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gjnhjfdhns: Part FIFTY: Final Prescription
“Well, fuck,” I muttered, and it seemed the others shared my sentiment with their silence.
Kevin-with-now-pure-black-eyes stood just before us; the rest of the monsters waited impatiently behind them, gnashing their teeth and flexing their claws and God knows what else. I could have cared less at the moment, I really could’ve. All that mattered seemed to have been thwarted immensely by the fact that the one person on the other side who might have been on our side (still following me?) was just completely and utterly overpowered. Somehow, it seemed like one of the last strands of hope I had been clinging to.
The man looked around at us, raising a brow that was nicely shaped (so he, like, totally had to be of the fluffy persuasion, the eccentric jerk).
“What, you aren’t happy to see each other? I had this all planned out as a touching reunion!” He sighed dramatically, because we all knew he hadn’t been planning a touching reunion because he was a big, big jerkface. “I suppose we’ll have to move on to the final event, then…”
And they way he said it, the set of his jaw, the tone of his voice, the look in his eyes- it didn’t fucking sound good.
“You’re not doing anything else,” I hissed from between gritted teeth, jabbing a finger at him. “You’ve done enough/. You can /stop now. You can just. Fucking. Stop.”
He had the goddamned audacity to laugh. Not one of those heart-stopping, fear-inducing, oh-my-God-I’m-going-to-die-when-he-stops-smiling chuckles, but a full blown guffaw that made me feel like an idiot. That mean idiot.
“On the /contrary/, Hazel, I’ve barely begun! I mean, really, it’s only been about twelve hours since you left the house.”
I choke on nothing. He knew my name and he knew we left the house and twelve /hours/? It felt like twelve /years/!
“How would you know that?” Mitchell demanded. Angel answered, a resigned note in her voice.
“It’s all been /him/, hasn’t it? I mean, all of this… All of… /this/…”
The man smiled ridiculously smug. The kind of smug you don’t want to punch off someone’s face, but stab and scratch and just beat the living daylights off. He looked too /proud/. Like he was a /somebody/.
But before he could say anything, Mitchell threw in his fifty-eight cents.
“/No/, okay? NO. You make him sound like some sort of GOD, and that /asshole-“ he pointed to aforementioned asshole, “is /no God. No fucking way. He’s just a dick, okay? Just some run-of-the-mill, no life /dick/.” When the man began to laugh again, Mitchell scowled. “You can of course go fuck yourself, you shitmonkey!”
“I’m a /shitmonkey/,” the man wheezed out between his shaking shoulders, “a shit… monkey. Oh, wow. Oh, wow wow wow. I’m awed by the extent of your vulgarity, Mitchell.”
“Stop it!” Angel snapped. “Don’t- don’t talk like you know us! You… You-“
“Assmuncher?” Offered Brian. Angel smiled mirthlessly, nodding. The man smiled, too.
“But I do know you. And quite intimately so- after all, a person’s true character will always shine through in a time of crisis, won’t it? And I’ve given you all crisis after crisis… I dare say I know you all better than yourselves.”
Well, nobody wanted that. And we said so- but not in so many… clean words. Almost not any clean words at all. The man held his hand out to Ydem, who had suddenly materialized from nowhere (no joke, really, what was that!?), and received a small stack of papers.
“/Angel R. Hemophobic. Indecisive. Believes that every world experienced is a nightmare come true./”
Angel paled more and more during the short recitation. The man flipped the page and moved on, looking for all the world like a doctor explaining the proper use of prescribed medicine.
“/Brian Y. Headstrong. Determined. Does what needs to be done. Doesn’t believe in the worlds; rather, goes through each with a dry regard./”
Brian stared blankly at the man.
“/Christina D. Follows instinct. Increasingly lost. Seems to lose memory with each world change./”
Christina’s brow pinched, furrowing, and her expression of concern was disconcerting.
“/Hazel A. Easily frustrated. Confused. Doesn’t want to accept the worlds, but believes in them all the same./”
Hell yes I was confused. What a friggin’ genius. I mustered up the best glare I could.
“/Mitchell B. Stubborn. Losing confidence. Doesn’t believe it./”
Mitchell scoffed, as though the analysis was some sort of lame-o magic trick where the bunny jumps out of the hat when the magician is trying to prove it empty. The man smiled at him personably (/now, would you like the soup or salad with that?/) and shuffled through the rest of the papers, humming a tuneless song. The absent smile lifted with the light in his eyes as he slowed his rifling, and he began to recite once more.
“/Alejandra B. Strong-headed. Broken./”
What? No, no, he couldn’t be- this wasn’t… Broken didn’t mean…
“/Anthony J. Friendly. Broken./”
Broken didn’t… It couldn’t, he couldn’t be saying…
“Candace W. Confident. Broken.
“Carlo D. Energetic. Broken.
“Chloe F. Hesitant. Broken.
“Jared P. Sure. Broken.
“Jerome-“
“Stop it!” I snapped, willing death to hit him through my eyes, willing anything to end this reading of eulogies. “Stop- that’s /enough/! No more, okay? No. More. We’re leaving. We’re going home! You fix everyone, and then we’re going /home/!” When he grinned, I clenched my hands into useless fists and knew that it would do no good to give in and clock him, no matter how satisfying it would feel to start a cerise bloom on that laughing cheek.
“What amuses me the most is how adamant you are to return home/,” he explained, looking fondly down at the lot of us like a grandfather might his silly grandchildren. “As though /home would become a sort of salve and smooth over this little mess.”
Dread polluted my stomach at that. That’s how it was, wasn’t it? Once we were home, it could all be a dream, couldn’t it? That’s all it really was… right?
I look up at the man with the wicked smile and ceased to have any organs left, let alone a stomach to pollute; home did not mean salvation, could not mean salvation, not from a hell such as this. There would be no returning, figuratively or literally. Figuratively, nothing would return to as it was before this soiree gone to terrors. Literally…
He simply wasn’t going to allow us. And maybe it was beyond his control, anyway- maybe the havoc he wrought upon our minds created a mutation so irreversible that even if he was a decent man (which he most definitely was /not/, in any sense of the term), there was just no going back.
Either way, we had reached the point of no return and skipped merrily over it long ago, and the realization was only just starting to sink in. This was it. We were going to break, just like everyone else, and this would be it.
“You are a terrible thing,” I managed to shove out at him.
“You know what?” He replied, lips curved amicably, relaying merely an anecdote and yet a pitchy promise, “after that yowling abomination bore its secrets in a scarlet puddle the kitchen floor, and I saw the expression on my mother’s face- I kind of gathered.”
“That’s disgusting,” Angel spat, staring daggers at him. He grinned back, made a sort of shrug, and beckoned Kevin forward.
“I must admit, I’m feeling quite disappointed,” he told us, rummaging through the papers again. “I expected you all to discover- well, I expected at least one of you to realize… I mean, really, honestly and truly…”
He pulled out a syringe, and I could feel rather than see everyone on my side tense. He gingerly slid the needle into Kevin’s outstretched arm, injecting a dark, thick liquid resembling blood into an abnormally dark vein.
“No matter. You’ll all find out in due time.”
Kevin (/it feels so strange to say his name because it can’t be his name anymore no that can’t be him no no no it’s not Kevin but then—how can—?/) turned his head to us. The mass of writhing, snarling darkness behind him seemed to swell, and my eye was starting to be able to pick out individual details- there’s a demon’s head, a monster’s hand, some bloody, bloody teeth…
“Fuck,” I mumbled, taking a step back, “/fuck/. This is the /fucks/. This is the ultimate, unabashed, unparalleled fuck up in the history of /ever/.”
Mitchell snorted almost in unison with Brian, both eyeing the multitude of antagonists we had so quickly seemed to gather.
“You know,” Mitchell mused, “I’ve only just realized that you’re swearing. And you’re swearing more than /me/. Why’s that?”
“Because we’re fucking fucked/!” I snapped, snapping my gaze to his. “Why /else would it be?”
“We’re not fucked,” he replied, in the way that someone would say /oh, goddamn it, let me pay for your meal already/. “We’ve still got options.”
“What? What can we do?” Christina asked, eyes shining with the sudden hope of a way out.
“We can jump,” Brian shrugged.
“We can fight back,” Mitchell added. Angel and I smacked our foreheads in a better unison than Brian and Mitchell had snorted earlier.
“You guys… are idiots.”
“That can be remedied,” the man said, grinning that crazy, I-could-just-eat-you-up-no-seriously-chomp-CHOMP grin.
Kevin was motioned forward, and our old pseudo-comrade seemed only too eager to leap into action; he charged at Mitchell, tackling him down, and there was only the most fleeting of moments to take in the mutation that had begun to wrack his body until the rest of us were swarmed.
I… I remember screaming. Someone screaming- everyone screaming. That noise of dying and hurt and everything wrong everything’s wrong and the faces I saw, I think I knew some of them- had laughed with some of them, had cried with some of them, had shared my heart and memories with some of them and oh my God they were clawing and tearing and ripping and no NO that’s not supposed to be ripped oh God oh GOD OH GOD
And then that’s it. The pain and that’s it. After it all, there was only /that/. You know, the one thing that had plagued us from that start.
Pitchy black and everything gone.
“Well, fuck,” I muttered, and it seemed the others shared my sentiment with their silence.
Kevin-with-now-pure-black-eyes stood just before us; the rest of the monsters waited impatiently behind them, gnashing their teeth and flexing their claws and God knows what else. I could have cared less at the moment, I really could’ve. All that mattered seemed to have been thwarted immensely by the fact that the one person on the other side who might have been on our side (still following me?) was just completely and utterly overpowered. Somehow, it seemed like one of the last strands of hope I had been clinging to.
The man looked around at us, raising a brow that was nicely shaped (so he, like, totally had to be of the fluffy persuasion, the eccentric jerk).
“What, you aren’t happy to see each other? I had this all planned out as a touching reunion!” He sighed dramatically, because we all knew he hadn’t been planning a touching reunion because he was a big, big jerkface. “I suppose we’ll have to move on to the final event, then…”
And they way he said it, the set of his jaw, the tone of his voice, the look in his eyes- it didn’t fucking sound good.
“You’re not doing anything else,” I hissed from between gritted teeth, jabbing a finger at him. “You’ve done enough/. You can /stop now. You can just. Fucking. Stop.”
He had the goddamned audacity to laugh. Not one of those heart-stopping, fear-inducing, oh-my-God-I’m-going-to-die-when-he-stops-smiling chuckles, but a full blown guffaw that made me feel like an idiot. That mean idiot.
“On the /contrary/, Hazel, I’ve barely begun! I mean, really, it’s only been about twelve hours since you left the house.”
I choke on nothing. He knew my name and he knew we left the house and twelve /hours/? It felt like twelve /years/!
“How would you know that?” Mitchell demanded. Angel answered, a resigned note in her voice.
“It’s all been /him/, hasn’t it? I mean, all of this… All of… /this/…”
The man smiled ridiculously smug. The kind of smug you don’t want to punch off someone’s face, but stab and scratch and just beat the living daylights off. He looked too /proud/. Like he was a /somebody/.
But before he could say anything, Mitchell threw in his fifty-eight cents.
“/No/, okay? NO. You make him sound like some sort of GOD, and that /asshole-“ he pointed to aforementioned asshole, “is /no God. No fucking way. He’s just a dick, okay? Just some run-of-the-mill, no life /dick/.” When the man began to laugh again, Mitchell scowled. “You can of course go fuck yourself, you shitmonkey!”
“I’m a /shitmonkey/,” the man wheezed out between his shaking shoulders, “a shit… monkey. Oh, wow. Oh, wow wow wow. I’m awed by the extent of your vulgarity, Mitchell.”
“Stop it!” Angel snapped. “Don’t- don’t talk like you know us! You… You-“
“Assmuncher?” Offered Brian. Angel smiled mirthlessly, nodding. The man smiled, too.
“But I do know you. And quite intimately so- after all, a person’s true character will always shine through in a time of crisis, won’t it? And I’ve given you all crisis after crisis… I dare say I know you all better than yourselves.”
Well, nobody wanted that. And we said so- but not in so many… clean words. Almost not any clean words at all. The man held his hand out to Ydem, who had suddenly materialized from nowhere (no joke, really, what was that!?), and received a small stack of papers.
“/Angel R. Hemophobic. Indecisive. Believes that every world experienced is a nightmare come true./”
Angel paled more and more during the short recitation. The man flipped the page and moved on, looking for all the world like a doctor explaining the proper use of prescribed medicine.
“/Brian Y. Headstrong. Determined. Does what needs to be done. Doesn’t believe in the worlds; rather, goes through each with a dry regard./”
Brian stared blankly at the man.
“/Christina D. Follows instinct. Increasingly lost. Seems to lose memory with each world change./”
Christina’s brow pinched, furrowing, and her expression of concern was disconcerting.
“/Hazel A. Easily frustrated. Confused. Doesn’t want to accept the worlds, but believes in them all the same./”
Hell yes I was confused. What a friggin’ genius. I mustered up the best glare I could.
“/Mitchell B. Stubborn. Losing confidence. Doesn’t believe it./”
Mitchell scoffed, as though the analysis was some sort of lame-o magic trick where the bunny jumps out of the hat when the magician is trying to prove it empty. The man smiled at him personably (/now, would you like the soup or salad with that?/) and shuffled through the rest of the papers, humming a tuneless song. The absent smile lifted with the light in his eyes as he slowed his rifling, and he began to recite once more.
“/Alejandra B. Strong-headed. Broken./”
What? No, no, he couldn’t be- this wasn’t… Broken didn’t mean…
“/Anthony J. Friendly. Broken./”
Broken didn’t… It couldn’t, he couldn’t be saying…
“Candace W. Confident. Broken.
“Carlo D. Energetic. Broken.
“Chloe F. Hesitant. Broken.
“Jared P. Sure. Broken.
“Jerome-“
“Stop it!” I snapped, willing death to hit him through my eyes, willing anything to end this reading of eulogies. “Stop- that’s /enough/! No more, okay? No. More. We’re leaving. We’re going home! You fix everyone, and then we’re going /home/!” When he grinned, I clenched my hands into useless fists and knew that it would do no good to give in and clock him, no matter how satisfying it would feel to start a cerise bloom on that laughing cheek.
“What amuses me the most is how adamant you are to return home/,” he explained, looking fondly down at the lot of us like a grandfather might his silly grandchildren. “As though /home would become a sort of salve and smooth over this little mess.”
Dread polluted my stomach at that. That’s how it was, wasn’t it? Once we were home, it could all be a dream, couldn’t it? That’s all it really was… right?
I look up at the man with the wicked smile and ceased to have any organs left, let alone a stomach to pollute; home did not mean salvation, could not mean salvation, not from a hell such as this. There would be no returning, figuratively or literally. Figuratively, nothing would return to as it was before this soiree gone to terrors. Literally…
He simply wasn’t going to allow us. And maybe it was beyond his control, anyway- maybe the havoc he wrought upon our minds created a mutation so irreversible that even if he was a decent man (which he most definitely was /not/, in any sense of the term), there was just no going back.
Either way, we had reached the point of no return and skipped merrily over it long ago, and the realization was only just starting to sink in. This was it. We were going to break, just like everyone else, and this would be it.
“You are a terrible thing,” I managed to shove out at him.
“You know what?” He replied, lips curved amicably, relaying merely an anecdote and yet a pitchy promise, “after that yowling abomination bore its secrets in a scarlet puddle the kitchen floor, and I saw the expression on my mother’s face- I kind of gathered.”
“That’s disgusting,” Angel spat, staring daggers at him. He grinned back, made a sort of shrug, and beckoned Kevin forward.
“I must admit, I’m feeling quite disappointed,” he told us, rummaging through the papers again. “I expected you all to discover- well, I expected at least one of you to realize… I mean, really, honestly and truly…”
He pulled out a syringe, and I could feel rather than see everyone on my side tense. He gingerly slid the needle into Kevin’s outstretched arm, injecting a dark, thick liquid resembling blood into an abnormally dark vein.
“No matter. You’ll all find out in due time.”
Kevin (/it feels so strange to say his name because it can’t be his name anymore no that can’t be him no no no it’s not Kevin but then—how can—?/) turned his head to us. The mass of writhing, snarling darkness behind him seemed to swell, and my eye was starting to be able to pick out individual details- there’s a demon’s head, a monster’s hand, some bloody, bloody teeth…
“Fuck,” I mumbled, taking a step back, “/fuck/. This is the /fucks/. This is the ultimate, unabashed, unparalleled fuck up in the history of /ever/.”
Mitchell snorted almost in unison with Brian, both eyeing the multitude of antagonists we had so quickly seemed to gather.
“You know,” Mitchell mused, “I’ve only just realized that you’re swearing. And you’re swearing more than /me/. Why’s that?”
“Because we’re fucking fucked/!” I snapped, snapping my gaze to his. “Why /else would it be?”
“We’re not fucked,” he replied, in the way that someone would say /oh, goddamn it, let me pay for your meal already/. “We’ve still got options.”
“What? What can we do?” Christina asked, eyes shining with the sudden hope of a way out.
“We can jump,” Brian shrugged.
“We can fight back,” Mitchell added. Angel and I smacked our foreheads in a better unison than Brian and Mitchell had snorted earlier.
“You guys… are idiots.”
“That can be remedied,” the man said, grinning that crazy, I-could-just-eat-you-up-no-seriously-chomp-CHOMP grin.
Kevin was motioned forward, and our old pseudo-comrade seemed only too eager to leap into action; he charged at Mitchell, tackling him down, and there was only the most fleeting of moments to take in the mutation that had begun to wrack his body until the rest of us were swarmed.
I… I remember screaming. Someone screaming- everyone screaming. That noise of dying and hurt and everything wrong everything’s wrong and the faces I saw, I think I knew some of them- had laughed with some of them, had cried with some of them, had shared my heart and memories with some of them and oh my God they were clawing and tearing and ripping and no NO that’s not supposed to be ripped oh God oh GOD OH GOD
And then that’s it. The pain and that’s it. After it all, there was only /that/. You know, the one thing that had plagued us from that start.
Pitchy black and everything gone.
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