time in a very long time. Her back ached worse than ever, too. With a feverish sweat beading at her brow, she held onto the arm of the chair she was in as the room swirled around her like a mushy soup.

"Damn. You guys really weren't kidding. Like, I didn't think you were fucking with us or anything... but hearing about it and actually seeing it is..." Raoul rubbed the back of his head, staring vacantly at the wall. He made an explosion sound effect and waved his arms around his head.

"...I'm not feeling well. I need a second." Clara managed in a rasp. She got up and made her way towards the bathroom in a haze. When her hair swayed, just enough of her back was revealed to show that there was... a strange networking of black, spider-web like veins growing there? "Don't follow me." She cautioned, completely unaware of this as the pain grew fiercer yet. "I... heard his voice again recently. The demon's. I don't want anyone to get hurt."

Clara only managed to make it to the door before she passed out on the floor.
 
Yay, a happy fucking ending! About as happy as it could reasonably get with a, you know, dead kid and her father. Not even Thea had expected fireworks and a saccharine sweet happily ever after-- the aftertaste in her mouth was too fucking bitter for that, as if she’d been swallowing nothing but bile. (Bile and ashes, too. The bastards had fucking burnt them, hadn’t they? Not just her and Clara, but all the kids involved in those fucked up rituals, like convenient little sacrificial lambs. To them, they’d been… well, numbers. Sacks of flesh, tied to shitty-ass mystic concepts via those tattoos. Had there even been a method to choosing the victims, or had they just snatched randos at some fucking mall? It was nothing short of crazy-- to think that her whole life’s trajectory had gone up in flames, all because some demon worshiping weirdo had been like ‘oh yeah, seems like our LordTM may like this chick.’ The antidote to cynicism, though? It was kind of nice to see, Thea supposed, that closure wasn’t totally out of question. That other people’s families weren’t giant-ass dumpster fires was still bewildering to her, but like, in a pleasant way? Like finding out that Santa had been real all along, as opposed to discovering that you giving a speech naked wasn’t a fucking dream this time.)

“Yeah,” she nodded, rushing to assist Clara. “And besides, people aren’t fucking aware that you’re still there after you die. There was no way for your father to know, okay? That he stopped going never meant that he got tired of you, or anything stupid like that. It’s just that, when you’re an adult, you can’t spend your whole life in some cemetery. Gotta pay your rent and so on! And, like, they don’t pay you for bringing your dead relatives flowers. It’s the opposite, ‘cause you have to shell out cash for the bouquet privilege.” Insensitive? Maybe a little bit, but it was also fucking true! As sad as it was, the kiddo needed a reality check. (Also, contrary to the popular opinion, children weren’t fucking stupid. They may not have had as much experience, but their brains worked, and were perfectly capable of absorbing information. It wasn’t that they were as dumb as a bunch of rocks, and then, with their 18th birthday, BAM! Level up, intelligence acquired. Just, nope. Many people just didn’t fucking bother with explanations, and then they were all shocked Pikachu when the kids didn’t get it. Like, no shit, Sherlocks?) “So, try going easy on him. He really did try, even if you couldn’t see that. You both tried.”

And it seemed that some of that did get through to Brianna, because, ta-dah! They were released from the fairytale nightmare-land, healthy and intact. (Or, in Thea’s case, as intact as they’d been when she’d entered. Oh well. Linking Park had been right when they’d sung about some wounds never healing, that much was fucking true.) “Yeah, welcome to the fucking club,” she patted Raoul’s shoulder. “As a bonus for your first encounter with the supernatural, you get brand new nightmares! I fucking wish it was a pay raise, but I still haven’t figured out how to get those fucks to give me money in the first pla… Clara!” The way her gf (!!!) specified that they shouldn’t follow her? Yeah, that was a guaranteed fucking recipe to force Thea to do exactly that. As far as she was concerned, it sounded like one of those noble-ass ‘care not for me and leave me behind’ speeches, which, not on her fucking watch! Not even if she had to wrestle her away from the demon’s control again. “Oi, Clara, are you okay? Talk to me, goddammit. What do you mean, you’ve heard the demon? I have, too, and I’m not fucking barricading myself in my room because of it!” And, you know, had Clara talked to her, Thea probably would have stayed on the other side of the door. Thanks to the newly discovered communication magic, they could have talked it out-- words instead of actions, and so on and so forth. The issue with that, though? She didn’t fucking talk. She made no sound at all, and Thea did not want to guess what she might have been doing in there.

So, yeah, it did make her barge inside. She barged in there, only to see…

“Shit! Shit, Raoul, help me with her!”

***

Beep. Beep. Beep.

The machines Clara was hooked up on were buzzing softly, the green curved lines painting the rhythm of her heart on the black monitor. (It was regular, as far as Thea could tell. You know what else could be regular, though? Dying. It wasn’t always an epic fight, like a knight versus a nine-headed dragon-- sometimes, it was just… slipping into the darkness. Letting go, without ever really trying to grasp onto anything solid. Would Clara ever do that?) Trying really hard not to think about that, she squeezed her gf’s (!!!) hand tighter.

“Doctor,” Raoul spoke up, addressing the young man with a red bandana wrapped around his head. “What’s up with my sister? Will she be okay?”

“We will need to run some tests,” the doctor replied, with that careful kind of diplomacy that made Thea go ‘uh oh’ internally. “Sudden losses of consciousness can be a sign of some deeper issues, but she may also be just tired. Has she gone through a lot of stress lately?”

Does exorcising the fuck out of murdered kids count? “Kind of, yeah. You could say that.”

“See, perhaps there’s no cause for concern,” he looked into his file. “It looks like Miss Loveless has a history of low blood pressure, too, and that can contribute to these fainting spells. I wouldn’t worry too much, if I were you. Just in case, I’m going to check her for parasites as well.” …parasites? Was that a common fucking procedure? Thea would have asked him about that, except that that was the moment she noticed Clara opening her eyes.

“Clara, you’re awake! What the fuck happened in that bathroom? And, uh… what’s that black substance on your neck? You fell into a puddle of ink, or what?”

‘Oh, you wish it was ink,’ an unfamiliar voice resonated in Clara’s head. ‘You know what you owe, don’t you? Time to pay it all back, blondie.’
 
Tests. Deeper issues. Stress. Parasites. Clara phased in and out of herself through a feverish haze, snippets of words spoken around her crept in between the unending thrum in her ears, pain pulsing from the back of her neck like second heartbeat. Holding onto the memory of her identity felt like trying to commit the details of a blurry reflection to memory as it shrunk and disappeared like drying rainwater. There was an unspoken threat lingering that if she were to forget what she looked like now, she might lose that perception of herself for good. The soul in her body was thinning away, losing shape and substance. (She fought it-- of course she did-- she'd meant it when she said Thea inspired her to try. So try, try, try she did. But old habits died hard and it occurred to her to wonder if that was all she ever was. A vessel, doctored up and prepped for some purpose beyond human comprehension. She'd always wondered if that why she always felt so dead inside. Maybe something in her knew all along that she was going to be replaced.) Her body was safely tucked in bed, but on the inside she was sliding down a steep, steep slope. Towards a dark, hungry void from which there was no return. Before it could claim her, someone had taken hold of her hand and firmly tethered her to the reality that existed outside of her own head.

Clara committed this wholesome sensation to memory over the last couple of days, so there was no denying that it was Thea. Thea was there with her. (Of course she was. Even though she told her not to follow, she followed anyway. The warmth of her touch was magic in the way it imbued her with new life. For the first time since childhood, she found herself imagining pictures of their future together when she allowed herself the luxury to daydream and-- if she was feeling extra bold-- assigned them a bit of hope. Even then, there was a part of her that was scared to. Not because of Thea, not even remotely, but... if fate had romance in store for them, maybe they really would've just bumped into each other on an average Tuesday at a pizzeria. Not in a graveyard, being pursued by an axe murderer. If she ever needed a reminder that her life was set in the horror genre, that was it.) Clara's fingers twitched as she tried to remind herself how to move them. Eventually she managed to reciprocate and open her eyes. The world around her felt far more tangible now that she could actually see it. A hospital room? (That explained the beeps of the heart-rate monitor.) She squinted her eyes against the bright lights. So bright it made the back of her neck squirm.

The doctor acknowledged her waking up and then said something about fetching the materials he needed to run the proper 'tests'. If she'd heard correctly, they were going to check her for... parasites?

"I don't remember. His voice was louder than ever. It was making me sick... and I wasn't feeling like myself. So I tried to get away. I didn't want to hurt you. Everything goes dark after that." Clara answered the first of the questions she was asked groggily. It was strangely-- familiarly-- hard to speak, as if there was a delay between the intent and action. The way her head ached was indicative of a fall. Must've collapsed to the floor. She looked up at Thea as a focus point, trying to pay more attention to her than to the sharp ringing in her ears and incessant pain that tried to gang up on her and reduce her to nothing more than a weak little wince. "...You followed me."

Of course she did. The knowing voice in her head repeated. Clara was thankful she had been there and at the same time she was frustrated? And not with Thea. Instead, the resentment came from the fact that Thea's proximity-- which usually brought her comfort-- could stress her out this much. What if the demon took over again? What if she couldn't stop him from killing her the next time? Thea was there because she cared about her and Clara appreciated that. But if Thea died because she cared, then what...?

"Yeah. And it's a good thing she did." Raoul said, walking over and pressing a hand to her forehead to assess her temperature. He gave her a long, hard look. "You fainted. But you're going to be okay." The doctor didn't necessarily confirm that. But he was saying it anyway, as if to will it into existence with sheer determination. "Since you're up, I'm going to swing back by the house to grab some stuff and see if Parker made it back. Either of you want me to grab anything in particular?"

Once Raoul had taken their requests down, he went off on his way. In the meantime, the beep, beep, beeps of Clara's heart kept count of the seconds. They last time they'd been in a hospital, it hadn't ended well either. That thought was quickly brushed away in favor of Thea's second question. "...Ink? What do you mean?" She squinted. "It's not like I keep my sketchbook in the bathroom. I wouldn't have..."

Then the voice spoke and Clara's sentence screeched to a halt like a car hitting the brakes hard and fast.

'Who are you?' Clara tensed. The voice was unfamiliar enough that she could designate it to stress, a lack of sleep, paranoia... but it cut through her mind like a knife to the point that it was undeniably real. What was also undeniably real was the pain pulsing at the back of her neck, stabbing deeper and deeper yet. 'I don't know you. I don't owe you anything.'

'You wish.'

"Thea..." Clara spoke to her girlfriend instead of the new voice at that point, specifically to ground herself. "I'm hearing a new voice now." She sucked in a sharp breath through her teeth, telling herself to be brave as she peeled herself semi-upright from the hospital bed, tilting her head to brush her hair away from her neck and bring it into view. (Her hands brushed over something that veiny in the process, sending a chill down her spine.) She was dreading having it looked at this way. But the only way to heal it was to expose it to someone who could potentially help her with it, right? "I can't see it myself. What's happening to my neck?" It wasn't normal, that was for certain. Whatever was happening to her neck, the black veins were crawling down her spine, from her neck to her mid-back, where her branding was.
 
"Guilty as fucking charged. What, you expected me to leave you there? In case you haven't noticed, you're not Stalin. You're much cuter than him, for starters, and I'm pretty fucking sure that you don't send innocent people to gulags." Yeah, all of that made perfect sense in Thea's head! And, to her credit? It occurred to her rather quickly, for her usual standards, that people who weren't her might not have made the connection. Character development, ladies and gentlemen! The only cure to MiscommunicationTM. "Fun fact: Stalin died in his bedroom because people were too chickenshit to check up on him. The guy choked on his own vomit. Poetic, eh? The point is, I'm not afraid of you, Clara. The demon is an asshole, but you're like, so far away from the label it isn't even funny. You're about as much of an asshole as your average lizard is a bird. And, yeah, there probably are some birds who cosplay as lizards," what, "but those are statistical outliers!" See? Thea could use buzzwords, too-- she had a thesaurus, and wasn't afraid to use it. (What? So she might have read a little while on her arm-related sick leave, sheesh. There just hadn't been that many things to do with one (1) arm only, so she'd gone for the activities that didn't require that much coordination. And, considering that Thea hadn't killed anyone with the hard covers? Mission fucking accomplished.)

"I get it, too. I really, really do. But, Clara? I've lost an arm already. If you think I'm gonna turn around and run away every time shit is about to get dangerous, you're wrong. The bitch can't scare me anymore. He's wasted all of his fucking ammo." Like, what was he going to do? Terrorize her with ~implicationy implications,~ or prophecies he pulled out of his formless ass? Yeeeeah, too late for that, pal! Thea had paid, paid, paid, in both blood and flesh, and while it fucking sucked, it also wasn't... well, life-ending. Life-altering, sure, though not the game over she'd perhaps thought it to be. (If he so pleased, the demon could cut her into little bloody pieces. You know what, though? Those pieces would still hate the fuck out of him, like the Thea mosaic they would be!)

"A new voice?" she raised her eyebrow, unsurprised but still not too happy about the development. Couldn't the ghost-ass motherfuckers at least leave them alone during a medical emergency? What were they, Jehovah's Witnesses? Because, no, Thea didn't have five minutes to talk about their lord and savior, the shitty demon himself! "What's the new guy's deal? I'm not hearing anything, by the way. If this goes on, I'll fucking complain about the blatant favoritism."

'Of course she isn't hearing anything,' the voice mocked. 'Your friend wasn't stupid enough to fall into that trap. Don't you know that, each time you receive a gift, you ought to repay the gesture? And, so far, you've been taking, taking, and taking. Time to give for once, Clara.'

With concern shining in her brown eyes, Thea leaned closer. "I... fuck. Shit, I don't know what it is that I'm looking that." Probably not the thing Clara wanted to hear, but she sure as hell wasn't going to grin and be like 'oh, just someone with a permanent marker being a lil' silly.' Nuh uh, no lies in their relationship! Lies were not conducive to CommunicationTM, and Thea actually treasured what she and Clars had. "Looks like a map of something real fucked up on your skin. Mordor, I guess? It's like, veiny, but I wouldn't say those are your veins. Shit doesn't really check out with the regular human anatomy, if you know what I'm getting at." Uh, a quick question! Could a person grow a new cardiovascular system from stress, or was this yet another passage to the merry land of supernatural bullshittery? Thea had an inkling that she knew, and no, she didn't like the answer. Not one fucking bit!

'How very astute of her,' the entity laughed, the sound of it scraping against her ears like sandpaper. 'No, they are not your veins. They're mine. But, the thing is, dear Clara: can you even consider us to be separate beings? Considering that I was born from you. From your desire to be better than you are. In a way, I'm the only one you can lean on! Because, you see, you don't even know your own fucking girlfriend. Don't believe me? We can run a little test, you and I. In fact, I insist. It will be a lot of fun, I believe. Buckle up, buttercup!' If Clara had any opinion on the matter, then she would likely be disappointed to find out that the voice did not believe in the first fucking amendment. It burst from her neck, spraying the white walls with blood, and then--

--then she found herself in a cave made of flesh, pulsating to a familiar rhythm. Thump, thump. Thump, thump. (Weird. At least the neck didn't hurt? A fucking miracle, considering how many muscles the thing must have torn through on its way out. Had it, like, administered some mega powerful sedatives? That would explain why, as far as the eye could see, there was only wet, warm darkness. ...wait, wet? And why was the liquid burning through her fucking shoes, as if they were made of paper?)

'Welcome, welcome!' her new friend giggled. 'I bet you didn't think you'd get to know your girlfriend this closely, but I figured you'd appreciate the chance. Yep, it's her stomach! And, let me tell those, those digestive fluids are no joke. Stay here for too long, and you'll look exactly like the pizza she ate yesterday. Oh, by the way? She eats too much pizza for a human, I'm pretty sure. If you ever get out of here, try proposing a healthier diet. Her body will thank you!'

'A-n-y-w-a-y,' the thing began, purposefully dwelling on each letter, 'you're gonna have to answer some questions. Easy enough, right? Since you loooove her and shit, yada yada yada. So, the lover girl's favorite color? Her greatest fear? Her worst trauma? Tick tock, tick tock. I'm waiting, Clara. Show me the strength of your so-called bond!'
 
"Yes, you lost an arm. And-- and that's really sweet of you to say. But I want to avoid a scenario where you lose your life, Thea." Clara reiterated Thea's point, breathing in ragged patterns against her thighs as she exposed her back. (A vulnerable place, her off-limits place. That was where her branding was. The beginning of a story that Ivy had laughed at and assumed was a joke. But Thea got it in a way no one else did. She trusted her with this. Trusted her more than any doctor who could walk through those doors. Would a doctor even know how to treat whatever was happening to her? They needed a supernatural specialist of some kind... assuming they even existed.) The point was, she felt for Thea in a way she never felt for anyone else. If she lost her because she couldn't contain whatever was growing inside of her, she'd never forgive herself. "I don't want to lose you. I don't want it to happen by my hand. Because I don't know how to control..." She winced. "I can't control..."

A map of something real fucked up on her skin? Full fledged panic set in with the confirmation of what she'd been dreading all along. Suddenly, the fierce heartbeat in her chest and resting on the back of her neck were all she could feel or hear. (...Was this it? Had she fucked herself up beyond repair? Was she dying, disappearing as she became a vessel for tampering with forces she didn't understand? Deep down, she always assumed she was going to die young. That had seemed natural to her, much like the sky being blue, and-- to be honest-- it never bothered her much. But now that she had someone who loved her, someone she believed could make her happy in the future... the concept of death didn't feel quite so welcome. She didn't want to embrace the end when they'd only just begun.) Clara's thoughts evaporated and a thick wall of cotton separated her from the sound of Thea's voice. The new voice took precedence by force-- as if gripping her by the face with sharp claws and forcing to stare it in the eyes.

"Thea..." Through it all, Clara clutched Thea's one hand between both of hers. As much as she tried to anchor herself to the present, she could feel herself slipping under whatever influence that voice was using to get to her. And fast. The unseeable claws were climbing all over her, dragging her towards something sinister. There was nothing either of them could do to stop it, was there? Control really wasn't something she possessed. "I'm scared." (Briefly, she saw a flash of her younger self. She was clutching onto a younger Thea's arm, pressing her face against her to hide. Saying those very same words.) "Leave if it gets bad. I don't think either of us know how to stop this. So promise me you'll..."

Clara couldn't finish that sentence. Mainly because something tore free from her neck, spraying the white hospital bed and Thea's clothes with blood. The ear-splitting scream that came from her throat as this happened effectively shattered the real world, causing the room itself to wilt. The pristine walls peeled away to reveal rot and maggots underneath. The light fixtures above the bed flickered uncontrollably, popping, sparking and giving off the look of lightning. Her hands slipped from Thea's as she went limp in the dirtied bed. Neck dripping blood, her eyes glazed over and vacant. In that place and time, she seemed very much dead.

Although Clara wasn't dead. Not really. Because through sheer absurdity, her soul ended up in... Thea's stomach? Her own twisted with revulsion at this revelation. (Yes, she loved Thea. This meant she loved every part of her. Did that mean she wanted to be inside of her? ...Um, okay. The phrasing of that question obviously made the answer a bit more complicated than she thought. So to be specific-- so there was no mistake whatsoever-- she didn't want to be inside of her stomach. They hadn't even kissed yet and she was about to get dissolved in her girlfriend's stomach. What the fuck!?) Oh no, no, no. After everything they'd been through, she thought she'd have been ready for anything. But she was not, for all extents and purposes, ready for this.

"Of all places, why here?" Clara pressed her hands over her nose and mouth. She stepped around in the dark, attempting to find a place where she could escape the fluids. Whenever they sloshed her own stomach turned another somersault. She retched, though her soul was incapable of vomiting. Ugh, why!? There was a reason why she got nauseous watching that Osmosis Jones movie-- and why she never explored a career in any type of medical field. She had a weak stomach for this sort of thing. And her mind went conveniently blank when faced with the questions the voice had to ask her.

"...We haven't exactly had time to sit around discussing our favorite colors! I don't know what you're trying to prove here, but... if you want to test us as a couple, shouldn't we both be present for this?" Clara fought back. Everything about this was rigged. Maybe if she kept the voice talking, she'd find an angle of some kind?

'I don't know what you're talking about! Of course you're both present. In fact, I'd say you're closer now more than ever.' The voice provided slimily. Bastard. 'Answer the questions and you'll be able to move on.'

Clara went silent. They discussed fears back when the teacher had asked about them in the classroom. Her memories of that instance were swallowed up by the sensation of choking and drowning in dark seas. Thea mentioned being more afraid of the dark than heights when they'd been asked about them the other day. But would that qualify as her 'worst fear'? Would there be a penalty for giving a wrong answer? The trauma bit was difficult, too. They'd experienced a number of traumatic incidents together... one of many involved being drowned as children. Needless to say, they'd never actually talked about the specific moments that fucked them up the very most. Probably because they wanted to recover give themselves a break from the absolute shitstorm their lives were. They'd barely begun as a couple. Had they more time, then maybe they would've talked about those things eventually. Thea had an anecdote for everything she was passionate about-- clearly there must have been definitive answers to all of these questions. Clara knew several facts about Thea just from listening to her... but those things in particular?

"It's because of supernatural bullshit like this that we haven't discussed these things yet." Clara lashed out, seething as opposed to panicking. Listening to Thea's heart, it occurred to her that she could hear her. To some extent. If some piece of her mind or spirit was trapped in Thea's body, did that mean she could reach out to her somehow? They were all connected, weren't they? There was a reason they could hear the voices of those other kids. So...

'Complain all you want. It won't change anything!'

This was a test. Clara felt it was appropriate for her to break the rules and cheat when the game was so obviously rigged.

"Thea, can you hear my voice?" Clara thought, stretching them as far as they could go in her imagination. She closed her eyes and tried to construct Thea's face by memory, willing her words to reach her. Please let this work. "Don't freak out, but... I'm trapped inside your stomach. Don't ask me how or why, I don't... I don't know! I don't know. In fact, I'm trying very hard not to think about that." Without waiting to hear if she was going to get an answer, she decided not to waste time. "If I want to escape I have to answer questions about you. I know, it's... weird. It's always weird, isn't it?"

'Tick tock, Clara! You're wasting precious time.' The voice nagged. The echo of Thea's heart continued to thump, thump, thump in her ears.

"I know this isn't exactly a candlelit dinner conversation. But I need your favorite color, worst fear and... and worst trauma." Clara hated herself for having to ask like that. All rushed and basically at gunpoint. But she hated being trapped inside of Thea even more. She'd rather be looking into her eyes than at her stomach fluid. "That's what the voice is asking for."
 
“Yeah, yeah,” Thea waved her hand, seemingly unbothered. “I’ll be gone before you can say ‘a demon fucked up my entire life.’ No worries! I’m a fucking expert at dodging my responsibilities, so don’t think I have forgotten how to get out of this one. If the worse comes to the worst, I can just…” And, normally? Normally, a long-ass tangent would have followed, containing at least three different similes, two anecdotes and maybe a stealthy compliment, depending on her mood. She could feel it being a zinger, too! One that would definitely bring a smile to Clara’s face-- a small one, accompanied with a hint of exasperation, but also one that would reach her eyes as well, and make her feel warm all over. 10/10, instant fucking mood lifter! The Big PharmaTM would be reduced to tears, knowing that Thea Holloway had the exclusive access to the world’s greatest antidepressant. The thing was, it was hard for her gf (!!!) to smile when she straight up exploded. Like, literally. Not a single metaphor in sight, if you didn’t count all that blood. (Blood was a metaphor for something, right? Except for all the times it was disgustingly real, staining your sheets and clothes and refusing to stay in your motherfucking girlfriend.)

“What the fuck,” Thea whispered, staring at the carnage before her yes. She should have done something, she knew, but what? Call the fucking ambulance? Give her some good ol’ CPR? Yeah, a little too late for that! Kind of like watching your childhood home go up in flames, and deciding now was the good time to get a deal with the insurance fucking company. Spoiler alert: not how the world worked. (This couldn’t be true, right? Had to be some sick-ass joke, with the punchline engineered specifically to destroy the pitiful remnants of her mental fucking health.)

‘Hahaha!’ the demon in her head laughed, confirming that conspiracy theory. ‘Man, you humans really are fragile. Have you checked her warranty date? If you’re lucky enough, you may be able to claim a new Clara for free at your nearest Clara factory. Oooh, sorry, sorry! I forgot that that isn’t how you guys work. Well, maybe that will teach you! Next time, just watch the TV instead of trying to get into the whole ‘human relationships’ bullshit. I hear The Simpsons is a good show.’

‘What did you do to Clara, you pathetic piece of shit?!’ Her hands were shaking, her breath a ragged parody of the usual calm rhythm, but if Thea focused on anger instead, shit would be juuuust fine. Anger was good-- one of the ProductiveTM emotions, with the ability to kick your ass and force you to Do Things. Function, function, function! Function and don’t fucking think, lest doubts might infect your mind. (You know, there was a reason Hulk had never gone to therapy. Drowning his enemies in tears did sort of seem like a viable strategy, but it would a) take ages, b) lead to him getting dehydrated, c) the fuckers probably die of laughter before that fucking happened. Punching shit was easier, and, haha! Thea would rather punch literally everyone in the whole wide world before she admitted what had happened there, even under her breath. Clara wasn’t dead. She couldn’t be. Couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t--)

‘Me? It’s always me, me, me with you two. Have you maybe considered that this was bound to happen? It’s not my fault that you were chosen as sacrifices. You did speak about having expiration dates before, and it seems to me that that was true. Yay, right? You will be able to join her soon!’

Before Thea could respond with something biting, though, the bandana doctor returned. He cast a quick glance at Clara, just sort of nodded, as if he had expected exactly that outcome, and set a strange-looking, heart-shaped machine on the table. (Thump, thump, it went. Thump, thump, thump. And, inexplicably? The sight of it filled her with pure, distilled dread-- kind of like recalling a memory you’d forgotten for a damn good reason, or, you know, watching your own limb get torn off. Considering she fucking had a frame of reference for this, Thea felt very confident about that comparison.) “I was afraid of this,” he sighed. “Young people these days just don’t listen to the signals their body is sending them. College, part time jobs, demon hunting-- all of it demands energy, and when they eventually run out of it… why, they tap into the reserves meant to keep them from exploding. I hope I don’t have to explain to you what happens then? I mean, you’ve already seen the results.”

Something in her eye twitched, and before Thea could even start thinking about the small thing called ‘consequences,’, she was holding the “””doctor””” by his throat. “What the fuck, you fucking cretin? I swear, if you’re another fucking human sacrifice byproduct, I will--”

Craaack!

Gulp. So, the bastard’s head? It must have been attached to his neck with some cheap-ass glue, because it broke off under the pressure and was now staring at her accusingly from the floor.

“Great, just great! Can you not control you anger just a little bit, Miss Holloway? I barely managed to pay off my last medical bills, and now I lost my head again. What will I say to my beloved wife? She died just a year ago, meaning she expects her anniversary coffin! Oh, and by the way, I won’t be able to perform surgery on Miss Loveless now. Seeing as the heart machine I brought is yours, though, I figure that you should be the one to bear the responsibility here. I suppose I can at least provide the instructions?”

“The heart machine? Responsibility?” Those were certainly words, and words that connected into legit sentences, but not even Thea’s brain could keep up with everything going on between the lines. Surrealism had sort of become her constant companion, but this was surrealism on fucking steroids! …steroids that only really kicked in when Clara spoke, apparently from within her own body. Okay. Okay, why the fuck not!

“Clara?” she asked, her tone dubious. “What the fuck are you… Alright, no, no need to waste your breath. A fucking carrot is holding you hostage, am I right? ‘Cause I refused to eat my carrots when I was a kid, or some shit like that. How very traumatic for the vegetable.” The thread of “””logic””” was thin, and couldn’t hold the weight of her hypothesis, but that wasn’t the goddamn point here. No, this was… Thea giving herself some time to process this? That Clara wasn’t dead, and could be saved. Fuck. Thank fucking god. “Right, the answers. My favorite color is green,” the digestive fluids receded at that, giving Clara more space to work with, “and my worst fear is, uh… still drowning. I mean, I think? It’s not like I fucking re-organize those whenever a new one rears its ugly head.”

Once again, the answer seemed to satisfy the voice. This time, the fluids parted before Clara like the Red Sea had parted before Moses, but… hmm, hmm. Thea hadn’t provided the last answer yet, had she? Maybe it wasn’t the brightest fucking idea to go there yet. “And as for my greatest trauma, I dunno. Would almost being sacrificed to a motherfucking demon qualify? I’m sure that would break most people.”

Bleep! Bleep! Bleep! Clara couldn’t see the bastard pressing the big, red ‘wrong’ button, but the sound of it was fucking unmistakable. And, the way the fluids returned with a vengeance? Yeah, that didn’t exactly scream ‘success,’ either!

‘Aaaand wrong. See how fragile the trust between the two of you is? She won’t even tell you a little thing like that! I’m not an expert, but it seems to me that this isn’t what a healthy relationship looks like.”

“Ehm,” the doctor coughed, somehow able to reach Clara’s ears as well. “I’m thinking that Miss Thea doesn’t really know herself what the answer to that one is. Maybe try finding her heart, Miss Clara? You’re in the perfect position to do that, and it will allow your friend here to be a little more honest. Don’t worry about the usual anatomy-- I can tell the heart is hiding in an unexpected place!”
 
Clara's knees nearly buckled with relief and she found herself overcome with a newfound respect for the color green. (Who would've thought that it would've played a role in saving her life?) She might have given that fact a little more thought-- perhaps asked what shade specifically she preferred so she could keep it in mind-- had she not been so fixated on the sight of the stomach fluid crawling away from her feet, graciously allowing her a place to stand without feeling it burn and bite at her toes. Oh. Thank goodness it worked. Thea would supply the answers and she would be able to escape from here. She came in for the save with yet another correct answer-- one that Clara actually would have known come to think of it. The two of them might have been personifications of day and night in more ways than one, but they could agree that water was the worst. This was going surprisingly well, considering the circumstances. (...Was this her cue to wait for everything to get infinitely worse? Good grief.) Greatest trauma. The next one was the one she dreaded having to ask the most. But this was a matter of life or death. Life or... ugh, digestion.

Clara watched with wonder, hesitating to approach where the fluids parted. She envisioned a trap where the walls pressed together again the instant she stepped close enough. One more answer and that was all she needed. It wouldn't be easy, but she could trust Thea to give it if it meant keeping her safe. (Would the voice let her escape after this? Or--) In her opinion, her girlfriend offered a completely valid and honest answer to that question. Except that didn't satisfy the voice, who pushed on the obnoxious buzzer and unleashed the fluids. They smashed into her with such force that she fell in it and her skin crawled all over with heat and disgust.

"Trauma is not a little thing." Clara snipped in Thea's defense, shaking herself off like a disgruntled cat as she brought herself back up to her feet. Ugh. She wrung her hands through her hair. None of this was real if this was her spirit self, right? But she could still feel the fluids around her, burning, burning, burning. Still. She wasn't about to trust this demon to give her love advice. Even though she hated everything about this, she needed to ask for more if she wanted to survive this. (She had to do exactly what she'd always hated having to do, so much that her voice got lost somewhere along the way. She had to admit she was vulnerable. She had to ask for help.) It wasn't that Thea didn't trust her, or that she lied to her. She had just given a facet of her trauma that the stingy, picky voice rejected. She trembled and leaned against one of the fleshy walls, her skin squirming wherever she made contact. "Thea, you might need to dig a little deeper for that one."

Meanwhile, the network of veins on the real Clara's back were gradually spreading, gnarling around her like roots. They stretched towards her shoulders, down her arms. Gripping her tightly, cutting into her skin. The heart monitor at her side beeped frantically, going on the fritz.

Thea's heart? Clara held herself, trying to cope with her panic long enough to think about the doctor's instructions. Fine, sure! Why not. Would... imagining it do the trick? Or would she have to wade through this gross, burning fluid? The voice didn't seem too inclined to let her explore this avenue presented to her, though.

'Face it, Clara. You don't belong in her heart. You never did. Why else do you think you ended up in her stomach of all places? Because she has an appetite for you. Once you kiss her, she'll move onto someone new. Someone exciting, someone who's actually deserving of love. Isn't that what you're afraid of? Isn't that why you keep hesitating? The voice continued to push towards her, with an oppressive force that squeezed at Clara's temples. No. That wasn't it. Not anymore. 'They all use you and throw you away when they get bored. I won't do that.' Then they laughed. '...Well, I do intend to use you. But unlike them, I'll keep you forever. Doesn't that sound nice? Like a fairytale ending? You won't have to try anymore. You'll be mine forever.'

Clara clamped her hands over her ears. Sure, some of those words cut through her like knives. Those had been her precise fears... before she and Thea actually talked things out, that was. They had already gotten past this and the voice was saying everything it could to dredge it all back up. To tear them apart again. When she focused on the words instead of the cruel implications, it sounded like the voice was reciting a stalker's version of a Valentine's card. Which, gross. "Keep talking. It won't matter. I'll never trust a creep like you."

'Don't you get it? You're going to die. If you don't accept me before your time runs out, you are going to die.' The voice seethed. 'You have to trust that Thea will accept you instead. Are you really going to leave your life in her hands? She already failed you once!'

Let's see now. Become this thing's permanent vessel (a fate she'd dreaded and feared since childhood) or put her trust in Thea. The answer was obvious. Even if it killed her in the end... at this rate, she really was going to die either way. Everything that made Clara 'Clara' was going to wither away inside of her body if the parasite took over, preserving her body instead of her mind. She had to trust that Thea cared enough about who she was as a person to want her to stick around a little longer.

Reminded viscerally of everything they'd struggled with before, Clara realized that communication-- trust-- was going to be their key out of this one. It always was. She couldn't brute force or bullshit her way into Thea's heart. She wouldn't just happen to stumble upon it, wandering around in the dark. She needed Thea to cast some light and guide her way. She pointedly ignored the voice, allowing her mind to favor the rhythm of the 'thump, thump, thumps' echoing above. "Thea, the only way I'm getting out of this is through your heart." She remembered the last time they were trapped in the hospital. The sight of her on the bed, the blotted out files. Although she didn't know exactly what to expect, she had a feeling she knew where this was going. Thea's heart, Thea's trauma. "While I'm there, I... might see some things you don't want me to see. But I'm running out of time. I think it's my only way out of here. Will you let me in?"
 
Jesus fucking Christ! What was this, an episode of America’s Next Top Trauma? ‘Cause in its hot girl counterpart, the judges had also always gone for a candidate Thea couldn’t see winning! (…ehm, ehm. Could she, like, request for the scenarios to be swapped? Not that she wanted to cheat on Clara or anything, but hot girls were much more fun to deal with than, you know, the very fears that had shaped your personality. See, they could easily unravel it. Thread by thread, they’d fucking pick at it, till it resembled one of those frizzy sweaters your grandma gave you every Christmas despite your vehement protests, and Thea… Thea didn’t want to wear it, okay?! Not now. It had taken a lot of work to reach this level of badassery, and she wasn’t ready to sink back into the old despair. She wasn’t ready for… for… all those things. The things that she had buried deep, deep in her heart, never to be dug up again. Fucking demon and his fucking invasions of privacy! Wasn’t it enough already that he had the exclusive fucking access to all of her Clara fantasies?! The embarrassment factor of that was high enough already, so his satanic majesty could fuck right off with those ridiculous requests.)

“What do you mean?” Thea giggled nervously, sounding so unlike herself that one could easily wonder whether she hadn’t been replaced by an evil twin. (Or by a timid twin? Yup, that would have been far more accurate.) “My heart is open. You know it, too. We’ve talked, haven’t we?” Yeah, they had talked, but not about everything. In a normal fucking relationship, you didn’t need to disclose all the details before you got intimate-- the Potential GF did not need to know your shoe size, your preferred means of death, and certainly not the deepest, darkest trauma. The problem was, this wasn’t a normal fucking relationship. Clara had stated that numerous times, hadn’t she? They’d been moving way too fast, losing way too many limbs, and then there was the whole murderous cult/demon shtick. She could already hear the bullshit input of the internet relationship coaches: blah blah blah, they’d only gotten together thanks to adrenaline, blah blah blah, this shit wasn’t going to last. The foundations were shaky, they would have said. And, to be completely honest? Thea could kind of sort of see where this was coming from, once she took off the rose-tinted glasses that she put on whenever she looked at Clara. Believe it or not, shared trauma was not a good fucking basis for a bond! Understanding was, though. Honesty as well. Communication was the one thing they got going for them-- the water with which they watered the tree of their l*ve, if you wanted to get poetic about it. Why shit on the only common sense aspect of them as a couple, then? And hadn’t Clara revealed the most vulnerable parts of her long before they’d even officially decided that they were A ThingTM? (…Clara wasn’t a coward. She was quiet, yes, but beneath that silence, there was the bravest fucking person she had ever known. Being a little more like Clara was something that she could handle, couldn’t she?)

“Miss Thea,” the doctor’s severed head frowned. “I have to advise against this course of action. What you are doing is something that we call deflection, and it isn’t helping at all. In fact, you are only digging your own grave deeper.” As if to confirm the words, the heart-shaped machine on the table buzzed in disapproval, somehow becoming covered in rust. (Geez. The fuckers who had designed the nightmare worlds really should have gone on to work for the fucking Hollywood, ‘cause the hacks responsible for the current horror movie production were getting severely outclassed!)

“Shut up,” she sighed. “I know, I know. Sorry, Clara, I just… need a moment, I guess.” A whole fucking eternity of moments, but that was exactly what she didn’t have. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. Shit will be fine. It has fucking happened already, and so it can’t re-happen. What did it matter that Clara would soon know? It wasn’t like her gf (!!!) kept a score of the horrific things she’d experienced, and was a step away from being like ‘hmm, yeah, the bitch is too much of a broken goods to keep, bye bye now.’ Nothing but understanding awaited her, Thea fucking knew that, and yet, yet--

(It was like jumping off a cliff, in the sense that you couldn’t take it back. No shutting down the game, no reloading the saves. Once you made that step? It was over, over, over, and you no longer had any control over anything-- over the other person’s interpretations, and the seeds it would plant in their fucking head. Shit, if only she could play the narrator in Clara’s head! …that was the entire fucking point, though. You couldn’t step into another person’s mind like that, and feed them info in bite-sized pieces. The demon fucking tried to control them like that, and was that a good guy behavior? Spoiler alert: nope, it wasn’t! Sometimes, you just… had to trust people. You had to take that step, despite the darkness looming beneath, and hope that they would catch you rather than laugh at the bloody fucking stain that would be left of you.)

A scalpel materialized in Thea’s hand, and in that moment? In that moment, she knew exactly what to do. (Perhaps she’d known all this time, kind of like when little birds were born knowing they needed to flap their wings to take to the skies.) “You need my heart, you say? Alright, then. It’s right fucking here.”

Slash!

As the red stain bloomed all over her shirt, drinking the whiteness greedily, Thea spared one brief thought to whether this, in fact, was a good idea. It was spreading, spreading, spreading--

And that, of course, was the moment Clara’s perspective shifted. Gone were the fleshy walls, the darkness, and even the sense of isolation that would be enough to give any claustrophobia sufferer a heart attack. Instead she… found herself in a hospital? All the hospitals looked the same, with their sterile white, inoffensive pictures on the wall and the quiet, stifling sense of despair, just barely contained. Thea, younger even than she’d been when they met for the first time, was gripping the blanket tightly. By her side, a pretty young woman was sitting.

“Mommy, why do I have to stay here? I don’t like this. The nurses don’t let me eat chocolate.”

“Oh, Dorothea.” The woman giggled, ruffling her hair playfully. “Haven’t we covered this already? You are very, very sick, and your diet needs to be balanced right now. Once you get home, you’ll get all the chocolate that you can eat.”

“I don’t feel sick, though.”

A shadow crossed the woman’s face, though it was so quick it might have been an illusion. When Clara blinked, her smile was perfectly pleasant-- toothpaste commercial material, as Thea would have called it. “Well, some illnesses are just sneakier than most. Doesn’t mean that you aren’t in danger, sweetie.”

***

Another day, another hospital. It did have the same hospital look to it, but somehow, Clara just… knew it in her heart that it was a different one? Or perhaps Thea did, and the knowledge was transmitted through some weird mental osmosis thing.

This time, an older Thea was being rushed into what had to be an operating room, her eyes glazed over. There was shouting, enough of it to drown out one’s own thoughts, and someone’s hand stuck a syringe in Thea’s long, pale arm. Before the consciousness left her, though? A mixture of voices pierced through her mind, like a monster’s sharp talon.

“…why did she have the access to…”

“I don’t know!” the woman, her mother, cried. “I swear, I have no idea how this could have happened…”

***

This time, when Clara’s eyes snapped open, Thea was conscious, and, as fit the pattern, sitting on a hospital bed. Something in her stare was different, though-- more guarded, as if she was looking at a trap that was about to snap shut.

“Do you think I’d never fucking find out?” she asked, her voice teetering somewhere between anger and hysteria. Such a fun, fun combo, huh?

“Language, Dorothea.” Her mother was once again sitting close, and holding her daughter by her hand. (If you looked closely enough, though? You could see that the grip was uncomfortable, to the point it left behind irritated red marks.)

“Don’t Dorothea me! I’m not her. I’m not.” For Clara’s convenience, the point of view zoomed on a discarded photograph-- photograph of a different girl, with similarly shaped eyes and the same brown hair, resting on her bedside table. ‘Dorothea Holloway, 13 years. Happy birthday.’ “All this time, you’ve been fucking with me! I was never sick. You just made me…”

“Fucking with you?” the woman repeated, letting go of her hand at once as if she’d been stung. “How can you even say something like that, to your own mother? I cared for you. Sacrificed so much for you, too. I made sure that you wouldn’t end up like your sister, and your only job was to be her!”

“To be… her?” Thea’s brown eyes widened, but by that point, the woman was already grabbing a pillow. (The same pillow the nurse had reached after in one of those visions, if Clara’s memory served well. The pattern, at least, looked strikingly similar. Back then, she’d said…)

“There’s no point in trying to fix something this broken, though. I suppose you never really could be saved.” She pressed the thing against Thea’s face, pushing harder and harder, and--

***

“Uh oh,” the voice grinned, as the vision dissolved into bleak nothingness. “Seems like your beloved Thea can’t handle it, after all. Look, she’s bleeding to death! I suppose that’s a good ending of sorts as well, though. At least she won’t live long enough to disappoint you. What a dream, right?”
 
"There's nothing you can do, is there? Helpless little bird. You're going to disappear now." Before Clara could process anything, a humanoid shape rose in the nothingness. Within seconds she hung in the thing's grasp by the throat. It didn't matter. And that wasn't to say that what Thea went through and felt about it didn't matter-- but rather her knowing this didn't alter perception of her whatsoever. Circumstantially, what they'd been through had been extremely different. At the same time, however, wasn't it similar? The way that neither of them could depend on the so-called adults in their lives to take proper care of them? Just because they were treated like they were undeserving of love as children didn't mean that they didn't deserve it, either. (It was eye-opening, to a certain extent. Like staring into a mirror. Without seeing herself in the role of the victim, seeing Thea in that position instead, she found herself sympathizing much more. They... were both brainwashed into believing they didn't deserve it, weren't they? They were both messed up in that way. Messed up but assuredly not broken, the way Thea's pathetic excuse for a mother implied. In spite of every foul hand they were dealt since childhood, they were still standing!) She choked in the figure's claws and the blood-- presumably Thea's metaphorical (she refused to believe the blood was anything but metaphorical) blood-- was flowing down the walls of the empty space she now inhabited. The nurse had torn Clara's heart out of her chest before and that hadn't been real, either. This had to be the same thing, right? That was what she told herself, at least. It was rising past her calves and steadily approaching her waistline. The thing squeezed out all of the information it asked for and it still wanted more. "She's completely lost sight of you, doll. And now you're mine."

On the hospital bed, the dark veins began to circle menacingly around Clara's throat like a thorny choker, digging in hungrily, reaching towards her jawline. The veins at her arms were nearing her wrists. The parasite's reach was spreading and fast. Sweat stuck strands of hair around her expression, torn between twitching and easing, like she was caught in the throes of a nightmare. The heart monitor attached to her continued to beep frantically, so much so that the sound no longer resembled what it was supposed to anymore.

"To think of all those deals you accepted in the heat of the moment to save her life. And now she's too busy dying again to save you when you need to pay up!" The voice Clara heard was beginning to creep through the speakers through beeps and static. "A tragedy for you two... a comedy for me. You humans are so foolish. So weak. You'll cease to be and He will rise."

The blood was rising, sloshing around like an angry red sea. Clara reached desperately for the thing's arms, sinking her nails in as she attempted to pry it off of her. No use. The strength was gradually leaving her body, her attempts to free herself becoming weaker and weaker yet. Finally, her arms dangled to her sides. She felt that she was going numb, that she was being pushed out. The blood flowed up to her shoulders now and she tilted her head backward to keep her nose and mouth above it for as long as possible. There was a point where she considered reaching within for the place where magic patiently waited inside of her, for her wings... but whenever she approached the thought, she backed away as flashes of Thea, bloodied and armless fell over her. Not again. Can't risk it again. Over and over and over. It didn't matter if she opened her eyes or closed them. Blood was everywhere.

"That's right. Your wings have been clipped, little bird. What good are you without them? Without us?" The creature smiled. "Nothing."

There was no way for Clara to speak like this, with hands crushing her throat. That didn't mean she didn't have a voice, though. She had another voice from within, a voice that connected them thanks to some mysterious, supernatural forces they'd been exposed to as kids. It would reach her, just like the voices of all those children always reached them before. It had to.

"Thea, it doesn't matter. None of it changes who you are to me." Clara tried to reach out with her thoughts. The blood was up to her neck. "You should know. Don't you remember what you said back when we found my memories? I was mortified... but you didn't care! I don't look at you and see someone broken. I don't see someone unlovable. Because I love you." Now the blood was up to her chin. She could feel the figure getting stronger as she got weaker, inhaling as if it was sucking her soul in through its nostrils. "...If I disappear, can you at least remember that? That I loved you." Could love from a heart like hers be enough to inspire her to keep going? Who knew. Anyway, was it wrong of her to think this could be her final goodbye? She was choking, about to drown in blood and feeling hazy as a ghost herself. "Fight it, Thea. Show the world what a badass you are. At least one of us has to stick around to kick the demon's ass, right? For all those kids. For ourselves. We all deserved better, didn't we? So we can't let him win."

The parasite was winning the fight against Clara, though. For once, she couldn't bring herself to pull any magic tricks out at the last minute and save the day. (That reliance was what got her into this mess in the first place, right?) Without so much as a gasp, she disappeared beneath a roaring wave of blood. The thing dragged her down, down, down... until the red blood deepened to pitch black. Then she was falling instead, as if from a great height. (Fantastic. Leave it to a place like this to wrap two of her worst fears into one!) Scraggily, shadowy creatures skittered around on the fleshy walls around her. Creeping around like starved predators who just eyed fresh prey. The creatures from the nightmares that kept her up for years, horrifying monsters that she had painted over and over to try and capture their likeness. To study. To prepare herself. But she couldn't really prepare herself for anything, could she? It was bigger than her. And there was no coming back from this.
 
Drip, drip, drip.

Fucking hell! She wasn't supposed to bleed this much, was she? Or like, any amount at all, if you took into account the inherent functionality of the human body to keep the blood inside. Once that bad boi left your veins? Bad, bad news, babey! The girl didn't need to be a fucking doctor to understand that, and so she did acknowledge on some level that this was a Certified Mess of a SituationTM. At the same time, though? It was hard to panic. The seas of red were surging, her head was spinning in these wild, wild circles, and all Thea Holloway could think about was how freeing all of this felt. You know, kind of like releasing a sneeze you had been suppressing for far, far too long? Yeah, an accurate comparison!

'Good,' the demon soothed her, his voice smooth like caramel. (Had it always been this pleasant? Thea kind of wanted to wrap herself in it-- to let him everywhere, even in places he hadn't managed to touch yet. After all, victory was just a matter of time for him. Why resist, then? Kicking the bucket and breaking your own spine was better than letting the rope fucking strangle you.) 'Just let go, crow. It was always supposed to be like that, you know? You've opened up, and now you're bleeding. That's what happens when you cut yourself open. Finally, for once in your miserable life, you should accept the responsibility for your choices.' Ah, yes, responsibility. Responsibility for herself, for others, for others' perception of her-- always, always they'd fucking pushed it on her, even if her shoulders had been bleeding. Maybe they'd been right, though. Like, so many people at once couldn't be wrong? The sacred principles of democracy, blah blah blah, and so on and so forth. 'Exactly, crow! No need to fight it. You were born to have your blood spilled, and it pleases me so that you can see that. I have always known in my heart that we would be friends, you and I. It just takes a while for people to warm up to me! I guess you could say I'm an acquired taste. In return, I shall soon acquire my taste of you. Are you looking forward to it, my sweet? To finally being a part of something.'

Vaguely, Thea could hear something else in the background-- something sweeter, richer, and more distant, somehow. A memory half-forgotten, shrouded in moonlight. (...wait, moonlight? Where had that come from? She wasn't one to reach for cheap poetic comparisons just to sound dignified, like some loser-ass """artists""" would! Nah, there had to be a fucking reason behind that. Why had her mind gone there? Who was it that was connected to... ah. Who, not what. She'd always been aware, hadn't she? Duh, Clara! Clara, who was still there. Clara, who had somehow gotten stranded in her stomach and then in her heart. Clara, who had seen everything, planted firmly in context. There were no excuses, were there? The game was up, her core revealed. The mask was gone, gone, gone, and Thea wasn't sure who she was underneath, and, if she didn't know, then how could she expect Clara to? The bystander Clara? Fucking hell, she was probably like 'man, I didn't sign up for this shit.' Thea hadn't, either, but it wasn't like she could opt out, as if this was a fucking subscription that didn't suit her needs. Clara could, though! She could, and her not doing so would be... well, kind of dumb. Like continuing to wear the shoes that didn't fucking fit you, just because you felt too sorry for the shoemaker. Poor, broken Thea, right? The girl who didn't have an arm and a genuine sense of identity. A hand-out gf was clearly in order here, like in all those stories where a relationship was a participation fucking trophy!)

...except that Clara didn't seem to see it that way. Not at all. Her words were gaining a more and more concrete shape in her mind, and, as opposed to hearing them, Thea sensed what they meant, akin to a blind person reading Braille. (Yes, Clara had seen everything. And, really, wasn't she kind of looking in the mirror here? Because her perception of Clara hadn't been altered, despite seeing her through the lens of her piece of shit father. That fucker's eye damage had had absolutely no effect on her! Why, then, should she suspect her gf (!!!) of being swayed? Clara wasn't a fucking mood ring, with her colors changing with the temperature of her wearer's skin. Clara was Clara, with all of her inherent Clara-ness. She still loved her. She loved her, and you didn't fucking throw your loved one away just because they'd seen some shit! Nobody sailed through life unaffected, so you just... learned to live with the scars. With yours, and those that covered your partner's body as well.)

'Don't listen to her,' the demon wailed, demanding her attention. 'Dove is just trying to lead you astray. You think she won't try to use you, crow? Fit you into a neat little category, so that you might serve her well? At least I am honest about it.'

'Fuck your so-called honesty,' Thea growled. 'You've been lying to me since the day your first opened your ugly fucking maw.' Clara wanted her to fight, she understood that now! To fight and remember her, in case she... no. Fuck no. Thea wasn't even going to acknowledge the possibility of her d-wording, 'cause fuck that shit! Not on her fucking watch. With all of her willpower, she outstretched her arm into the gnawing emptiness--

'Too late,' the bastard grinned. 'You cannot reach her now. How could you, with that sorry excuse of an arm? I won't help you, crow. I won't. You pathetic humans are nothing without me, and it's high time for you to learn that.' Nothing without him, huh? Well, the fucker was also nothing without them! Because he lived rent-free in their heads, not the other way around. A parasite had no fucking right to act this high and mighty when he sucked the blood from their veins, and got his energy from their neurons firing! Guided by some strange instinct, Thea reached for him, not for Clara.

'Wait, crow. What are you--?!' Ah. There it was! The power to rend the soul apart, and stitch it back if need be. The lightning in the fucking bottle. (Shadows were dancing all around her, and once, that might have been scary. Not anymore, though. They couldn't fucking exist without the sun, you know? Without her, as all those rituals oh-so-helpfully indicated. The demon's own power was a reflection of her, and Clara, and all those kids that had fucking died just because a bunch of lunatics just had to fabricate their own toy god. Well, time to take it back! ...the shadows screamed in agony, but Thea didn't care. Not in the slightest. With her mind, she carved them into pieces, attached them to the dead flesh, and, ta-dah! A new arm. An arm with which she grabbed Clara, and pulled, pulled, pulled, as if her life depended on it. In a way, it did.)

"A-are you okay?" she gasped, once the real world Clara opened her eyes. (The nightmare hadn't ended yet, judging by the maggots crawling on the rotting walls, but maybe, maybe they'd taken the first step towards awakening. Duh. Most likely, they still had to save the poor schmuck stuck in here. You know what, though? Fuck that for now, 'cause Thea was ConcernedTM.) "Clara, can you hear me?"
 
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Clara didn't want to die. Granted she never really wanted it per se-- but there was perpetually some part of her that expected it to come for her in her youth. Long ago she sealed that grim thought in her head, kept it as a reminder, and made her peace with it. As a result, she only lived her life about halfway. Drowned herself in art and music, didn't put much effort into building anything that would last for years to come. For years she knew she wouldn't have. And she'd approached her thoughts of death calmly, she intended to go gracefully because she saw it walking behind her. One day it would catch up, embrace her, and she would disappear from everyone's lives. (Everyone's lives, who would continue to go on without much change regardless of her presence. Except Raoul. But Raoul would finally be free, wouldn't he? He wouldn't feel that obligation to keep her around. He could move on and live his life for himself.) She felt she was prepared for death and strangely enough, that gave her the illusion of control. All of those nightmares she'd had? They looked just like the hellscape she fell through now. So they had been premonitions, just like she suspected. She was right and the confirmation of that left a cold, bitter taste in her mouth. Because as it turned out? She wasn't prepared after all. Then again, she guessed no one could ever be prepared for anything when someone like Thea Holloway entered their life.

Clara was falling, dying, approaching the threshold between life and the afterlife. The calm she'd built up for herself in preparation for this moment burned away until there was nothing but her pounding heart and shaky hands. Fear. There was no ledge, no one left to grab onto. Just the endless fall, waiting to crash, waiting for the end. This was really it. (...What waited for her beyond the threshold? No doubt a cage with her name on it, prepared years ago by the demon himself. A realm of her own would form around it and... and perhaps someday she would meet Thea again. When she had to set her ghost free. Cerberus would weep obnoxious tears and perhaps sharing the first kiss they never got to have would be the action that set her soul free. Ideally, the kiss would destroy the demon as well and Thea could move on and live a happy life beyond all the supernatural bullshit. That was the one hopeful thought she had left, she supposed. Thea. Surviving and thriving as she deserved. The thought offered her a glimmer of light, even when she was on the brink of being swallowed into eternal darkness.) Tears began to cloud her view of the monsters around her. When she blinked, the droplets of water fell upwards. She wasn't prepared. She'd never been in control. Death took her with cruel hands, just when she'd found someone who inspired her to live as opposed to just... existing.

As Clara's vision began to fade and blot at the edges she saw an arm made of shadows stretching towards her at a lightning speed. She braced herself for impact and then...

A sharp ringing pierced through her skull. Her temples throbbed. Her heart pounded with a galloping thump, thump, thump in her chest, each of which was further punctuated by the beeping on the machine at her bedside. Clara opened her eyes, the inky black that clouded them dissipating to reveal the soft brown beneath. She was back in the hospital bed. Back in her own body. The parasite's dark veins rotted away, unfurling around her limbs and leaving her with thorny scars around her neck, arms and back as they slithered back into the mark that remained firmly planted in the back of her neck. '...ou okay? Clara, can you hear me?' She heard a voice. Thea's voice. Gradually, everything fit into place. Thea broke out of the trance, she came for her, didn't let her... let her...

Of course Thea broke free! She was a certified badass, wasn't she? And she believed in her wholeheartedly. But admittedly, Clara hadn't been prepared to be torn from the throes of certain death at the last moment. (Maybe she didn't always need to be prepared, though. Thea shattered through that concept quite spectacularly... and, to be honest, Clara wasn't necessarily upset about that.) Death had come, just like she always thought... and Thea essentially just told it to fuck off. It was one of many reasons why she loved her so damned much.

So, yeah. Clara wasn't prepared to live after preparing to die. She wasn't prepared for her remaining walls to crumble in a maelstrom of emotion, or to sob from the sheer force of it. But she did. And it didn't matter. Thea wasn't going to leave her for showing that there was indeed a vulnerable heart hiding behind her carefully curated calm and quiet. (She hadn't back when panic crept past it, or when the ugly parts of her past unearthed themselves for her eyes to see.) And no way in hell was she about to leave Thea, either. She must've got the message, right? Considering they were both still alive and everything.

Clara shot upright in bed and embraced Thea, holding her tight against her. She buried her teary face in her shirt, allowing herself to cry unashamed. They were cleansing tears, the tears she never cried for herself when she thought so passively about dying without ever really living. With time, the feeling of Thea's heartbeat so close to her own lulled her back into a state of calm and she managed to speak. "You heard me. I wasn't sure if..." Despite the monster's hands being around her throat, the message reached her. Clara reached her. Even though the demons tried to make her evaporate like nothing more than morning mist, Thea was still able to hold onto her. "I mean, I knew you'd make it out. You're strong, Thea. I believed in you. But I wasn't sure if..." If her words would reach her. Clearly, even now it was hard for her to find them. 'I wasn't sure if, wasn't sure if...'

Clara pulled away slightly, then. Looking her in the eyes meaningfully, as if she was determined to truly look at her. To look at her as if it might be the last time-- because she had been scared she might never see it again. She gently pushed Thea's hair out of her face and tucked a short strand behind her ear. Her own eyes flickered like candlelight. Passionate, if a bit hesitant. She really thought she was going to die. And they weren't in the clear yet, were they? They never would be until they destroyed that demon and his followers. "I wasn't sure if I'd ever be able to..." Oh, to hell with it! They'd agreed to communicate, yes... but sometimes actions articulated far more than words ever could.

Clara grabbed Thea by the shoulders and kissed her.
 
‘Shh, shh. No reason to cry.’ Except that, you know, there was a fuckload of reason to cry, and Thea would rather eat her own shoe before she tried to silence her gf (!!!) like that. Just, no. The no crying brigade could fuck right off-- ‘hurr durr, feelings are bad because reasons’ was kindergarten-tier ideology, and she wasn’t about to support that sort of nonsense. “It’s okay,” she hugged Clara clumsily, both with her healthy arm and… well, the other one. (The one made of shadows. Now that their help wasn’t desperately needed, the shadows swirled around her stump lazily, akin to cigarette smoke. But, you know, the hardcore version of it! More than something truly tangible, it felt like an idea of arm? A concept chained by her mind, not the whims of that nasty-ass demon. …it had belonged to him, Thea could sense that. Just like art nerds could look at a painting and tell which ancient master had painted it five hundred years ago based on the strokes of the brush alone, she could tell, with 100% accuracy, that this thing had been born from his dark essence. Oh well! A tooth for a fucking tooth, right? The bastard had fucked around and, indeed, found out. Heh.)

“I’m here, and you’re here, too, and that… uh, means that we’re both here. Therefore, we aren’t dead. Or, if we fucking are dead, it’s not so bad after all. I mean, it doesn’t feel that different from our usual lives? But I genuinely think that we’re still alive, considering that death is supposed to be your ‘get out of bullshit free’ ticket. And I’m pretty sure that we’re still stuck in the same bullshit that we stepped in, so… yeah.” A statement that couldn’t be disputed, no matter how hard you tried. Yay for those sick propositional logic skills! Maybe, once the ghosts were all free and they lived a semblance of a normal life, Thea could return to college and kick all those stuck-up academics’ fat, pasty asses. In the meantime, though? Tears glistened in her own eyes as an invisible hand threatened to crush her fucking throat, with a force that almost caused her to topple over. (Clara. It wasn’t fair, you know? She’d just met her, and yet, yet the demon tried to take her away from her, as if she was a toy and Thea a kid that had been deprived of her good girl privileges. Forget about it, fucker, she thought, clutching her gf’s (!!!) t-shirt. We aren’t your fucking toys. And, besides, we still have too many anniversaries to celebrate.) “I did,” she confirmed, because it was true. “Loud and clear. He bound us together, so now he shouldn’t fucking cry that it actually works. I mean, can you imagine? Being indecisive like that totally is a sign of--” oof. Brain malfunction, brain malfunction, brain malfunction!

See, Thea had been kissed before. She’d done way, way, way more than that, and sometimes not even a full day had passed since her meeting her partner for the first time-- after all, breakneck speed had always kind of been her thing. Music, drugs and rock’n’roll, right? No fucking point to waiting when death was lurking just behind the corner, sharpening its cheesy-ass scythe. You know, ‘tomorrow’ was for people who had a future. For people who didn’t hear voices, didn’t have weird occult symbols tattooed onto their skin, and who, for the most part, knew that they were welcome home even if they assassinated the motherfucking president. Thea had had none of that. The one thing nobody had been able to take away from her? The moment, to which she’d clung with all the desperation of someone hanging onto a cliff. (Beneath that cliff, there had been spikes, and scorpions, and enough poison to feed to all the Snow Whites in the world! The poison called emptiness, spreading from her core to her fingertips, and taking, taking, taking, until she herself was just a hollow fucking puppet.) So, yeah. No blushing maiden here, by any stretch of imagination. Still, when Clara grabbed her like that? When she embraced her, Thea’s heart skipped a beat, and her eyes fell down on her lips. You know, the lips that were getting closer, closer, closer--

--and suddenly, they were kissing. Ehm. There wasn’t any epic soundtrack, and the rusted, rotting doctor’s office probably wouldn’t win the award for the most romantic environment ever, but the fireworks behind Thea’s closed eyelids? Those more than made up for it. (Cliché as it was, it was like… like coming home. Real fucking home, where nobody would judge her for daring to be herself. And that was the thing, wasn’t it? Love. Not pink fucking hearts drawn on the picture of your crush, but knowing that, no matter what, you would be accepted by Your Person. Thea Holloway might have been super fucking unfortunate in many regards, but in that, at least, she counted herself blessed.)

“You did make it memorable for me,” Thea said, her eyes sparkling, when she finally pulled away. (Her cheeks were flushed, her breath shallow, and her heart drumming a staccato rhythm in her chest, but none of that bothered her. It was nice, like riding a rollercoaster could be.) “Ten out of fucking ten. I’m thinking that all of our kisses will be a ten out of ten experience, though, because I love you. That helps a great deal.” Probably to test the hypothesis, she planted another kiss on her lips. Hmm. Yeah, one could get used to that! “Checks out,” the brunette grinned. “But I’ll need a bigger sample size. ‘Cause, you know, science.”

The doctor’s head lay dead on the floor, his eyes glazed over-- no fucking wonder, because anyone would have been embarrassed to witness that scene. Still, Thea appreciated the privacy.

“She went to prison after that,” she said, before helping Clara back to her feet. “My mother, I mean. I managed to push one of those buttons that notify a nurse that something is wrong, and oh boy, were a lot of things fucking wrong there. Afterwards, my aunt adopted me. Come to think of it, she wrote me a letter and asked me to visit last year. Called me ‘Dorothea,’ though, and so I didn’t go. Was that childish?”
 
"...Did I? Good." Clara replied with a little smirk, her own eyes shining back a mingling of affection and mischief when they parted. (Most importantly, they were shining with something other than tears now, which had since all dried up in the heat of the moment.) Their kiss banished everything else into the background and the only thing that mattered was the feeling of Thea's lips pressed against her lips. Their proximity compacted the tides of fear in her into something smaller, something conquerable. Their kiss was real in a way the horror-movie setup standing around them was not... and yes, maybe they'd been assigned lives labeled with the 'horror' genre from birth-- but who was to say they couldn't choose romance for themselves along the way? Suddenly she found herself determined to take it for herself, in spite of all the shit that'd been thrown their way. (...On some level, she understood that could be the adrenaline from the kiss giving her a power trip. It wasn't that easy, was it? It never was. If it was a choice, she was sure that she and Thea both would have chosen something different for themselves. But now, knowing she wasn't alone anymore, she felt that the future was a possibility that she could reclaim.) The casual way she admitted to loving her, without an 'I guess' posed in front of it, as if it was a sure thing brought her to smile effortlessly into the second kiss. She tilted her head inquisitively, gently caressing Thea's neck, before guiding her fingers through her short but impossibly soft hair. "Hm. I think I can do better than that. I'd like to aim for higher than ten." Where did the confidence come from? Clara wasn't sure, but she pressed a soft kiss to Thea's jawline to give a quiet little hint of her intentions. (...She'd never been introduced to this version of herself, she realized. Moreover, she'd never been this Clara with Ivy. Maybe because she'd never been allowed to be this Clara with Ivy.) Thea had told her she was a lot... and Clara knew, deep down, that she herself was secretly a lot as well. And maybe that allowed her to lean into it a little more. Was there any reason to hold back, with someone who made her feel as safe as Thea did? "You're right. Science is very important. But we should probably wait until we're in a ten out of ten room to get those samples." A sanitary room, that was. Because while her fantasies were sweet, she wasn't so impatient to act on them that she'd proceed all while ignoring the mold growing all over the walls. That was just gross. And they deserved better than that.

And honestly? There were a lot of facets in their lives where they deserved better. Clara solemnly squeezed Thea's hand.

"Thea... I changed my name altogether. I couldn't stand to go by the name he'd given me anymore. Never felt like a Beatrice, anyway." Clara began. Come to think of it, she had never spoken about it with anyone before. Her papa had wanted a different daughter, that was for certain. A normal, happy daughter. But he never wanted her to act as an exact reflection of someone who already existed. There was a whole extra layer added to Thea's hatred for her full name with that context in mind. (And it turned Clara's stomach. People weren't made in factories, mass-produced in cookie-cutter shapes. Thea hadn't been expected to grow up and be her own person... instead, she existed to fill the hole her older sister had left in her mother's heart. But that wasn't how it worked! It took someone with a twisted mind to assign those expectations to anyone, to essentially strip them of their own identity. That was the one thing every person born on this earth was entitled to.) Either way, it was clear it went far beyond having an aesthetic distaste for 'old lady' names. "Raoul understood that when he adopted me. I didn't even have to tell him that for him to understand." That didn't mean it wasn't headache inducing for him, to sort all of that out. Making sure he was a fit guardian for her when he was barely out of college himself, studying how to go about changing her name legally... she'd still been a kid, but she saw his stress on the sidelines. He'd gone over and beyond to set her life on a new path. (Yeah... too bad that a whole murder cult was on her tail, just waiting to render all his efforts useless.) "You deserve to be around people who see you, Thea. If your aunt didn't understand how that name made you feel, then you don't owe her anything. Fuck that."

Yes, fuck that. Clara said what she said and she meant it. As far as she was concerned? The time for blaming themselves for things they had no control over was officially done. It'd died with their kiss, with accepting that love existed somewhere on this earth for the two of them... far, far away from all the people from their pasts who hurt them.

...Oh. And speaking of seeing Thea? Clara blinked as she brought herself to her feet, bewildered when she finally caught a glimpse of the shadowy arm at her girlfriend's side. Emotions had been running high, rushing through her with such tremendous force that some part of her didn't even register the fact that Thea had caught her and held onto her with two arms instead of one. (It was just so natural to be held with two arms that it didn't really occur to her that it was strange, despite the memory of cutting her arm off having engraved itself in her mind.) It felt a bit silly, that of all things, that was the last she thought to address. But absurdity had become such a staple in their lives that, perhaps, in some way it also checked out.

"Wow. Thea, your arm." Clara hesitantly reached out for her shadow hand, quickly glimpsing Thea's eyes to make sure if it was okay if she touched it. (Her first instinct was to reach for her hand-- of course-- because she didn't want her girlfriend to think she was going to recoil or judge her for it. All in all? It was pretty badass. But she would refrain from giving that judgement until she knew for sure whether or not it was hurting her.) She compared the sizes of their hands, tilting her head curiously. The feeling of it was sort of wispy... but also tangible. Fascinating. "How does it feel? It doesn't... uh, hurt or anything?" There were several other questions floating around in her head, of course. She was Clara and there were always questions. Like how, and why-- and what kinds of things could she do with it? Did she think it was going to last? And most importantly, how did Thea feel about it?
 
You ever thought you were 100% in control, only to have the rug pulled out from under you? Like, a psychopathic CEO who would fire his assistant over buying a wrong brand of coffee level of control? Well, disregard the ToxicTM factors from the equation and Thea felt exactly like that as she stared at Clara with wide eyes, unable to rein her imagination in. H-higher than ten? What would that entail? (And, oh so helpfully, her mind provided answers. A whole lot of them, even. Admittedly, a lot of them were strictly on the nsfw side, and Thea had to slap herself mentally in order to fucking function. Since they were, you know, still stuck in someone’s nightmare? Yeah, not getting to experience any of that because she was too busy fantasizing to dodge a death laser or something would have been the lamest reason ever!) “Really?” she blinked, her voice suspiciously hoarse. (Her cheeks were flushed, too, and normally, her first impulse would have tried to hide that-- after all, showing Feelings like that was Not CoolTM. That being said, though? Clara embraced the uncool parts of her with the same fervor with which she accepted her certified badass parts, and that… Uh, it made her feel safe. Vulnerable, but like, in a good way. Removing the armor she usually wore felt damn nice, okay? Because the steel plates were real fucking heavy, in case you didn’t notice. The steel plates, and also the creeping suspicion that, without them, they’d throw her away like a chewed-out bubblegum. Eh, a thing of the past!) “I do like a girl with ambition. Nothing more attractive than that, you feel me? And, since this is a project for two, I’ll be fucking overjoyed to help you reach those new heights.” …not here, though. Clara did very much have a point, as per usual.

Thea stood up, dusting off her trousers in the process. More than anything, she did so because it was easier to busy her hands-- otherwise, they’d be shaking like fucking leaves in the wind, and the idea of that was deeply unpleasant. “You’re right,” she nodded. “Like, fucking duh. I knew it as well, but I guess I needed to hear it from someone I trust as well. I blame all the Hollywood propaganda. It’s like, blood over water, yada yada yada, but they can’t fucking conceptualize that some of that blood is just rotten.” Her gf (!!!) of all people would understand that, though. Mindless approval wasn’t her thing, for one, and the personal experience with her piece of shit father must have helped her cultivate a particular resistance towards that kind of brainwashing. “Thanks for saying that,” she added, for once without joking around. There was no reason to wrap her statements in a comedy sandwich, y’know? It was almost an instinct at this point, to try and make her words easy to digest, but Clara didn’t need tons of metaphorical sugar as a motivation to actually listen. Nah, no empty fucking calories in the communication between them!

“And, yeah. I guess I have an arm now? Or something arm-adjacent,” Thea shrugged. “When you were about to get fucking drowned, I just… switched to autopilot, I guess. I knew I needed something to pull you out of there, but I didn’t know where you were, and couldn’t reach you with my normal arm. So, the one that you see? I took it from the demon and let it find ya. The bastard stole mine a few weeks ago, so I fucking hope he’s happy with the exchange.” Looking the limb up and down, she gave Clara an easy, wide smile. “It doesn’t really feel like anything, you know. At first, I was so fucking afraid I didn’t manage to get you out of there, but then you were safe, and… yeah, it’ll take some getting used to. Overall, I’m just glad that I have a normal-ish number of hands. Not sure if it will work in real world as well, or how I will explain to people in the fucking grocery store why my other arm looks like a futuristic cigarette commercial, but that’s the problem of my future self.” Sucked to be her, really! It also kind of sucked to be the Thea stuck in another nightmare dimension, though, and so she supposed it kind of evened out. “Let’s see if we can get out of here, then?” The last time they’d been in a hospital, no ghost had been freed-- the weight of their own pasts had dragged them down, down, down, like the proverbial ball and chain tied to their ankles. Without that burden, though? Thea was confident they could float back to the surface, just like they always did. (That was their entire shtick. Survival, despite all the odds, despite all those dark figures thinking they knew what their fate was. Well, guess what? They were fucking wrong! All this time, they were the ones who held that thread, and, using it, they would fucking strangle them. Poetic justice and all that.)

“I suppose we should find the poor bastard stuck here. Can you hear them?” Because, come to think of it, Thea couldn’t. How very MysteriousTM, considering that they couldn’t fucking shut up under normal circumstances! It seemed that the Powers That Be were eager to provide that answer, though, because the moment she opened the door to get the fuck out of the office… well, a corpse fell inside.

“Eek!” Thea jumped aside, genuinely startled. What the fuck, man?! Had the person been eavesdropping on them, resulting in the awesomeness of their crisis resolution skills fucking killing them? Although, hmm, hmm… the corpse looked familiar, actually. Strikingly familiar. “Wait a motherfucking second,” she leaned closer, putting the woman’s (?) dirty hair away from her face. And, sure enough! It was Ivy who was staring at them with her empty eyes, her lips frozen in a silent plea. (A million emotions ran through her at once with all the might of a bulldozer, ranging from anger to, shockingly enough, pity.) “Shit,” Thea whispered. “What do you wager that is? Another fucking trap, or… uh, did they kill her because we managed to escape?” And, more importantly, what did she have to do with the hospital? Because in the last installment of this shitshow, Ivy very much had been alive-- meaning that she couldn’t be their fucking ghost!
 
In a way, Thea's new arm was a manifestation of her determination to keep Clara safe... and that revelation had her staring at it with an expression of soft fascination more than anything else. It warmed her to know that she was there for her. That she could fall and someone was there at her side that she could depend on to catch her. The world was so uncertain when they wandered these worlds... and it was nice to be sure of at least one thing in the fact that she could depend on Thea. That went both ways, too. There was a balance set between the two of them that her past relationships had lacked. That her relationship with Ivy had lacked. "We'll figure it out." If they could solve their way out of more than three of those ghostly traps, they would find a way to cope with this new development. When it came down to it, who even cared what people in the grocery store thought? (If Thea's arm was anything like the wings she'd grown, she supposed it was possible that it could exist beyond the ghost realm they were in now. Except somehow this seemed different than the wings. The smoke-like resemblance made it different somehow, too.) Briefly, she considered the implications of the permanence of such an arm. It wouldn't bother her so long as it didn't bother Thea, she supposed. And if it did, there were always long sleeves and gloves, and...

Clara's gut twisted when the familiar corpse fell into their path. She set her hand over her nose and mouth to shield herself from the stench. The woman who called herself Ivy. The woman who might have killed her dog, played with their hearts like toys, and shot her out of the sky with a crossbow of all things. And yet the sight still yanked at her heartstrings. No. She'd been more successful in catching them than any of the cultists they'd sent after them thus far. The idea that they would punish someone they could still foreseeably use to their advantage with death seemed wrong somehow. (And of course she wouldn't put murder past the cultists, for all the obvious reasons... but wasn't it odd? What would the motive be to get rid of her unceremoniously and to plant her here of all places?) Another ghost had existed in the hospital setting before they ever met Ivy, too-- and she had been very much alive back then. (Unless she'd been a well-preserved, convincing looking zombie all that time and they never noticed. Clara had gotten used to a lot of weirdness lately, but that conspiracy theory was one she found particularly hard to believe.) It was Ivy and at the same time it wasn't. She looked younger, didn't she? Not in that she had a particularly youthful glow as a corpse or anything... but her stature in general appeared smaller than the Ivy she remembered. There was something else, too. Something Clara couldn't quite put her finger on.

"I... I don't know." Steeling herself, Clara kneeled down to examine the body a little more closely. She checked Ivy's wrist for a pulse she knew she wouldn't find. But she did find something. It was a peculiar marking on her wrist, a marking that branded this corpse as one of the ones who died alongside all the others. Oh, that's right.

"Thea, look at this. The marking on her wrist... it's a twelve." Clara turned her wrist at an angle where it could be seen plainly. Sure enough, it was an XII. If this was really Ivy, shouldn't the marking be an XVII instead? "Do you remember what Ivy said when we met? She was supposed to be the star. The roman numeral on her wrist was seventeen." The star tarot card, in other words. However, looking at this corpse's wrist, it would imply that they were looking at the sacrifice those cultists had linked up with the hanged man. Meaning that the girl they thought they knew was pretending to be someone else... or this was another girl entirely. There had to be several explanations for the reason why the world would have conjured a near exact replica of the person they'd met, the person who betrayed them. "I don't think this is Ivy."

The second that Clara said that, the hospital around them morphed into a new one entirely. The walls were cleaner, soft daylight streamed in through the windows, and children were everywhere. A small handful of them ran around freely while others were sitting in wheelchairs. (Among the children present were younger versions of herself and Thea, she noticed. They sat across from each other at a table... playing checkers?) Wait a second. "Thea... I never asked you. But you said you remembered something about this, didn't you? The last time we were in the hospital. With the wheelchairs." Back when she'd found that photograph of the kids with their faces scratched out. She massaged her temples. Were they in for another trip down memory lane?

At some point, Lizzie had wheeled herself in and began to pester Thea for attention. In typical Lizzie fashion, she proceeded to get upset and had a tantrum that involved flipping their board over. Pieces clattered all over the floor. Clara's childhood self, predictably, did not look impressed.

"Lizzie. Again? Can't you let them finish one game before you flip the board?" A girl who resembled the corpse strode into view with a sigh. Unlike the three of them, she was a bit older and distinctly not in a wheelchair. Apparently, that left her as the only one who could bend over to retrieve the pieces. "Now I've got to clean all of these up."

"Sorry, Eleanor." Lizzie sighed, jutting her lower lip out in a somewhat theatric way that made her look like a little angel in spite of her actions. Eleanor? Wait a second...

"Pick up the pieces." A voice said. The scene around them froze, holding all of the children in the memory still. "Can you pick up all the pieces?"
 
“A… twelve?” Thea’s forehead scrunched up, the confusion practically tangible. It was so fucking thick that you could probably cook a delicious, confusion-flavored soup from it, too. “What the fuck? But if this is not Ivy, then who is she?” Maybe the answer was obvious to all the fucking Sherlock Holmes types who like, twirled their moustache and examined everything with their comically sized looking glass, but that wasn’t who Thea was. Nuh uh! She understood exactly nothing about this situation, and her ego wasn’t fragile fucking enough to fear admitting to it. “You think they have a stash of Ivys at their disposal?” she raised her eyebrow. “Like, it may be their go-to design when it comes to The Seductress types, or something. I bet it’s fucking cheaper to mass produce them than it is to commission them individually.” …what? The theory wasn’t that out there! They’d run out of ‘but that’s unrealistic!’-type excuses the second an actual, literal demon had been planted in their fucking heads. By that point, the correct line of reasoning had morphed into ‘actually, that isn’t batshit insane enough.’

Anyway, ta-dah! It turned out that she and Clara had won another exclusive trip into their Traumatic PastTM, and refusing to participate wasn’t an option. “Ugh,” Thea made a face. (Once, the visual effects accompanying the transformation would have impressed her, but her experience told her that the effort that had gone into this was mid-tier at fucking best. Where were her fireworks, huh? Where was the metal soundtrack she so deserved? Nah, the demon definitely should have tried harder! No longer was she going to ‘oooh’ and ‘aaah’ over something excruciatingly average. …and, yeah, Thea might have focused on her critique to sidestep the sudden bolt of pain at seeing herself in that fucking wheelchair again. So what? Considering all the coping mechanisms in the world that she could have gone for, this was one of the least destructive ones.) “I guess this is helpful?” she shrugged. “Like, about as helpful as getting your fucking head chopped off the second you start complaining about your migraine, but it should give us some answers.” (Her new, fancy hand? The second they entered the memory, it solidified again, like a snake preparing to strike. Or, uh, a snake preparing to defend? Not a common fucking collocation, but Thea assumed that the ‘alert, alert, alert’ light blinking furiously in her brain might have activated some sort of protective instinct.)

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Thea rolled her eyes. “Look, I understand that Lizzie went through a lot, but she deserved to be shoved into all the lockers in the world. Such a nerd.” A Thea-nerd, which of course was kind of valid, but not when it interfered with Thea’s own activities! Couldn’t she have, like, asked her for a fucking autograph without being weird about it? And no, Thea’s young version also wasn’t too happy about the development.

“Man, and I was just winning!” she fumed. “Okay, be like that, Lizzie. As a punishment, I will play ten consecutive games with Clara and I won’t even acknowledge your existence while I do so. You’re dead to me.” Oof, harsh! But, through the lens of an angry preteen whose winning streak had just been interrupted, entirely fucking warranted. (Actually, Thea lowkey thought that it would be warranted even now. All those videos of parents “””triumphantly””” pulling the plug out of the socket mid-game just because they were too boring to grab their kid’s attention? A fucking guillotine-tier offense, she was convinced.)

“What? Whole ten games?” Lizzie’s lower lip trembled, but Thea knew she was about as innocent as the guy cops found at a murder scene with his hands covered in blood, saying ‘no, I swear it’s just ketchup, man.’ “You can’t mean that, Thea! I mean, she,” the girl glared knives at Clara, “can’t fun to play with, anyway. How do you even speak to her? Telepathically? I bet she’s too afraid to open her mouth because all of her teeth are rotten.”

Fucking classy, Thea thought, but she turned to Clara’s adult self. “Yeah, I did remember something, but it’s fucking fuzzy. Like a grainy photo, but worse? The gist is they did something to us to… uh, ensure that we’d be suitable vessels.” Just saying this made her skin crawl, but they were past the point of softening the blows. Just, nah, man. What they’d done was fucking nasty, and pretending otherwise would be the equivalent of putting wool over their eyes. “I don’t see how this relates, though.” Especially when it came to those pesky pieces! Still, it was far from an unreasonable request, and so Thea, along with the soon-to-be-dead Eleanor (?), bent down to collect them.

“Jeez. Y’know, as far as weird-ass requests go, this one is pretty fucking tame.” Of course, it should have been beyond obvious to her that this was just a TrapTM! Because, the second Thea said it? The piece that was within her reach jumped aside, giggling in the process.

“Tee hee! You can never get me, Thea. Never ever! You blocked out those memories for a reason, don’t you think?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Thea recommended. “You’re an inanimate fucking object, not my therapist!”

“Not that you even have any therapists. Which, have you thought about amending that?” Yeah, no, she wasn’t going to accept mental health advice from a fucking board piece. Thea tried to grab it again, but, ah, shit! The stupid thing was way faster than it had any right to be, considering it had no fucking legs.

“C’mon, Clara,” she gestured at her gf (!!!). “We shouldn’t get separated. Sounds like a bad fucking idea to me.” Following the piece into what seemed to be a closet also struck her as a bad idea, but what were they to do? Sit on their thumbs and wait for a kindergarten teacher to hold their hands through it? Because, spoiler alert-- wasn’t fucking happening, mate!

The closet, dark and small on the outside, turned out to be a whole-ass new room. (Okay. Okay, why not.) Colorful liquids were brewing in test tubes, with a quiet ssss, and Thea could only suppose they found themselves in a laboratory. “Wait,” she squinted, “is one of those pieces inside a fucking tube?”

Workers in white coats were scrambling to meet some deadline, most likely, with their faces as scratched out as theirs had been on the photo from before. The only one whose features were recognizable? Eleanor, not too surprisingly.

“Have you known all this time?” she asked, her voice shaking.

“Why, of course! Some children don’t respond too well. It is hardly our fault that the Lord finds some of them to be unsuitable.”

“Yes, but I thought the unsuitable ones--”

“What, were going to be returned? Don’t be naïve, Eleanor. Why would you think they would want them in the first place? The failed vessels get broken. It is you who forgot about it.”

‘Spill,’ the voice in Clara’s ear whispered. ‘Spill, spill, spill, and drown the traitors.’
 
"...She had a crush on you." Clara supplied in response to Thea's commentary on Lizzie, nodding sagely. "You were a very cool kid." It was relatable enough, considering how she'd found herself in a, ah, similar position. (Didn't excuse how she went about acting on it, of course, but Lizzie had only been a kid back then. With room to mature and grow, who knew who she would have become? Who knew who any of these kids would have become for that matter? Clara was guilty of lashing out out of jealousy herself back when Ivy turned up. One slip wasn't an unforgivable offense, though. They were in a high-stress situation then... just as they were in this memory, recovering from whatever surgeries the cultists put them through to make them 'suitable vessels'. Ugh. The very concept of it gave her the creeps. Was that what allowed a parasite to grow inside of her?) There were so many children in this room and the sight made her heart clench. They'd met Lizzie, Ian, Brianna, and now Eleanor. Ivy's involvement was still very much a mystery. While she couldn't bring herself to forgive the woman for what she'd put them through, she felt that there was much more nuance to her story than they could possibly know. She'd mentioned Eleanor when she tracked her down in the woods. She said that they would pay. It was completely unfair of her to blame them for anything and proceed to work for the cultists of all people. Had they brainwashed her or something? The prospect didn't seem particularly outlandish. Even the most 'standard' cultists were known for implementing such tactics.

The bright side of the memory, perhaps, was Thea herself. (Naturally.) Seeing the way that even back then, Thea had defended her with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. And Clara wasn't left in the corner to sit and fidget, or to invisibly cradle herself into a little ball of loneliness. Beatrice watched Thea shyly, with admiration and respect shining in her eyes whenever she wasn't looking back at her. Then she proceeded to roll her eyes at Lizzie's comments and, when the other girl wasn't looking, mischievously bared her teeth like a little wolf specifically to show that they weren't rotten. Heh. Just because she didn't talk much didn't mean she wasn't fun to be around! ...Thea had always given her the opportunities to let that side of her show. Quiet and mousy, most people just assumed she was boring without even bothering to sit down and talk to her.

"I guess it'll make sense at some point. Or... lead us to something that will make sense. Eventually." Clara shrugged when Thea mentioned it not really relating to anything. It all tended to tie together in the end, even when things got particularly random. Looking for patterns all the time was headache inducing at best. She knew this from experience. If anything, she was just relieved that they weren't in any cheap hotels, wearing lingerie and lipstick stains. Facing terrible, manipulative exes who deserved to stay in the past. Ugh. The memory of it made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Everything about those scenes brought out the worst in both of them. "We just have to roll with it like we always do. We... we can do this."

'Roll with it'. Clara couldn't believe she was saying those words. But she was strangely relaxed with Thea at her side. She had come to find there was a pattern in all the non-patterns in these worlds. The one thing that stayed consistent was that she and Thea were only able to get through it when they stayed together. (She swore she wouldn't let the demon manipulate her anymore. Trusting in Thea above all else would get her through this.) Sure enough, her girlfriend mentioned that they shouldn't get separated at the same time that she thought it. So she followed her, chasing the giggling checkers piece. (Because why not, right? This was what their lives have become! And she was just, ah, rolling with it. Because there was nothing left to do at that point.)

Clara stood still and held her breath as they found themselves in a laboratory. (The children had never indicated that they could see them. Wandering through the memories, it was fair to assume that they were essentially ghosts who wouldn't draw anyone's attention. There was always a risk, though, that things could take a dangerous turn.) She felt the same creeping amalgam of shock and dread that Eleanor herself was no doubt feeling in that moment when the men with their scratched out faces spoke so casually of the 'unsuitable children', the implications that they just got rid of them because they were deemed broken. (The same way Thea's 'mother' had called her broken. The same way Clara's papa had treated her as if she were broken.) Her blood began to sizzle like the inside of one of those test tubes, repressed anger crawling higher and higher within her. It had claws. It had teeth. It was the desire for revenge. To save all of the captured children before those horrible fates befell them... and yet knowing that she was powerless to do so, because they hadn't actually traveled back in time. They were standing within the confines of a memory, where they were powerless to change the tragic fates of all those children they saw before. Playing like the children they were-- innocent and oblivious to what they were being signed up for. All of them oblivious except for Eleanor, that was, who knew everything. (Were these Eleanor's feelings, seeping inside of her and mingling with her own? Because there was a sort of hope in her that she could still change it. That she could go behind all their backs from the shadows and change the narrative. Unlike Clara, this version of Eleanor was living in her version of the present. Meaning that she could feasibly change things.) Clara knew she hadn't, though. She hadn't, because they already knew how this would end, and...

Spill. Drown the traitors. The voice insisted. "Fine. I'll do it." Clara didn't need to be told twice. With a pent-up, furious cry she swept her arm across the table, smashing all of the test tubes to the ground. The piece bounces across the floor among shattered glass and liquid... and then it glows bright and swallows up the memory in a flash of light. Suddenly they're standing in a dark hospital room, lit only with the bluish tint of moonlight streaming in through the window. Eleanor was sitting on the foot of a young Clara's bed. It seems they're the only two inside.

"Bea, listen to me. We're about to get split up. The little kids and the big kids." Eleanor whispered. "You're a smart girl. And I know I can trust you not to tell anyone what I'm about to say."

"...I'm good at keeping secrets. And I know this is weird." Beatrice glared at her hands on the covers, wringing them anxiously. "We can't afford trips to the doctor. Papa would never sign me up for something like this." Yeah. After all, she knew since she was a kid that her mom might still be around if they could afford it. Trailer walls were thin and outbursts about money were an everyday occurrence. She sounded wise beyond her years when she spoke, but when she looked up with her big brown eyes she looked very much like the scared little girl she was. "What are they going to do to us?"

"I don't want to scare you..."

"I'm already scared." Beatrice stressed, clutching onto Eleanor's hand. "And I heard Thea crying yesterday. She's scared, too. I don't... I don't..."

"Hey, hey. Shh. I know. I'm scared, too. And I don't know all that much either. But panic is not going to help us right now. You need to stay calm. Be brave." Eleanor said. (Part of that was a lie, based on the memory they just saw... but maybe that was for the best. Who knew how telling a little kid that she was fated to die would go, anyway? But why was she let in on the plans while the others weren't?) "When we get split up I want you to pay very good attention. Observe everything, the way you always do... and don't trust the adults. That's all. If you can find any means of escape, or any opening at all... I want you to take it and run as far as you can. Take all the little ones with you if you can."

Clara thought back to the memory of herself attempting to break the wobbly lock on the window. The memory of the way she didn't trust or eat those pies that the cultists had wheeled in for them. While it was true she was a sharp kid, it made a lot more sense knowing that she was given a tip from an older kid to act that way. (Take all the little ones with her if she could... and yet it seemed like only she and Thea managed to make it out. And Ivy, provided Ivy was even there.) "I... I don't remember this happening." Clara admitted. It must have happened, though. It felt right, if anything. "I wonder why Eleanor knew all of this stuff... I mean, wasn't she a sacrifice as well?"

'Escape the room.' Thea's voice spoke this time. 'Escape the room before you drown.' The walls themselves shivered and cried out then, like a giant child, and oversized teardrops began splashing into the hospital room. The water collected and began rising around their ankles at an alarming rate--!
 
"A crush, huh?" Lizzie had had some real good taste, that couldn't be denied, but, too fucking bad! Thea's heart was occupied. It always had been, as she was coming to realize. (Too fast this, too fast that. That had been Clara's main issue in the beginning, after all-- that their relationship wasn't following the usual fucking trajectory of prolonged awkward flirting before kinda sorta admitting they thought the other was neat. It hadn't fucking been that way, though, now had it? 'Cause Thea could see now! A single glance at her young self's determined glare told her that Love Was In the AirTM.) "Y'know," she grinned, "something tells me Lizzie wasn't the only one with a crush problem here." And, in a sense, it was comforting. Lately, Thea had been wondering what her life would have looked like if not for the suppressed fucking trauma-- if they hadn't programmed her via their manipulative bullshit, demon and everything. There had been a fear, microscopic as it was, that she was just a fucking collection of wounds, wrapped in gift paper. A bunch of shards, broken in shapes the bastards liked. This proved it wrong, didn't it? Even before all of that, she'd still liked Clara! Clara, who was not just her gf (!!!), but also her anchor. Clara, who made her so fucking soft that she didn't even mind being so cheesy that cheddar would turn green with envy. (It felt nice, okay? To be this vulnerable, and expect not a slap to set her straight, but understanding. Wooow, what a game changer!)

Just... roll with it? Coming from Clara, whi probably planned her fucking bathroom breaks? Thea couldn't help but grin. "My, my. Gotta tell ya, Loveless, that you've been getting real wild. What will happen next, hmm? Will you wear a sexy vampire outfit for me?" And, just to be 100% clear, Thea wasn't fucking joking. There were few topics that demanded seriousness like that, but this sure as hell was one of them! She needed to see her like that for... uh, science. "Depending on whether you think this is creepy, I may or may not have an outfit I'd love for you to wear. DM me for details?"

That wasn't fucking happening for now, though, because the hyperactive-ass world was forcing them on its wild ride of freakazoids. From it, Thea could only conclude two things: a) the cultists were assholes, b) the cultists were fucking assholes. Like, on what level of villainy did you have to be to straight up refer to children as 'broken vessels'? Right, on the same level that would make you think that sacrificing them to a motherfucking demon would be a good idea. Touché.

Meanwhile, Eleanor... turned out to be an ally? What? Thea had lowkey thought her to be cultist-adjacent, considering the likeness to Ivy, but apparently not. (A positive older figure, in their backstory? No fucking way! Surely, you understood the doubts.) "I mean," Thea tilted her head aside, "it doesn't fucking seem to me as if she was a regular sacrifice. Like, judging by her talk with the lab guys, she strikes me as more of an accomplice. An accomplice who found her sense of shame." Why the tattoo, though? Why... ugh, literally everything? Fucking hell, Thea Holloway shouldn't be forced to use her brain for things that weren't coming up with hot scenarios of herself and Clara! "She's older than us," the brunette pointed out. "I dunno, maybe she could be one of those failed vessels that won the survival lottery? Just spitballing here." There wasn't enough time for that, though, because the world didn't hesitate to fling more of her phobias at her. Eek! Why water? Why the fuck did it always have to be water? If she had to drown, then Thea Holloway would prefer for it to happen in a sea of wine! ...that, or in Clara's eyes. Haha. "Those fucks and their cheap-ass tricks," she muttered under her breath. "I hope I can leave a bitter review on their homepage, because boy, do I have things to say!" Something like: 'Maybe stop milking my one (1) fear, bitches!' would do.

Panicked, she rushed straight to one of the windows. The water was rising, rising, rising, so much that it was reaching her beck, and, fuck! Once Thea managed to open the window? The stream fucking flushed both of the girls outside, making them land into the soft mud. Gross! She had fucking liked those jeans before this incident, dammit. (The moon was high in the sky, the stars invisible. What was the point, huh? Was this a dead end? ...or maybe not.)

"Look, Clara," Thea said as she rose from the ground, trying to (unsuccessfully) clean the dirt from her pants. "Look who's fucking here."

And, surprise, surprise, it was Eleanor! Eleanor, who was kneeling by the same pond they'd almost drowned them in. Sweet fucking memories, huh? (It felt as if a ghost touched her, the contact freezing her in place. Thea couldn't move, couldn't, and... why was Eleanor staring so intently into the waters? Had she dropped something there?)

"Are you sure?" she asked into the total silence. "Amy, now isn't the right time to be kidding about this."

"Do I look like I'm kidding?" ...waaaait. That wasn't Eleanor's voice! What was worse, Thea's brain actually had no trouble categorizing it-- that teasing lilt belong to Ivy, or whoever the fuck she was. (Amy, apparently. Amy, who for some reason looked like Eleanor's spitting image. Or, like, was she even talking to her reflection? Every theory Thea seemed to make here collapsed like a house of cards approximately five seconds later!)

"Listen to me, sis," she said, annoyance dripping from her voice. "When they come for you, you gotta board the blue Toyota. The blue Toyota, get it? I... tampered with it. The door will open even if they think it's locked. There's your chance. Just fucking run, okay? Jump out of the car while it's moving if you have to, I don't care! I won't let you end up as..."

'End up as, end up as, end up as," the choir in Thea's ears whispered, enjoying the structure of the phrase. As for Clara, though? Oh, her voices were singing a different tune. 'Follow the light, follow the light, follow the light. You must! You have to!'
 
"Maybe. They were clearly using her, though." Clara pondered quietly, bringing a hand to her chin. She thought back to the scene they'd witnessed in that strange, eerie lab. The test tubes, the men in long coats with their faces scratched out. Either she didn't remember their features or she didn't want to. It was a pretty aggressive means of blocking people out, wasn't it? The act of scratching went beyond vandalizing an old photograph with a marker. And if the corpse they'd found was any indication... "I can't imagine she would've been so calm and complacent if she'd known the truth all along. Especially since it sounds... and looks like she was a sacrifice herself." There was too much they didn't know, so it was hard to say for sure what the memories were trying to tell them. Theories spun through her mind-- like the possibility of Eleanor being one of the cultist's children and brainwashed into believing their cause. Or maybe she was set aside and given special privileges for being one of the older kids they might've used to keep the younger ones in line? Obviously she wasn't given the whole truth. "She was angry when she found out about what they were doing. I... think I felt it?"

And then she had tried to warn Clara. Whatever her role was before, she felt inclined to believe that the other girl had come around if she had been on the cultist's side once. She genuinely wanted to use her knowledge to help as many kids as she could. (Too bad that they were kids and not spies. This wasn't one of those movies where the adults were cartoonishly bad at their jobs and all of the kidnapped kids made it out to reunite with their wholesome, nuclear families and share hot chocolate at the end.) Then there was Ivy to consider. The woman who looked like an older replica of Eleanor. The woman who they knew had aligned herself with the cult. Who sought revenge for Eleanor. Twin sisters? Sisters who looked remarkably similar? Or... uh, clones? Listen, Thea did have a valid point that anything could be on the table-- so she wasn't going to throw her suggestion away. However, there were more pressing matters than clones to attend to as water began pooling inside the room.

"I'd give them more than just a bitter review." Clara mumbled darkly as she watched the flowing water with dread, fighting to hold onto her thoughts amidst panic as the water and her pulse began to rise. A sucker punch to the face sounded appropriate. (Violence wasn't her go-to solution before, of course, but things changed. Particularly when being harassed by nonsensical entities that tried to kill her at every turn became her new normal.) Without wasting time (because time was air) she rushed to the other side of the room to try the door, yanking and pushing to discover it might as well have been bolted shut. Just as she began to curse her shortness, as the water was about to get into her nose and eyes, Thea had pried a window open and they went spilling outside into a heap of mud. Ugh. Yuck. Well, at least they weren't going to drown she guessed.

Gazing up at the moon, Clara swallowed hard. It kind of reminded her of the moon that night that they'd been drowned in the pond. (How many times had that happened to them? Just that once? Or was it a common occurrence to be treated that way? Remembering Ian, the way he'd been put on a leash... it turned her stomach. Some people just didn't like children. But she didn't understand how anyone could bear hurting them the way that those cultists had. They'd been horrible, horrible scum before they'd even begun murdering them.) Look who's fucking here. Thea's voice pulled Clara out of her reverie and she followed her lead, bringing herself up to her feet. Sure enough, when she assessed their surroundings she found that her memory was relevant, given that they were there in front of the very pond she'd considered upon seeing the moon. Like Thea, she found herself frozen at the sight of it. Eleanor was there too, because of course she was. She was clearly the star of this reel of memories. But not the star in the arcana. That was Ivy... or Amy, as it was turning out? That was interesting, wasn't it?

"I knew it. That name... it couldn't have been a coincidence. She just used it to get under my skin." Clara sighed. And despite all of her suspicious, it had worked. "Ivy" had done a lot of things to get under her skin. It'd be easy to beat herself up for trusting her-- but they were both hurt and tired. To say that it'd been a rough couple of days by the time she found them would be a severe understatement. She'd rehashed all of the 'what could have beens' sitting at Thea's bedside after she lost her arm, though, and now there were other pieces to this puzzle that she needed to pay attention to now. (The red threads were connecting in her mind... and she'd have to apply everything she'd learned to the board she'd been creating in her room. Detective Parker encouraged this endeavor, considering he bought her the supplies to create one with.) "Amy and Eleanor... what's up with them? I wonder if we're hearing Amy's voice in Eleanor's head, or if it's actually being projected from the water somehow." It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that they were plotting an escape. It was clear that they hadn't been successful in that, though...

Clara and Thea had escaped, though. So did 'Amy'. As far as she knew, there weren't any other survivors outside of them. End up as... The memory froze and nothing followed. Either that or both of the girls had fallen into a grim silence, because they both understood what she meant by that.

The light, the light, the light! The voices were particularly demanding about this. Clara arched an eyebrow, observing their surroundings. At first, the only light she saw was emanating from the moon. Then she noticed the spot Eleanor was leaned over was glowing a soft gold. The light was in the water. In the pond they'd been drowned in as children. Seriously!? As if being locked in a room quickly filling with water wasn't bad enough as it was!

"Th--thea. The voices are telling me to, ah, follow the light..." Clara reached for Thea's hand and held tightly to anchor herself. She tilted her head slightly towards the pond to indicate where it was coming from. Thea had been brave back when she confronted her trauma, when she'd reached out for her. With a deep breath, she walked slowly to the water's edge. Closer to Eleanor, she saw that she was frozen in time within the memory... her hands clenched tightly, her face taut with concern. Then she sighed and turned to face the glowing spot on the pond's surface. "I hate this." Vocalizing that wouldn't do anything to change it, though, and she guessed it was their only way out of this one. With a sharp breath, she exchanged a wary glance with Thea and let go of her hand. Stepping closer to the water, she peered at her uneasy reflection on the surface despite everything in her screaming to turn and run. "I'll go in first... you stay out here. That way if something goes wrong you can pull me out. If it seems safe then follow me. Okay?" After all, she knew Thea had to hate this just as much as she did. If she could protect her from having to go through it if it turned out it was actually unnecessary, then she would take that opportunity in a heartbeat.

Gulp. Clara took a deep breath and then jumped into the pond. She couldn't swim and began to sink closer and closer to the light...

It was only a matter of time before Clara found herself lying on asphalt instead of submerged in the water. Cold, night air hit her dampened skin and caused her to shiver. The cold, however, wasn't what she was concerned about. The thing she really had to concern herself with were the bright headlights spotlighting her-- indicative of a car coming right for her! Or them, rather, because Thea quickly appeared beside her in the memory. With a gasp, she used all of her strength to push both of them off to the side of the road and out of the car's path. They rolled together before landing in a patch of grass, with Thea ending up on top of Clara.

"...Oh. Hi." Wow. Real smooth. Clara should have probably said something like 'that was close'-- but being underneath Thea led her cheeks to turn a soft shade of pink instead. (To think they'd shared their kiss just moments before they'd been hurtled into this whirlwind of memories. It felt like seconds ago and a lifetime ago all at once.) "Um. I wouldn't be, ah, particularly opposed to... staying like this, but..." What was she even saying anymore? Thea's face was so close... and it'd be nice to kiss her again. (Clara's face burned from pink to a full-blown red the more she thought about it.) But there were times and places for everything, right? "I-I guess if the memories are connected, we should be looking for a blue Toyota?"
 
No way. No fucking way! What kind of telenovela-ass twist was that? Long lost twin sisters, forged identities, motivations that changed the second you as much as glimpsed them from a different angle-- at this point, it honestly seemed as if M. Night Shyamalan had gained the fucking copyright to her entire life’s story, and was editing the fuck out of it now. (And, in case that assessment proved to be right? Let it be known that Thea did not consent! She did not fucking consent, and wanted her old life ba… uh. Okay, no, she didn’t actually want it back. For all she cared, the aunt and the rest of her family could choke themselves on the “””wholesome apple pie””” she was probably baking at this very moment to create the illusion of the Perfect American FamilyTM. Still, was it so much to ask for some connection to reality? Pretty, pretty please? Apparently so.) “I’m going to need a fucking drink,” Thea huffed, dreaming of the sweet, sweet embrace of alcohol. (To think they could be getting shitfaced in some club right now if it hadn’t been for that idiots’ decision to include them in their pet experiments! The injustice. The audacity, too. That she had never gotten be the proper Party GirlTM was clearly their fucking fault-- just, try acting normal with the voices in your head filling your ears with gibberish 24/7. Yeah, even people stronger than her would have cracked.) “A drink, and a family tree of the two ‘cause this is getting real disorienting. In that fucking order.” Sadly, they didn’t have time for a private venture into the realm of genealogy. Instead of that, they were supposed to…

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Thea shook her head, her disappointment only rivaled by her disbelief. “What is this, Black Friday, but for traumas? Buy one, get three new ones for free!” Again, she was as far from being a therapist as humanly possible, but it did not strike her as a good idea to pour salt into their wounds like that. Shouldn’t they, you know, heal first? Mourn what they’d lost or some shit? They’d barely been able to acknowledge that it had happened in the first place, even without all those ghosts going ‘hurrr durrr, gonna remind you every five fucking seconds.’ Timing, ladies and gentlemen! Timing was of essence, and Thea didn’t feel… uh, properly timed. “I don’t fucking like this,” she murmured. “Can’t we, like, attack the pseudo-orphanage instead and have a boss fight? I’m sure that violence is the answer somehow.” Even her stubborn self knew that there were no shortcuts on their wild ride, though-- the dead were a sour bunch, and not listening to their story was the spiritual equivalent of a federal crime. There was no escape. “Alright,” Thea capitulated. “We’ll do it your way, but if it doesn’t work, I reserve my right to punch the door right to its fucking face.” That… didn’t actually make a lot of sense, as she realized the second those words left her mouth, but she felt that saying all that was self-care, somehow. Don’t fucking judge, okay?! As long as the coping mechanisms coping mechanismed, Thea wasn’t going to throw them away just because they made her look “””uncool.”””

So, watching as Clara descended into the water? The hardest thing she’d ever fucking done. Every fiber in her body was screaming at her to intervene, to throw a fit, to pull her back to safety--anything, anything but stand there, and let the pond swallow her. (The waves splashed ominously, filling her heart with dread. What if this was an elaborate attempt to get them to drown? A fucking performance, staged by the cultists? Maybe they’d already figured it out in their microscopic fucking brains that only Thea Holloway was badass enough to kill Thea Holloway, and decided to enlist her help. Clara isn’t fucking stupid, she reminded herself. Just trust her. Trust was an expensive-ass commodity when the price of failure was death, though! Thea watched and watched and watched, ready to end the whole thing at the first sign of distress, but… well, no distress came. No desperate bubbles were fighting their way up to the surface, either. Could it have worked, then? Was this their magical solution? Thea took a sharp breath, gazing into the rippling depths. They resembled the sizzling stomach juices of an especially hideous monster, a monster that was fucking starving, and she just knew that jumping in its jaws was a goddamn death sentence. You know, it wasn’t too late to run ye-- No! Clara did it without bitching, so you have no fucking excuse. Right, Clara. She had to be brave like Clara, otherwise she might as well have put on her little ‘dunce’ hat. A hat that, in case she needed a reminder, was nor fashionable neither flattering!)

Closing her eyes, Thea did jump. She expected the water to grind her lungs into fucking dust, but… uh, her clothes weren’t even wet? It was kind of hard to take in her surroundings, though, when she somehow landed on top of her gf (!!!). As in, close enough to touch her. And, yeah, that was a ‘no shit, Sherlock’ kind of comment, but Thea still felt compelled to point it out! For, uh, reasons. Hehe. Hehehe. Btw., you noticed how there was only a tiiiiiny layer of fabric standing between them? ‘Cause she had! Dedicated to being a fulltime lesbian, her brain bumped that realization on top of her queue of priorities-- you know, before the whole ‘almost getting killed’ thing. Fucking hell, she is as soft as she looks! Oh, sweet mother of god. (Would it be slap-worthy to touch her some more? Since this seemed like a prime opportunity to, uh, deepen their understanding of each other. And, shit, could she imagine like a million things she’d like to do to her!) “Hi there, beautiful,” Thea beamed, her heart somewhere in her fucking throat. (Did she look ridiculous, with her cheeks as red as a tomato? Probably. Did she care? No.) “And before you ask, no, I didn’t fucking fall from heaven. I might have fallen in one, though.”

Of course, Clara then had to go and ruin that with the ugly thing called ‘reality’. Ugh! (Yeah, yeah, she was right, but Thea wished she fucking wasn’t. In a romance novel, they could have spent a few hours enjoying themselves! …alas, their lives were burdened with the fucking ‘horror’ tag.) “Sheesh, way to spoil the fun. Make it up to me later, eh?” she winked before getting up and helping Clara back to her feet. “I fucking swear, situations like that should be illegal. How am I supposed to focus now, hm?”

It made sense to look for cars near the road, so yeah, they did just that. “A blue Toyota, huh,” she muttered. “I think it’s this one.” Cars were racing across the asphalt, so fast they were leaving marks behind, but, conveniently enough? The Toyota moved at a snail’s pace, with all the door ajar. “I… guess this is an invitation to hop in?” The whole clusterfuck couldn’t get that much worse, so that was exactly what Thea did!

It wasn’t much of a surprise when the doors shut behind them, nor did it shock her when they got locked. The thing that did seem off, though? The fucking steering wheel was turning by itself, with no driver to be seen. And, you know those toy dogs with nodding heads that people with no sense of taste bought for their cars? Well, one of those was speaking to them.

“Clara, Thea! Welcome, welcome! I am so glad to see you,” the dog nodded his head. “It’s been such a long time since you fought for your life together that I genuinely thought I’d never meet you again. Most people don’t really want to revisit such memories. Anyway, which Pokémon are you going with here?” All of a sudden, a set of three Pokéballs materialized in front of them, shimmering with golden light. What the--

What the fuck x2, actually, because the road had the audacity to disappear! Inevitably, they were heading towards a cliff, its edge sharp like a knife. Gulp.

“Which Pokémon?” the dog repeated, his tone urgent.
 
Clara pursed her lips playfully at Thea's wink. It wasn't like she was spoiling their fun on purpose or anything and they both knew that. Normally, that would be the moment that the demon would interject with a 'Thea would prefer to be around someone a lot more fun than you' or something equally as ridiculous. (Especially given the absurdity of their situations? Of course Thea wouldn't hold it against her for trying to approach these situations with a level head.) And now? The demon was silenced and she took it in stride. With the blush brushed over her cheeks and the heat pooling in her belly, it was easy to see that she'd also prefer to be somewhere that they could stay in that position. And, ah, maybe try a few more? Somewhere safe, preferably. Whew. She tried to erase the images her mind sketched up as she thought about it. They could both agree there were better times and places to, ah, finish what they'd started. "...Well, of course. I did promise you an experience you'd rate higher than a ten, didn't I?" Wow, um? She wasn't sure how she was able to say that line without stuttering, but she did. Focus, Clara. For now she needed to set herself back on task so they could make it out of this and live to enjoy that theoretical experience. (An experience she wasn't afraid to indulge in anymore... an experience she wanted now. Human lives were so fragile. They could end in an instant. Rather than neglecting and hiding her feelings from the sunlight like she'd always done, she wanted to nurture them properly. She wanted to let them grow.)

Another car. Like Thea, Clara wasn't terribly surprised when the doors locked behind them and it began to drive. She did inch a bit closer to her girlfriend, though, and gripped lightly onto her arm for stability. (Cars just... made her nervous, okay? The same way that breaking glass without the proper safety equipment made her nervous. With an unstable driver, a car could be just as dangerous as any weapon. Perhaps even more so.) Rather than succumbing to panic, though, she chose to focus on what the bobble head on the dashboard was saying to them. "...Such a long time?" She raised an eyebrow skeptically. Because in case the dog hadn't noticed, they'd been fighting for their lives together ever since they met! (Hm. Was this dog referring to memories they had lost, then? Perhaps the memories of when they'd managed to escape the cultists? It'd align with the timeline of the snapshots they were traveling through now. This seemed like that was the case, considering the way it spoke of 'revisiting memories'.) Unfortunately, there was no time to investigate that line of thought any further. Time ceased to exist at all when it became apparent that they were approaching the edge of a cliff! No, no, no!

Clara sucked in a sharp, audible breath and hugged Thea's arm even tighter. Her heartbeat and blood both pounded in her ears and she could hardly make out what the dog was saying about Pokemon. Pokemon of all things!? Okay. Okay, she at least knew the basics. (Yeah, good thing she paid attention when Raoul talked her ear off about his favorites. Some of them were undeniably cute, too. Like that fluffy one that looked like a dog with long ears? But the little dog with long ears wasn't going to help them here! What was it again-- Eevee? She'd played a little of the game, too, which she'd gotten as a hand-me-down from her brother.) Shit, she needed to think fast. They needed one that was big. One with wings.

"Char--" Clara hesitated. This Pokemon was fairly common and she hoped she was remembering the evolution and name correctly. That big, fire dragon... with claws to carry a car with and giant wings. That one could get them out of this. Right? (Well, it better. Because they were about to go over the edge!) "Charizard? Give us a Charizard! A-and have it use fly."

One of the Pokeballs flashed the way it did in the games. Before Clara knew it, there was a 'thunk, thunk' as giant claws slammed into the sides of the car... which was now soaring over the rocky terrain. It might've been a fascinating view if she wasn't terrified out of her mind. This must've been what it felt like to ride in a plane, or maybe a helicopter. (She'd never been on a plane before and after her recent experiences? She wasn't sure if she ever wanted to.) They were so high up. So high and she was starting to feel lightheaded. At the very least, she was relieved they weren't plummeting to their deaths. Eventually the car landed on the ground and the doors opened, ushering them out.

Clara blinked, finding they'd been set down at the mouth of a pixellated cave. The chiptune music playing around them was clearly ripped straight from the game. With a flash and a blip, she discovered she and Thea were now wearing trainer attire... complete with cute hats and little traveling bags. The dog nodded and the two remaining Pokeballs soared into their hands.

"Go forth! Battle your way through the cave as a duo... and when you come out on the other side, you will find the answers you seek." The dog continued to nod, as that was clearly the only thing it could do, and the Charizard flew off with the car before they could protest or ask any more questions.

"Looks like this is what we're doing now." Clara sighed, at the very least relieved to be standing on solid ground again. All things considered, the situation could be a whole lot worse. Playing in the real life equivalent of a Pokemon game did seem kind of fun... if she ignored everything else that was going on, that was. She frowned at the Pokeball in her hand. She guessed they'd have to chose which ones they wanted to use going forward? "...I usually liked going with the Pokemon I thought were cute." Gosh. Why couldn't it have dropped them off at one of those Pokemon daycares instead? The idea of playing with some of the adorable fluffy ones sounded kind of like a dream. No, no. Focus! (And again, it could've been worse. It could've dropped them in the middle of an ocean course instead of a cave.) "But we should probably go about this strategically, right? A cave's sure to be filled with rock types." That seemed logical, right? Scratching the side of her head, she tried to remember how everything worked and looked to Thea for answers. "Do you remember what type rock is weak against?"
 
Alright. Alright, you know what? Thea wasn’t even going to complain. Between all the creepy-ass circuses, demonic nurses and cafeteria workers threatening to cook them alive, Pokémon was a welcome distraction. All aboard the hype train, ladies and gentlemen! Gotta catch ‘em all and shit. (Nope, she hadn’t actually played the fucking game. Not that she’d been disinterested, but, at that age, her parental units had been more keen on ensuring that she’d, quoting now, ‘stop with the disruptive behavior.’ Letting her burn the excess energy on a harmless videogame could have been a nice solution, eh? Yeah, maybe if they hadn’t been a bunch of assholes who thought that ‘discipline’ was synonymous with ‘suffering.’ …anyway, surely this lack of knowledge wouldn’t bite her in the ass? ‘Cause she was Thea Holloway, and ‘fake it till you make it’ was her entire life’s goddamn motto.) “Ooh, a good choice,” she squeezed Clara’s hand. That Charizard was big as fuck and had wings was knowledge accessible to literally anyone under forty on the whole planet, so she felt qualified enough to leave behind a glowing review. Great thinking! That was her Clara, always… aaaah!

So, for future fucking reference? Wear your seatbelt, kids. Wear it especially if a house-sized Pokémon was about to lift your fucking vehicle and carry it across a gaping chasm! As Newton himself had confirmed back in the day, gravity wasn’t a kind mistress. Not at all. “Shit, shit, shit!” Thea tried to grab onto something, literally anything, that seemed stable enough, but when your world turned into a motherfucking centrifuge, that sort of thing was kinda difficult to assess. Couldn’t they have received one (1) warning? Fucking seriously? Thea had thought that the point of Pokémon was supposed to be cooperation, not their own critters trying to murder them! (…alright, she may have been exaggerating a liiiiiittle bit. What was existence worth without some drama, after all? If you didn’t invite excitement into your life, you would one day wake up middle-aged, and discover that the greatest accomplishment of your pathetic fucking life was managing to pirate Adobe Photoshop. Just, nah. She wasn’t about that kind of lukewarm shit.) Half-expecting to be dropped unceremoniously, Thea closed her eyes… only to enjoy a buttery smooth landing, almost as if the ground was made of cotton candy. “Wow. Gotta say, the Charizard Airlines were pretty fucking good. The take-off could have used some improvement, and I would have liked to be offered a cup of coffee, but I don’t have much else to complain about.” And, considering it came from the notorious complainer herself? Not bad, not bad at all!

“I take it someone was suffering from the gaming withdrawal symptoms here?” Thea pulled onto her sleeve, which had magically transformed into… uhh, something. Something presumably wearable. (Not that she understood fashion much, but like, this had to count as a mortal sin against it, right? Right? Clara somehow managed to pull it off, but that didn’t fucking count because she would have looked stunning even in a potato sack. Seriously, being so pretty must have been illegal! …and, haha, Thea would enjoy arresting her, if you know what she meant. Protip: She didn’t. Blame her fried fucking brain, ‘cause thinking of innuendos with Clara looking like that was a Herculean fucking task. Focus, Holloway. Focus!) Thea shook her head, as if doing that could send all those FantasiesTM straight into oblivion. (Spoiler alert: Nope, didn’t work. What the dog said did sort of distract her, though, because, woo hoo! Yay for fulfilling unrealized childhood dreams. This particular one didn’t really kept her awake at nights, but maybe it was one of those things that you didn’t really know you missed until something reminded you.)

“Alright, entering the I wanna be the very best mode,” Thea beamed. “Let’s fuck them up, babe! We’ll earn the Pokémon crown, or whatever the hell it is that people get for winning.” Yeah, yeah, her lore knowledge may not have been stellar, but, come the fuck on. How complicated could it possibly get? Rather complicated, as it turned out, when Clara started going on and on about strategy of all things. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Thea raised her hands defensively, as if hearing that very word hurt her. “Aren’t you overthinking it a bit? It’s a children’s fucking game, so the cuteness factor method seems just about right to me. And, like, how do we know there are going to be earth Pokémon, anyway? Could be a red herring. Maybe they moved into a location like that to make us think that they’d use those types. My evidence: nobody in their right mind would go for a fucking earth type. Why would you when other Pokémon exist? That’s basically like stuffing your mouth with butter when you could have a fucking burger instead!” Just, no. It didn’t seem right to Thea that they’d have an epic showdown with the equivalent of mud, and she wasn’t going to bet her success on that. “I think I’m going with…” she gave Clara a wicked grin, “…Pikachu, I choose you!” And, indeed, the famous yellow critter jumped out of her Pokéball, cocking its ears. “It’s a main character thing,” Thea explained. “The protagonists never fucking lose, so it doesn’t matter who we have to fight. The sheer coolness will beat them, mark my fucking words.”

The cavern, as it turned out, was more spacious than it looked from the outside. Despite there being no sources of light, they could also see just fine-- if she had to guess, the kids simply hadn’t thought about shit like ‘realistic layout’ or ‘laws of physics.’ Which, good for them! Thea’s life had been considerably worse since she had learned of those cursed fucking concepts. “So, like, do we just fight anyone that we meet here?” Thea tilted her head aside.

“Ahahahaha!!!” The mad laughter reverberated across the corridors, and, to her endless fucking annoyance? Thea recognized that voice. “Let me guess: Lizzie discovered that with great power come great bullying opportunities?” And, as usual, Thea’s analysis wasn’t even wrong. Upon entering a circular, Pokéball-shaped arena, they indeed noticed Lizzie-- Lizzie, who was apparently commanding a whole fucking herd of Geodudes. And what were those Geodudes doing, pray tell? Ganging up on a crying Jigglypuff! “There, this is what you get for not paying your dues,” Lizzie smirked. “And for trying to be a psychic Pokémon in my earth kingdom.” When she noticed Clara, the girl turned around on her heel and put on her cap, with a flourish she probably considered to be supercool. “Came to taste the bitter defeat, huh? Okay, I accept your challenge! But if I win, I get to keep Thea.”
 
"...Badges." Clara supplied the right answer and bit the inside of her cheek to keep herself from smiling too wide herself. Seeing Thea grin like that, with unadulterated joy sparkling in her eyes was just... nice, okay? Like a weight rising off her chest that she didn't even realize was there until that moment. They've been through a lot recently and it was clear as day that she needed something like this. (They both needed something like this.) She could understand, watching her excitement, the appeal in taking advantage of the fun in this scenario. How many people got a Pokemon experience this immersive, anyway? There were people out there who would undoubtedly spend good money to be in their shoes! (Well. Just in this one, very specific moment in time.) She'd never had the money for those expensive Disneyland trips she'd always wanted as a kid. Maybe this was the next best thing? While it... stayed wholesome, that was. The tables could turn at any minute and she still had to hold onto that personal reminder. She tugged lightly at the brim of her new pink cap and tilted her head to the side. "I'm surprised there's a video game I know more about than you." Although it was fair to say this was one of the only games that she had any knowledge about. Raoul had gotten her to play it mainly because of the cute characters. "But Thea, strategy is very important. Weaknesses are a pretty big deal and--"

"...Ah." Clara froze mid-lecture when Thea summoned a Pikachu of all Pokemon. There were a lot of things she could say about this choice from a strategic standpoint. Namely that an electric type like Pikachu would be toast against rock types. But a soft, natural blush colored her cheeks instead. Oh. Oh, goodness. It was so cute. Cuter than any plush of the Pokemon she'd ever seen in her life! Watching it bounce around on its tiny little feet, tilting its head and pointy ears from side to side, and even just blink? Everything and anything it could have done was adorable. Because it was a Pikachu and it was a universally known fact that Pikachus were cute as hell. There was nothing she wanted more than to hug it close and maybe give its chin an affectionate little scratch. Rock types might not have been weak to Pikachu, but she without a doubt was. Realizing her mind had gone completely blank when the sheer cuteness stunned her into silence, she hid her face in her hands. "It's so cute." She coughs the words quietly into her palms. Ah-- focus, Clara!

"That logic works in the show, sure..." Clara tried to start over again, still very much a melted, gooey mess on the inside whenever she so much glimpsed Thea's Pikachu. Gosh. The two of them made such an adorable duo, she wasn't sure if she was going to be able to focus enough to actually win this thing. She tugged harder on the brim of her trainer cap, as if that might hide the blush on her face. "But I'm pretty sure Eleanor sees herself as the protagonist in this world. What if she shows up with her own Pikachu? No. It... it should be fine. There might be a little variety thrown in there, for all we know."

This was truly a war between Clara's mind and her heart right now. Perhaps one of the biggest disputes they've faced yet. Did she summon up the Pokemon her younger self would have loved to cuddle or did she summon the one that would increase their chances of making it through this challenge intact? (When it came to cuteness, Clara Loveless took these matters very seriously.) Following Thea into the arena, stroking her thumb gently around the smooth surface of the Pokeball in her hand, she tilted her head to the side as she observed their surroundings. Wow. This was really happening, wasn't it? Her heart fluttered in her chest. "You have to battle when your eyes lock with another trainer." She remembered the way they would stand lined up, or walk in those little squares, and battled your trainer when they caught you regardless of whether your Pokemon's health was low or not. There was no escape from those battles, either. No way to refuse them. So if this worked the same...

Clara sighed exasperatedly at the sound of the maniacal laughter nearby. It couldn't be! (The thought dripped with sarcasm.) No, yeah, but it totally was. It was Lizzie. The resident Thea nerd. And in typical Thea nerd fashion, she insisted on fighting for Thea. Here they go again.

That Jigglypuff wasn't real, sure, but Clara couldn't help feeling for the poor thing when she watched it cry like that. (Okay... whoever designed that Pokemon to be so round knew what they were doing. Like Pikachu, it was adorable. It was certifiably adorable and did not deserve those struggles!) It was, uh, sort of reminiscent the way Lizzie and her band of followers would gang up on her, too. They were just kids and obviously it doesn't matter anymore now, but... ah, maybe that was part of what was tugging at her heartstrings. (Probably because watching the scene somehow accompanied brief flashes of those very memories? Whether it was Lizzie and her friends cornering her or if it was Lizzie interrupting her games with Thea.) In a way, wasn't a Pokemon battle a completely harmless way to hash things out?

"Fine." Clara nodded once and stepped into the arena. She glanced back at Thea, confidence shining in her eyes as she smirked. "Let me take care of this one, dear. Don't even worry about her terms. I'm going to win." (That poor Pikachu might faint if she tried battling with it now. Until they had some healing items... it was probably for the best for her to sit this one out.)

"What!? Do you think you look cool or something!?" Lizzie scoffed in an outrage, popping her fists to her hips. "Well, you don't! 'Cause you're a nerd!"

Geodudes used to spawn all the time. This would be a cinch... so long as she stuck to her strategy. (And yeah, Clara supposed that might make her a nerd. But nerds won in nerdy games like this... what could she say?) Gripping her Pokeball, thinking of the one she needed, she tossed it with a flourish of her own. "Marill!"

The blue mouse Pokemon somersaulted into the arena, swathed in a beam of light. (It was a compromise, right? Water would be strong against rock and the Pokemon was also cute to boot. A double threat, in other words.) Gosh, it was so cute. But Clara couldn't afford to lose her focus here. Luckily for her, she didn't have to memorize any of the attack moves... convenient windows displaying their Pokemon's hp and four available moves appeared overhead. Lizzie's Geodudes snapped to attention, gathering around their new target. The Jigglypuff wobbled over to hide behind Clara as soon as the coast was clear. She rubbed it gently on the head to console it and it nuzzled closer to her legs. (Aw! It was too cute.) Shoot, she had to focus!

"Geodude! Use tackle!" Lizzie shouted, pumping her fists into the air. Clara flinched when the Pokemon attacked. (It was one thing to see these fights pixellated on a small screen... watching cute creatures fight each other this way just made her feel sorry for them.) It did some damage, but not enough to concern her. "Take that!" She punched her fists out in front of her, now, as if imagining that she had Geodude's fists herself. "Hahaha! We're gonna pummel your lame little mouse into the ground, Clara!"

"...Marill, use bubble beam." Clara said, tilting her head to the side. (If there was anything she remembered about defeating Geodudes, it was that she used a bunch of bubble attacks to do so. Oftentimes, they would defeat those Pokemon in one hit.) The attack whimsically floated towards Lizzie's Geodudes and the girl snorted, unimpressed. Then the bubbles burst, the lightning sound of an 'effective' attack rumbled around the arena, and the Geodudes hp bar dropped into the red... and then disappeared entirely. They collapsed immediately.

"...What. What!?" Lizzie dropped to her knees and puffed her cheeks. "You-- you cheated! That was just a bunch of bubbles! I-- Thea! Are you going to let this slide!? Fight her! Defend my honor! ...You're my knight, right?"

Before Lizzie could even begin to bat her eyes, Ian strode into the arena in a way he must have thought was cool. (Yeah... and he called her a nerd? Because he definitely found a way to look like the biggest nerd there based on the way he sauntered in.) He tipped his own hat and shooed Lizzie with the dismissive wave of his hand.

"You know the rules! You've been eliminated, Lizzie. Now it's my turn." Ian smirked and waved challengingly at Thea. "Let's go, Thea! You and me. You think you can beat me?"
 
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