Cartomancy

campkilkare @ 2009-12-10T08:02:00

2009-12-10T14:02:07Z

Nobody has to explain to Santana Lopez that high school is a war.

Quinn wasn't supposed to be here tonight. This isn't her kind of party; not the squeaky-clean whitebread queen of William McKinley, who really believes all that stuff they talk about in Celibacy Club.

(Pop pop pop pop goes the imaginary balloon, as Santana's hips jerk to the beat, up in the business of Mike Chang, who is borderline at best; whoever heard of a Chinese breakdancer? She's looking at him but not looking at him, Coach Sylvester says your eyes are a vulnerable point and a true Cheerio has no vulnerabilities, so you armor your eyes; you don't look where you're looking and your smile, no matter how steely and fake, goes up past your eyes and into your brain. Knot the ends up in your ponytail and ride it into the sunset.)

It's not hard to smile, watching Quinn play with her hair and ooze up against Puck, she's been doing it since a fistful of diet pills and a summer at that camp Coach Sylvester owns 25% of (Camp Yurafadi) transformed her from "who's that fat Mexican chick?" into, well... Santana Lopez.

Still, she wishes she had her uniform on. Coach Sylvester would murder her if she spilled one of these Jack and Cokes on it (She drains hers, then drains Mike Chang's, and looks around for Britney. Time to pull out all the stops.) but it makes her feel good. Strong. Invincible, really, a cast-iron bitch just like Coach Sylvester, and if none of the other girls (except Britney) really likes her, well, Coach Sylvester says it's better to be feared than loved.

She moves off of Mike Chang and turns to Britney, who is dancing by herself with the sort of blank, happy concentration that makes her... makes her Britney. Sometimes she wonders if there's something actually wrong with Britney, but she's pretty sure the other girl has just kept her brain in the off-position for sixteen years. She doesn't need to think; if high school is a war, Santana thinks of herself as a smart bomb, but Britney is a blockbuster. She's perfect... at least as long as she doesn't open her mouth.

Speaking of: "Britney, make out with me."

"Okay." You can always count on Britney.

Never, ever let anything distract you from winning. That's what Coach Sylvester says. Only why doesn't she notice that Puck isn't in the appreciative circle of hooting boys that gather as she bumps and grinds with her best friend? Why doesn't she notice any of them until the song stops and her lips leave Brit's and she looks around to see that Puck and Quinn are already gone?

Britney drives (Britney is not allowed to drink much--Santana worries she'll stop breathing if she actually gets drunk) and when they park outside Britney's house (the three of them, Britney-Quinn-Santana, have stayed over at each other's houses in rotation practically every weekend since they were ten) Britney seems to think she knows how this is supposed to go; it's how it always goes with the boys she makes out with, when the night is over.

Santana pulls away. "Britney, what are you doing?"

Britney blinks at her. "What?"

"We can't..." Something. There's something they can't do.

"Why not?" Britney doesn't look seductive, or hurt, or winning; she just looks confused. There's only room for very small concepts in that pretty (gorgeous) head, and if it feels good, do it is one Santana taught her herself.

She can't remember why not. Britney's hands are in her hair and her ponytail is falling apart and she really really can't remember why not.

***

It's not something you talk about. It happens, things like it happen, it's a game, it's fun, it's very modern and sophisticated, boys like it, except there weren't any boys in Britney's room Friday night. Or Saturday morning or.

They never need to talk about it.

"When you did that thing with your tongue--" Santana blanches and her hand clamps on Britney's shoulder, dragging her away from the lunch table and the other Cheerios, into an empty classroom.

"What is wrong with you."

Britney stares at her with a dumb, sad look. "You hurt my shoulder."

"You can't tell them about us."

"Us?" Britney mirrors, blanks.

Santana wants to scream. "There is no us!"

"...okay..."

"It just... happened. We don't need to talk about. We never, ever talk about it."

"Okay," Britney says, nodding seriously, and Santana can see it sinking in. She won't. Probably. Unless she forgets. She rubs her temples.

What would Coach Sylvester do?

"Are you going to come over again this weekend?" Britney asks.

"Yeah. Sure," she says. Distracted.

"Is it going to happen again?"

What would Coach Sylvester do?

Coach Sylvester would take what she wants, and crush anyone who tries to stop her. QED.

"...probably," Santana says, sounding bored. Buffing her nails on the Cheerios uniform. Britney's grin is big and goofy and beaming.

"Okay."

He only does it to annoy

2009-12-02T00:33:14Z

"Hey. Hey. Michael. Hey. Michael. Hey. I'm hungry. Michael?"

"Mnnngh."

"I'm hungry."

Michael loves his apartment, here on the Upper East Side, for its light. Just not at five. "You know where the kitchen is," he mutters into the pillow, and turns a broad dark shoulder on the Cheshire, who pokes it.

"I'm hungry."

"Mng. There are Pop-Tarts in the kitchen," he repeats, and Chesh is gone.

And back. "I can't find them."

"They're in the same place they always are."

"...I can't find them."

"Nng." He holds out a hand, and zip, they're in the kitchen. He takes the Pop-Tarts down from the shelf.

"...oh." The other man stares at him for a while with wide green eyes, so he puts two in the toaster and wanders back to bed.

There's a bang from the kitchen. "Sorry!" Quick padding footsteps; the window opens, and the fire escape creaks. Michael tries to remember if he was wearing pants. The toaster pops, and there are frantic galloping feet, and the sound of the chair going over again. "Haha!"

"Mnnnng." After a few minutes Michael accepts that he's awake, and begins to stir. This is when Cheshire fades back in, squarely on his chest.

"Hello." He settles cheerfully on the gunslinger, folding his arms.

"What are you doing?" He's pressing idly on the other man's chest with his fingers, like playing a piano.

"Hm?"

"What are you doing?" As always at these times, the Cheshire's expression is one of concentration; near fury. He does not look happy. This is a lie. "Ow."

"You love it." He lays his head on his hands, over Michael's heart, and he's asleep.

Michael reaches for his phone, to check the time and the news.

Nope.

He reaches again, stretching, and the Cheshire grunts sleepily and slaps his arm.

Eventually he reaches a newspaper, only to have a head of dark, matted hair thrust in between his face and the pages. "What are you reading?"

"It's..."

"I wasn't finished with that page." He turns it back.

"I can give you your own section." Michael shifts; the younger man's weight is all on his hip. Cheshire shifts with him, and digs his fingers into his chest, sticking one elbow into the crease of the newspaper.

"No, I'm fine."

Eventually, he surrenders the newspaper, and Cheshire makes a hat of it while he's in the shower. Cheshire does not want in the shower, but he perches on the sink and talks to Michael while he's in there.

"I want coffee."

"There's coffee in the kitchen."

"I want Starbucks." He wants a cigarette.

"It's around the corner."

"Will you come with me?"

"No."

"Please?" He laughs unhappily.

"No."

"Come with me."

"I'm in the shower."

"Can I have money for coffee?"

Michael gets out of the shower and gets some money. He's just got back in when the buzzer goes. It's raining. A few minutes later, he changes his mind again. He brings them both back coffee, looking inordinately pleased with himself. (He lost the change, though). The drink he got Michael is the same as his own, a complex mocha-chocolate frappe thing, and Michael pours his out and makes tar-black instant.

They watch The Deadliest Catch while he smokes, his head in Michael's lap, the same expression of furious concentration back in place. Michael strokes his hair and his foot never stops kicking, dangling over the foot of the sofa. Michael waves the smoke away from his face. "You love it."

Michael coughs theatrically. The Cheshire gazes up at him, eyes fixing madly on the open collar of Michael's shirt. He bites his lip, staring at the fluttering of the skin between the gunslinger's collarbones as he breaths. Michael grins at him. "What?"

The Cheshire rolls up abruptly, starts to stand, then twists back, his mouth all ash and coffee crushed against Michael's. In the middle of things, Michael's shirt open, his fly undone, the other man suddenly lifts his head and begins to stare out the window. "Are you kidding me?"

He shrugs. He's stripped down to briefs, and Michael is fairly sure he's still interested (it's pretty obvious), but when the gunslinger puts a hand on the small of his back he bats it away. He's apparently incredibly interested in the afternoon light. The windows are really incredibly huge for a building of this era.

Michael gives up; zips up, stands, heads to the kitchen for more coffee. A moment later, the Cheshire is there, with hardly any fade at all, pressing him back against the counter, wrestling him to the ground.

If Michael wanted to, he could bench press the Cheshire; he could break him in half. He's wiry and pale and bedraggled, not at all the gunslinger's usual type. He lets the Cheshire pin him.

He smacks his arm when he bites, though.

The other man vanishes within seconds after coming. Michael pours his coffee, and finally lets out the laughter that's been building up all day. He drops onto the sofa and goes to finally check his messages.

The Cheshire is back, perched on the back of the couch, and pokes him.

"I'm hungry."

The Wedding - completed

2009-11-28T00:22:37Z

Summary: It's the first wedding for one of the Bailey kids, and predictably, all Hell breaks loose.

Prompt: varadia X and Laura or Michael Bailey (Or Rose, if current Milli-continuity works better) Love Love Love

Notes: This is by far the longest thing I've ever written, I'm pretty sure. All the Chapters (except for the last one) are over 2000 words. It kind of rapidly ballooned out of control, and to encompass several of the Bailey stories I never got around to (or finished) writing, in one form or another. It's set the latest so far, as well--in 2060, about four years after Laura and Alice entered the Labyrinth.

Hopefully it will be comprehensible even if you don't have an encyclopedic memory for everything that has been done in this 'verse. It may also help to have read It, although again, I hope it isn't necessary.

The future versions/descendants of everyone here were used without their permission, because I'm lazy and kind of a terrible person, and it shouldn't be assumed that it has an authority or means anything. Particularly, keep in mind that the Baileyverse is explicitly and deliberately an AU from mainstream Milliways continuity. I hope I haven't upset anyone.

On the same note, I hope it goes without saying that I am using characters based on portrayals by other people, in a sort of double jeopardy fanfic-ness, and should not receive credit for anything but my own original characters featured herein and the larger plot.

Specific warnings attached to their respective chapters.

Chapter 1

There is a brief UNDER THE DOME spoiler in the last section of this chapter; it can be skipped with impunity, and the spoiler warning is repeated in the text. Just stop when you see it. You won't miss anything important.

Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6

There is a brief attempted sexual assault, sort of, in this Chapter. It's not explicit or completed, but may be triggery, if you are sensitive to that kind of thing.

Chapter 7

A clown and a little girl are walking through the dark woods. The clown turns to the girl and says, Gosh, this is scary.

7.1 - 7.10

2009-11-28T00:06:36Z

7.1

He starts with: "I'm sorry."

"You should be." He's seen her angry, but never this furious, and never with him.

"She's okay," he says in a low voice.

"What?"

"I went back. I helped them find her. She's okay," he says, not quite sulky.

"Oh." Her hands knit together. She looks... mollified. "Good."

"Yes."

"And her sister?"

"She's unconscious, but their psychics are trying to help."

Alice nods. "Okay." A beat. Formal: "Thank you."

He starts to fade away, and she says, "Where are you going?" Her voice is querulous.

He blinks at her, half-vanished. "Out."

"Don't--" She swallows. "Don't do anything stupid."

"I should think," he sniffs, "you'd be afraid of me doing something clever."

He fades the rest of the way away, and then his mouth says. "But I won't." And it grins at her before he goes.

2

Earlier:

"Hey, look," Michael says, rubbing the back of his neck. "Now that we've got the hero stuff out of the way... do you want to get a drink?"

"I don't drink any more," the Cat says blandly, looking the other way.

"Yeah," Michael says. "Probably a good idea."

"I still have sex with strangers some times," the Cat admits, and Michael grins.

"Are we still strangers, after that?"

"My dear," the Cat says, in mock surprise, "have you really ever met anyone stranger?"

3

"How's Mom?"

"Bustling around like she owns the place," Alice says. "She's fine." Her mind steals to the balloon, hidden deep in the Underside, and she feels a cold grip around her own heart. "Maybe you should go check on yours," she adds gently.

Laura looks away. "She got hurt because of me. They both did."

"You have to give them a chance," Alice says, and Laura shrugs.

"Maybe they'd be better off if I... at least Teta can protect herself. Maybe they'd be better off."

Alice is no longer gentle, or quiet: "Maybe you're an idiot."

"I love you, mia." Laura squeezes her, and Alice squeezes her back, and then Laura goes to find her family. Her other family.

"Is that how I seemed to you?" she asks X. (Still regenerating in a hospital bed, X was content to let Alice handle this case.)

Flat, and very very dry: "Seemed?"

4

"I don't know how long I can keep doing this," Simon says quietly, and 'Nessa stares at him.

"What do you mean?"

"This is twice in five years we thought she was dead. And now you're... It was so close to you." Simon shivers. "I love her, but..."

'Nessa counts to ten. Thinks of Ihsan, and words you can't take back. "There's no but," she says, and she takes Simon's hand. "We love her. We love each other. So we stand it. The end."

"And what if we can't?" he says, hollow. "What if I can't?"

She kisses the corner of his mouth; chaste, but possessive. Inclusive. "Then you're not the man I think you are."

5

It's after midnight when Allen wakes up; Julia feels him, and wakes up, too. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong," he says bleakly. "I know how to wake her up."

"Then you have to," Julia says, and hopes she didn't wait too long.

"It might... it might make everything worse," he says.

What does he want? she thinks. Then: He wants me to give him permission.

"Ka," she says, and his face crumples.

It's the same answer he got twenty years ago, when he asked why he wasn't a gunslinger like his brothers and sisters. "Yeah."

6

This is insane, he thinks. Then corrects himself: No. It's magic. They just... look similar.

There's no piano in this room; it would be strange if there was. But he pulls a seat around to face the wall, and holds his hands out in mid-air, and he closes his eyes, and he begins to play. Fur Elise.

Eventually, he feels a hand on her shoulder. Wren smiles at him.

"Now what?" he whispers; he's not sure he meant to say it outloud.

"Now," she says, "we have the conversation you moved two thousand miles to avoid.

7

They talk a walk, under the big endless New Mexico sky, and they have a conversation.

It is not easy, and it is not fun. It hurts. She finds out she can live with that. She is, after all, a gunslinger, and she can be ruthless when she needs to be. Even, maybe, a little cruel.

Does it hurt?, she asks herself. Well, it's supposed to. That's why it's called getting your heart broken. You'll survive.

Broken hearts mend; sick ones just get sicker.

She hugs him, and she sends him back to her wife, and then she stands in the moonlight and cries for a while.

"Are you okay?" It's one of the Taos people; Walter or something. A big bald man; his voice is thick and slow.

"I'm fine," she says curtly.

"We can help," he says. "Take it away."

She frowns; recoils a little. "The pain? No."

"The... feelings," he says. "For him."

"Jesus." She more than recoils; she takes a few steps back. "No. Thank you."

"Sorry," he says, looking down. "Just wanted to help. Not appropriate. We're sorry. Cry your pardon, gunslinger."

She folds her arms, trying to stop her flesh from crawling. "You--yeah. Okay."

He turns to go, and the words jump out of her mouth. If anyone knows, it will be them. "What's buried in New York, Walter?"

The psychic freezes, and turns back.

(The goodmind does something.)

"What was that, Miss Bailey?"

"I--" She presses her fingers to her temples. "I don't remember."

"You should rest," he says, and she nods.

"Yeah. Maybe I... maybe I need to rest."

8

There's a doctor in her room when she gets back. "There you are," he says, with irritation. "Good to see you're up and around and everything. Nice of someone to tell me."

"Sorry," she says. "You're not one of the Taos doctors, are you?

"No, I got dragooned," he says. I've been hanging around here waiting to... I don't even know why," He folds his arms. "Then I step out for one cup of qingwa cao de coffee and you're just gone.."

"I'm sorry," she says, more sincerely.

He harrumphs, and takes out his scanner. "Well, while you're up--" He goes through a standard neurological checklist. Insanely, impossibly, naturally, she's fine. He sighs.

"Well, you're all right," he says. "Take it easy for a few days, but... there's nothing wrong with you. I'll write you up a list of recommendations that you can ignore at your leisure."

She laughs quietly at that. "We're not very good at following orders. You may have figured that out by now."

"Just a bit." He sighs, and tries to flatten out his hair. "I'm Doctor Tam, by the way. Jordan Tam. Er. My friends call me Jam."

"Why on earth do they do that?" she asks, amused.

"Because I asked them to stop calling me Tart," he says, with a slightly pain smile, and she snorts.

"Tordan Jam," she says. "Tart-and-Jam. Very nice. Nicknames suck."

"And, ah, what's your name?" he asks. He doesn't have a proper chart; he's heard people calling her Eddie, but he catches on quickly.

"I don't really know," she says. "But you can call me Wren, if you want."

"You can call me Jam," he says. "I suppose."

"Yeah, I'm not going to do that," she says. "But I'll call you Jordan, if you want."

"I'd like that." He clears his throat. "Well, I'd... better get going back to Milliways. Now that I'm out of patients."

They share a little smile at the not-quite-joke, and he heads towards the doorway.

"You know," he says, paused in the doorway. "My grandmother always told me to avoid getting involved with gunslingers. She said you're very dangerous people."

"She was probably right," Wren says soberly.

"Yes, I can see that. Good night, Wren."

She smiles. "Good night, Jordan."

9

Earlier:

"You can't keep on doing this forever," Alice tells her. "Coming in to save our butts. Sooner or later they'll have to live without their guardian angel."

"I am not an angel," X says. "And... maybe. But not today." A beat. "You were right, before. When you said that things keep coming back around. I thought I could change that by leaving. I was wrong." She shrugs. "Go home, Rose."

She's very tired, to make a mistake like that.

"Come with me," Alice says. "I'm pretty sure Zora will be happy to see you this time."

X shakes her head; that time is over.

10

"You all right?" he says. It's not strange for her to show up in his room, but it's... well, it's a little strange. He can't count on one hand the number of times she's come to him and not vice versa, not over fifty years, but he wouldn't need three.

"I am always okay," she says, settling on the edge of the bed. "You know that." He pokes her shoulder, and she tilts her head, the hair falling away from her face.

She looks old he thinks. The face is still barely edging out its teens, even now, but in the eyes; not around them but in them. She looks old. As old as he feels, some days.

"Long day," she says. She reaches for him, her hand fisting in his shirt, and he forgets all that shit about feeling old. "Make me feel something."

"Do not hold back."

He'll do his best.

6.1-6.11

2009-11-27T22:40:46Z

6.1 Moiraine is back; at Alice's request, and with great misgivings, she had attempt to reach out to the Endless for help. The results were, perhaps, predictable. Now she has taken a look at Zora, and prepares to remove her and some of the other allies (and Dr. Tam) to Taos, for the infirmary or the door back to Milliways.

Alice is left holding a balloon by a silver thread.

"Take this," she tells Ingress. "Take it someplace safe. Someplace no one else can reach." Remembering: "Please."

Ingress nods. "And then? What do we do next?"

She shakes her head. "I don't know."

She feels old. Her eyes steal to the fragile red balloon, and its grisly promise, and she feels very old.

2

She has to get to the disruptor. She has to get to the disruptor right away. Her leg screams as she drags herself across the flagstone; as the spider closes on her.

X bursts through the door she had recognized. The one she had seen from the other side. She drops to her knees beside the dead woman and takes a deep breath, inhaling past the stench of spidergod and sewage and sweat. Taking in the scent that hangs around her mother, the stink of death.

And then, in a very real sense, X ceases to exist.

X-23 rises, turns, and acquires a target.

3

"This is why it kept me alive, isn't it?" Wren looks up at the sky, which is grey now, and lowering. Thunder rumbles, like screams of pain. "Why it waited until the wedding. It wanted to wait until it could draw in as many of us as possible. It learned, from when I came in after Laura."

"I-it knew that one a l-l-long time ago," Bill says. "I th-think it's worse than that. I th-think--"

4

X-23 lands on it, shredding, and Laura's stomach heaves as it cycles wildly through glamours, searching for one that will get purchase on the mutant's mind. Good luck with that, she thinks wildly, and drags herself a little farther.

X-23 rises from the demolished ruins of the spider; she has hollowed it out. Destroyed it entirely. A low growling sound comes from the back of her throat, as her eyes come to rest on Eddie Bailey.

Target acquired.

5

"I think it wants to l-l-l--." Lighning strikes from the gravestone sky; not forking but single burning stroke.

"See, now, it's back," Richie says, stepping in from his stuttering friend. "It's got you locked in here with it. And if it kills you... it'll be here. In your head. In your body. And you'll be gone. Which means it has access, see. To the rose, and to what's buried there. And--"

"Wait, what?" she says, grabbing at his shirt. "What's buried where?"

"Beep-beep, Richie," Mike says, warningly, and Wren rounds on them.

"What's going on? What aren't you telling me? You keep starting to say things and then cutting off... you said something about being my namesakes, but then not really, and this, and... where's my grandmother? Where's my mother? Why are you guys here and they aren't?" It started off angry, but now it's just hurt and scared.

Something is coming through the Barrens; something big.

"What are you keeping back?"

6

Laura doesn't try to say anything. There's not really any point. She just waits until X is in range and then she fires. She doesn't let up until the disruptor gets too hot to hold. What falls to the ground is charred beyond any recognition.

I'm a mile or so underground, behind a maze of tunnels, she thinks. Eddie's still unconscious. X is either dead or she's going to regenerate, and when she regenerates she may or may not still be able to smell the trigger scent coming from beyond that door. And my leg is broken.

Other than that, this all went pretty much according to plan.

She laughs bitterly, and starts to cry. She touches the three bracelets around her right arm, one after the other. I'm sorry, Simon. I'm sorry, 'Nessa. Her fingers linger on the last one, black and iridescent. It feels almost warm to her touch. I'm sorry, Teta.

Then she sees the grins.

7

"They are," Ben Hanscomb says. "And we're not keeping back anything you want to hear. We're just a part of you, Wren. Just trying to help you."

"And they aren't?"

"They are," he says, putting his hands on her shoulders. They aren't kid's hands, and they aren't kid's shoulder. They're an old man's hands, on a young woman's shoulders.

I remember you she thinks. I remember... everything.

"They're a lot closer than we are. They're in your blood. In your hands, and your eyes, and your hair."

"Namesakes," she says dizzily. "But not exactly. Wren for Stan's birds. And Eddie. The ones who died. Oh God."

They nod solemnly. Behind the fortifications, It is getting closer. "My mother wouldn't name me that."

"She never knew us," Mike says gently. "None of us but Ben ever saw Bevvie again."

Ben smiles tremulously. "You look just like her."

She's still got the slingshot, even now; even in the green dress. Her hand tightens on it. "It was easy, the first time," she says "I was young, then. And in love. And it was all... easy. It never laid a finger on me."

"It could still be that way," Stan says. "You just have to find the magic again. I couldn't, but you're different. You're a gunslinger. You can do this."

She shakes her head. "I'm too old. And I did it the wrong way, anyway. I did it all the wrong way."

"It's c-c-coming," Bill says, looking over his shoulder. "T-t-take Silver. Buy some t-t-time."

"We'll hold it off as long as we can," Stan promises solemnly. She shakes her head; tucks the slingshot into her belt, and takes the hands of the two closest to her.

"Time to fight," she says. "Time to grow up."

They make a ring; make a circle. And then she's alone. To face the dark.

8

One of them, she recognizes.

"MICHAEL!" And past him: "Teta!"

"...Cat?"

"I don't want to go among heroic people," he sighs. "And yet here I am." It is, after all, the only way she'll ever forgive him.

"You remember," Michael says, crossing the flagstone, with a weather eye on the ruined mass of spider, "when you fell down at Rockefeller Center and broke your leg? I carried you home?"

Laura smiles tremulously. "Yeah."

"Well, today you walk, bitch." He picks up Eddie, easily. She's so light. He shakes his head. "I told mia thirty years ago that bringing more girls into the house was a mistake."

"Michael," she says, sweet as poison. "Please don't use the three word around my girlfriend."

"To be continued," he says, taking the Cat's hand.

When they're gone, Teta finally comes forward; finally speaks, the words pouring out in a rush. "I found you! I found you in the Force! I didn't think I could but I did and Julia wired us all together with the psychics in Taos and we... we found you." She kneels in the mud and embraces her.

"See," Laura says, muffled in the Jedi's shoulder. "I would've gone with a joke on the thirty thing. Keep things light. Your way was okay, too." Kind of made me cry.

"I found you." Teta sniffles. "Simon and 'Nessa are... okay. Your--um. Your mother had a heart attack, but we think she'll be okay now. Is X--"

Laura nods towards the half-disintegrated body, her face pale; Teta looks over. "I think--" She holds out a hand, feeling in the Force. "I think she's alive."

"Can you tell if she's... if she's X?" X doesn't like for people to know about the trigger scent; Laura herself knows very little. How long the effects last, how much may be clinging to their clothes or hair now. How powerful the labyrinth version may be, compared to the other.

"When I say alive," Teta says hesitantly. "I mean like on the cellular level."

The Cat reappears. "Next?"

Teta and Laura exchange looks. "We're bringing her," Laura decides, firmly.

9

She's waiting for It. As It comes, the landscape changes, closing in around her; she's not surprised to have the music practice room grow up around her, because she can feel It moving through her memories, long tickly legs, light hairy touches, picking and choosing from the darkness and sorrow inside of her.

She composes herself, and waits. When It comes through the door, it's with Allen's face. Of course.

"You shouldn't have done that," she says quietly. "Just like you never should've threatened him, back then. Never should have taken Laura. You shouldn't have tried to hurt my family."

"Come on," It says, coming closer. "Admit it. This is what you've always wanted."

"You shouldn't have brought them into it," she says, pulling away. "It's not about them." It bounds after her--it's a small room, a close room, and It grabs her by the arms. She recognize the other half of this script, too, from a bad experience in college. She wonders if It saw it through to the end.

She suspects not. "Come on, you whore," It snarls, pressing her up against the wall. It's face is at kissing distance. "You've been begging for it for years. What are you, a fucking tease?"

It wants her afraid, she knows; wants her afraid, but that doesn't really matter, as long as it can kill her. Steal her life. "You can rank me to the dogs and back," she says, her voice dreamy. Her voice is Richie "Trashmouth" Tozier's. "But I'll still never lose the hard-on I use to fuck your mother."

It gapes in shock and confusion, and she dips close enough for that kiss; close enough to bite down on, bite through Allen's lip, and then It gives a muffled shriek and tries to get away. She gets ahold of one arm and gets it up behind It, and when It doesn't stop struggling she breaks Its arm in two places, just like she did to the boy in college.

She lets go, lets it scream and flail, and then she clocks it with the violin, swinging for the fences, smashing Its nose--Allen's nose--and Its teeth. "Do you like it?" she pants; those roses back in her pale cheeks, crazy green fire in her eyes. She brings the violin back down the other way, destroying it totally, then bounces Its face off the piano. "Do you love it?"

She can feel It trying to shift, trying to find another way to fight her, but it's too close in here for the spider and she's done with being afraid of clowns. It lashes out at her mind, but finds more than the steel it expects; finds a love that burns with poison, a hate that burns like battery acid. She kicks It in the crotch. "I have come in the name of my mother, this time," she tells him. "And I'm not locked in here with you."

When It reaches for her with Its good arm, she twists the hand up and backwards, the wrist snapping and three fingers, and It falls to its knees and shrieks. "You're locked in here with me."

And trust me, she thinks, here where thought and speech are the same thing. It's no place you want to get caught alone. Especially after dark.

"I wanna go home!" It screams, hurt worse than It has ever been, even in dying; she was more merciful, then. She was younger. Once before It had suspected that there was an Other, that Its enemies were aligned against It deliberately, but this is more than a pawn of the Other. This is a Knight.

At the least. "I w-w-wanna go home."

"Go then!" she shouts in triumph. "And don't come back."

Then the ceiling rolls back, and the sky opens up.

10

"No brain activity," Dr. Tam says, in Taos. "I'm sorry. She's alive, but she's... not here."

Julia nods, her face heavy and expressionless. She's sensing the same thing.

"As for this--" He can't even call this a patient. It's... burned carbon. "I don't even know what to say."

X's voice is a terrible thing; his face goes sheet-white, and he drops the clipboard he commandeered from the Tet medical corps with an almighty clatter. "I will try not to take that personally."

11

The sky opens up, and she's looking up into the deadlights.

Oh God, she thinks. That's home. Everything is vanishing into the terrible white soundless blaze; the worst part is the way it feels, the affection reaching out to embrace the shattered thing that is disintegrating beneath her fingers. That renewing, materal presence; that awful analogue of love.

I take it back, she thinks helplessly, but of course some things you can't take back, and the deadlights take her.

5.1-5.10

2009-11-27T19:24:16Z

5.1

Now, here is a place worthy of being called the Barrens; a sterile gravel pit, where a fat boy is putting the last touches on a series of makeshift fortifications. Behind him two other boys, one black, one white, with taped-together glasses, are building piles of ammunition--of rocks, in other words.

"I know who you are," Wren says; her memory is filtering back. She's excited. "You're those kids, the ones that beat It before." Beat It, killed It--she's starting to wonder if there's any difference, or if you can only buy a little time. If something like It will always come back. "Is... Is she here? My grandmother?"

Oh, the hope in her voice.

The fat kid--Ben, she remembers, Ben Hanscomb, her grandfather, made young--shakes his head. Apologetic. "But she wants you to have this." He tugs something from the back pocket of his jeans, taking the time to hike them up. He's not as big as he looks, under the baggy clothes.

It's a slingshot. The slingshot. "I lost this," she says, and she can hear the tears in her voice even before she feels them start running. "In the woods." Later, there had been the ones from Cuthbert and Eddie Dean, the ones Ingress gave her, that she brought with her to Derry--but this one was first. This one was lost. "Oh my God."

There's a rattle like (nothing like) machine gun fire, and a tall boy on a huge monster of a silver bike ramps up the slope of the pit. "It's c-c-coming," the boy pants. "M-Mike, Eddie, take her back there. She needs h-h-h-h--" He grimaces-- "help. And history. The r-rest of you guys--"

He wheels the bike behind the ramparts, and picks up a rock. "H-hhelp me h-hold the line."

2

Alice Bailey waits. She's not good at it.

If she dies-- It's not a complete thought; not a sane thought. She's not thinking about fairness, or the likely (inevitable) civil war with Tet Devar, if she loses control. She's barely thinking at all. All she can do is stare at the fine dark hair of the young doctor, the bones at the base of his skull, and think if he lets her die--

"Ma'am, can you.... close?" Dr. Tam says shakily, moving aside so Ingress can do her trick in reverse. For the last five minutes he's felt as if someone was pointing an invisible gun at his head; now he relaxes. "She's stable," he says, to the room at large. "She should still go to a hospital, or see a magical healer--" He'd feel a lot better if it was the later, really, considering the nonsterile circumstances-- "--but she's stable now."

Alice Bailey claps him on the shoulder, and he almost jumps. "Good. Thank you." She addresses the crowd. "Anybody heard from Moiraine, yet?"

3

Allen shudders in relief, withdraws from the crowd; rejoins their little party upstairs. They're crammed into his old bedroom. "She's all right," he says. His complexion looks grey, and Julia wants to hold him--wants to ground him--but when she reaches for him he pulls away.

When she tries again, he pulls her into the hallways. "I'm sorry," she says. "I shouldn't have looked."

"No. You shouldn't have."

"But it's not even... nothing happened. There's so much guilt, Allen, and nothing happened."

"I couldn't... I didn't..."

"You handled it the only way you could," she says, laying a hand on his chest. "You got out of the situation before something... stupid could happen."

"I didn't get it right," he says, shaking his head.

"What else could you have done?"

"I don't know," he says. "But she almost died. Her and Laura. The family... splintered. I don't live here anymore. And now they're gone again. It's my fault. I couldn't fix it."

"Allen..." The guilt is between them like a wall.

I shouldn't have looked, she thinks. And if we can't fix this... if we can't save them...

Oh, God. I shouldn't have looked. I take it back. Please.

4

Michael watches them withdraw, troubled. He's the only one in the family who really likes Julie; she can rub people the wrong way. If this--

"I need more," Teta says. "What happened next?"

"Is this even doing any good?" he says wearily.

"I don't know, but I know we don't have anything better."

He shakes his head. "I don't know. None of us were there but the two who are gone. They went to Derry. Got there in the middle of the night. They were going to wait until morning, but then Pennywise came. He took Laura. Something about her being... too old. Not thinking the right way anymore to protect herself."

"Eddie went into the sewers after them and she killed It."

It's not much to go on. Teta raises her eyes to the ceiling, trying to still her raging emotions. Come on, Laura.

Where are you?

5

"Aw God. Aw jeez, that's foul."

She surfaces in the pool of scummy water; in the sewers. X is already ahead of her, clambering up onto level ground. "I can't see anything." There's faint light filtering in from somewhere--from doorways around the limits of the wide and empty room--but not enough to see be. Unless, maybe, you're X. The mutant gives her and hand up from the water, then leans down with a lighter to ignite the oily sludge on the surface of the water. It burns with a thick nasty smoke and an awful smell, ugly green light that makes them both look dead, but at least she can see.

Oh.

She recognizes this place. She's been here before. The walls and ceiling are festooned with thick white webs, heavy with filth and refuse and things shaped an awful lot like old, old bodies. And one new one.

Snikt. X heads towards the wall. "I will get her down. Be ready to catch her, if it snaps. And be on guard."

Laura nods, and looks around at the doorways. She kneels on the flagstones and tries to figure out how to fieldstrip and clean the disruptor; the handgun is a lost cause already.

6

Somewhere above, Pennywise is feeding. This body is young, and its metabolism runs fast and hot; It's hungry. But trapping the slow weak things that live above It is an easy task, and It has yet to learn to really enjoy playing with It's food. Not as it will in a hundred years, or a thousand.

It feeds, but elsewhere, Its mind is otherwise occupied. Frustrated...

how much do you know about

7

"...magic?" Mike asks her; Wren shrugs.

"A little bit." Her fingers tighten on the slingshot. "Shouldn't I--" Noises are coming from the barricade; shouts and stuttering warcries; accents and what sounds like a catalog of the names of birds. "Shouldn't I be helping?"

"You can't yet," Mike says. "That's why we have to help you. You have to remember how to fight the right way. With magic. You have to remember how to be a kid."

"There's black magic and there's white magic," Eddie says, taking a hit off the inhaler; her eyes flicker to Mike (she's used to a more sensitive age) but he doesn't react. "Like this stuff."

She eyes the inhaler. "Which one is this?"

"My mom gave it to me," Eddie says, with a troubled expression. "It saved my life. Only maybe it wouldn't have needed to if she hadn't--" He shrugs. "Some of us grew up after. Some of us just got old. Sometimes love can be poison. Like Bevvy and her dad, too." One of those too-old expressions crosses his face. "Poor old Myra."

"Cheaters!" the clown roars behind them; they jump. "None of you belong here! Some of you aren't even dead!"

"Yeah, well, you know what they say," the boy with the glasses snaps; he winds up a rock and lets the clown have it, square in the mouth. Dropping into a broad, ridiculous southern accent: "It's a small town, sahn, and we aill support the team."

"What about him?" she asks. "Is It the same one I fought before? The same one you fought? I thought... I thought I killed it."

"Me too," Eddie says.

"I think it is," Mike says. "It seems like it must be. But I think--it's just a theory, but--"

His eyes flicker to the fortification, where the clown is snatching furiously for Ben Hanscomb, shaking him by the collar of his sweatshirt, cursing him and screaming as he's driven back.

"I think It's like us," Mike goes on. "I think It's old, but It's young, too. It's still learning. That's why we can help you."

"You might need to use that."

Eddie. Can you hear me?

The voice booms out of the sky; she raises her head. "Yeah, I can hear you! Hello? X?"

Eddie? The clown raises Its head, lips curling back from Its teeth like a dog.

I am going to cut you down. If you can hear me, try to remain limp. I will try to use the webbing.

With a shriek of rage, the clown turns away from the battle and runs; they pelt it with rocks as it goes. "Aaaaaand stay out! Ya big maroon." Trashmouth Tozier collapses against one of the big rocks holding up the walls, and pants.

Wren looks back and forth between the boys. "Is this a good thing or a bad thing?"

Mike shakes his head. "I don't know."

8

Invasion!

Theft!

It tosses aside a tiny body, and squeezes Itself through a storm drain; charges back into the sewers. They're in Its place, meddling with Its revenge.

Everything is going according to plan.

9

Everything is going according to plan; the web wound around Eddie like a shroud untangles slowly, spinning her around and around but lowering her slowly to the ground. X watches with the cold satisfaction that comes from the right, clean cut in the right place doing its job.

"I got her!" Laura calls up, getting underneath her; X clambers through the webbing towards the wall, scenting the air. "Be careful," she calls. "Something is moving." The whole place stinks so badly--she stinks so badly--that's it's hard to be anymore sure of what's happening than that.

She rips the cobwebs away from her, from her body and face, while X climbs down the wall, cutting into the limestone as she needs handholds. "I think she's breathing! I think she's--"

It doesn't come from any of the doors; it comes from a ventilation hole in the ceiling, dropping like a stone, shredding through the webs that hang overhead, causing a sudden unseasonal rain of bodies. Laura rolls out of the way, cradling Eddie, and snatches at the disruptor. She gets off one shot, vaporizing a leg, before the spider lunges forward, seizes her in its mandibles, and shakes her like a ragdoll.

When X lands on it, carving and digging in her with the claws on her feet, it hurls Laura aside. She slams into the wall, knocking up limestone dust. Another few feet and she would've fallen into the flaming pool of wastewater ...leg just broke. Oh, that's not good. X...

She rolls upright in time to see X thrown to the floor, as the spider changes shape. Nothing she recognizes--not the Wolfman or Frankenstein or Dracula or whatever. A blonde woman in a blue shirt; bleeding from her side.

That's mine, Laura thinks, with a kind of confused pride. I did that. She drags herself towards the fight; towards Eddie and the disruptor, her leg screaming.

10

"You are not Elle," X says, backing away. "You are a shapechanger. You are choosing a shape that can hurt me. It will not work." Her face... her face is terrible. Her hands clench in fists; the claws flick in and out. It's been a long, long time since she hurt herself, but right now, she feels the draw; the need for clarity.

(It's perfect. Everything about the illusion is perfect. Even the smell--)

"Won't it?" Light crackles between her fingers, and the woman in blue fires a lightning bolt that slams her back against the limestone; stops her heart for a stuttering moment. "Can you bear to watch this one die?"

The woman's voice is flat, without affect. (Perfect.) "I really don't think you can do it again." She takes a step towards X.

There are places in the labyrinth of X's mind where she knows better than to go; there are doors, too, locked forever, the keys thrown away, the rooms themselves burned and blackened and impassable. Dead.

The woman--the spider--the thing's eyes are silver coins, and there are lights behind them; lights that go up and up into the infinite. Deadlights. No door is locked to its touch; at its voice the graves give up their dead. She's fixed for a moment by its stare; only able to move when Its concentration breaks. It turns to fire a bolt of electricity over one shoulder, blistering the flagstones in front of Laura, freezing her. The disruptor is still yards away.

It turns back to her, a look of sadistic concentration in place. She's seen that face before.

Even gods can be killed; she has done it before. But the price is always high. "Laura," X says, raising her voice. "I am sorry."

She does something she has not done in a long, long time: she turns and runs, crashing through one of the doors back into the labyrinth.

4.1-4.13

2009-11-27T12:42:43Z

4.1

She's floating.

Floating somewhere white and soundless; somewhere free and easy. Somewhere that sixty plus years of time no longer bends her back and weighs her shoulders. (She's always been shorter than she'd like.)

Something is going to happen to her, one way or another. No reason to make a fuss over it.

(alice)

The peace is undisrupted. Eternal.

(laurie)

Unbroken by any

well sort of i mean not exactly

eds do we have time for this

names are important

i know but

it never should have called itself bill

im sorry but i dont understand what either of you are talking about!!

(EDDIE)

anything.

2

Answers in the past.

It's three in the morning when Alice gets home. Zora is awake; those late night phone calls have a way of doing that.

They found her at a Tet site in Maine, Alice said. Near Motton. She just walked out of the woods and collapsed. They thought I could help.

Why?

Because besides two things, she's only talking in the High Speech.

Alice gets out of the Tet company car, with a bundle in a blue blanket. A lot bigger than any of the other bundles they've brought home. By their best guess, she's eight. By their best guess, she came from Derry. (It's one of the two things.)

By their best bet, her name is Wren Edwina Hanscomb.

There's nothing to discuss; that all happened on the phone, and it was over with remarkable quickness. "Welcome home, Wren," Zora whispers, taking the red-haired bundle from her wife; the girl clings to Alice, then lets go all at once, grabbing hold of Zora like a life preserver, and her last doubts die in that moment.

mine youre mine just like the others mine

(EDDIE!!)

It's Laura who will start calling her Eddie, and it just sticks; Laura and Allen, the two youngest, who walk her out of herself bit by bit. With hardly any sulking, Laura takes to having a sister like a duck to water, and while Eddie is sometimes overwhelmed--

"These are my Barbies you can play with them if you want and this is the playhouse and this is the trebuchet we built to launch them it will go over the back wall and this is where we put the cot but you can move it it's not heavy and mia says we can get bunk beds and you can have the top bunk if you want I don't care your hair is really pretty--"

--she's also almost forced to start talking just to keep up. Allen is the older brother; sternly protective and all-wise. Michael and Robert love her, too, but they have their own dramas and Robert...

Soon Robert will be gone.

Pain. Pain has invaded this floating place.

im tired of hurting

she manages to think, and then it engulfs her.

3

Laura takes her hand, but X knows it's not over. She can smell it. "I'm not going back. Not without Eddie."

"Yes," X says, inexorable. "You are."

"Did my mother send you?" Laura sounds, now, furious.

"No one sends me," X says, with just a touch of sharpness.

"You can never tell Eddie about this," Laura says. "Never. Do you know what it would do to her to know that she was just... written off? What it would do to us?"

"It is not personal." X's patience is not infinite. "It is pragmatic. It is not too late to bring you back."

"I have been here before, you know," Laura says. "Here in the labyrinth, and in Derry."

"I know," X says, although that was after her time. "I do not think it went well for you."

"I have to try," Laura whispers. "It's my fault."

"No," X says. "Eddie would have done it for anyone. This is not personal." Laura always tries to make things personal.

"This is not how it ends between us," Laura says. "We fought. I hurt her. I'm not losing her before I can--"

X cuts her off. "You are coming with me."

"I'll fight you."

X shrugs, quick. One-shouldered. "You will lose."

4

They're waiting for news. They haven't given up. And it's better than thinking about what's going on in the kitchen.

"I need to know more about Derry," Teta says. "About what happened there."

Michael frowns. "Laura never told you about it?"

"A little bit. It wasn't something she liked to dwell on."

"It was when we were just kids," Allen says. Julia is silent beside him; she doesn't know this part of their past. She finds his hand and folds it in hers; he squeezes. "It was Wren's... Eddie's... trial. You know about the trials?"

Teta nods.

"It was after X left," Michael says. "Her parents had died there, in Derry. Pennywise killed them. We think--we're pretty sure--her grandmother had killed Pennywise in the past. Cycles, you know?"

"Eddie ran away," Allen says slowly. Julia can feel something there, some heavy and dark memory weighing him down. She knows she shouldn't look. "And Laura followed her."

Of course she looks.

5

Allen fumbles for his phone, checking the time before answers. Two in the morning. Great. This had better be important. "Hello?"

(With his family, it probably is.)

"Can you come pick me up?"

"Eddie?"

There's a long silent beat. "Can you come pick me up?" she says again. "I came to this party with Laura and I don't--I just want to go home."

Why didn't you call Mom he swallows; there are a lot of good reasons, starting with the fact that Laura is two years older than Eddie and would probably have hell to pay for taking Eddie to one of her parties. The kid is only sixteen. Laura has been getting wild since X left, on thin ice at home already, and no way Eddie would want to get her in trouble.

He sighs. "Yeah. Where are you?" Not Manhattan, if she needs a ride.

"Jersey."

Awesome. "Let me get dressed."

6

X's labyrinth seems dull. All straight brushed-steel corridors and glass staircases. Or maybe X just knows which turns not to take.

"I know you are awake," X informs her.

One of the relevant features of being tiny is that people can throw you over your shoulder and carry you around. You have to take the good with the bad, Laura thinks groggily. But it hardly seems fair.

Derry she thinks, more coherently. Derry.

It's intention that shapes the labyrinth. The effort of will. On her feet or slung over X's back--maybe she can do something. Lord knows she's stubborn. And if X is divided at all--if X is worried about Eddie, too, somewhere deep down--

Derry. Derry. She remembers Derry.

7

"What happened?"

Eddie looks nice, in a sort of floaty green party dress. She looks enormously sulky in the face. "I don't want to talk about it."

"Eds--"

"Don't call me that!" she yells. His eyes flick back to the highway, his expression freezing.

"It's not my name," she adds in a low voice.

"I'm sorry."

"Call me Wren. That's my real name. I don't want to be Eddie or Eds or Ed-o or any of that crap anymore."

"Okay."

"I'm practically an adult, you know."

And how many wine coolers did our idiot sister let you have, oh practically-an-adult? "Okay," he says again, conciliatory.

"Do we have to go home?"

"Well, we can't go back to my dorm," he says dryly. "I'm not doubling up with my roommate because you had a fight with Laura, and you're definitely not."

She does look grown-up, in that dress. Laura probably did her make-up, too. It's disquieting; as if the time he's been away at school, just a few blocks away, something fundamental has changed. Eddie and Laura fighting, too; that's new.

"I'm supposed to be staying with a friend," she says. "Can we just do something until morning?"

He looks at the dashboard clock. Morning is not that far off. "Like what?"

8

In the kitchen:

"Should I keep doing the CPR?" the Indian man asks him.

Dr. Tam completes his scan and says crisply, "That depends. Would you like her to stay alive?"

"This is bad," he goes on, rummaging through his bag. He's intensely aware of the crowd of onlookers; of the dangerous-looking one-armed woman behind him. He wonders what his life expectancy will be if he can't save the woman on the ground, whose heart is only still moving by virtue of the Indian man's work. "Her best bet is to open her up for direct massage of the heart," he says, thinking aloud, "but even if I had a chest tray, I don't know that she'd survive the surgery--"

"Excuse me, get out of my way please, excuse me--" A blocky woman, oddly-dressed, her blue hair shot through with silver, shoves through the crowd and kneels beside him.

"Ma'am, I'm going to have to ask you to stay back--"

She reaches out and touches the chest of the woman on the ground.

Oh.

That was easy.

9

"Look," says the bigger boy. "We don't have that much time. We can talk about this later. I'm Stan and this is Eddie, okay?"

The names are familiar, but some of her memory is still... floating. A lot of it, maybe. "I'm... Wren," she says. "Like the bird?"

The boys exchange a glance; Stan's hand tightens on his book. "Yeah, okay," Eddie says. "Look. It's going to come back for you. We've got to be ready."

"So It does want to kill me?"

"In here," Stan says. "And if It kills you in here, it doesn't matter what happens to the body out there. In fact--"

There's a huge rattly noise; Eddie sucks in on his inhaler. "Let's get going," he croaks. "We can walk while we talk."

But as they move single file through the Barrens, hopping patches of marshy water and slapping at mosquitoes, there's no talk; and Wren probes the hole in her memory like the place where a tooth used to be.

(Derry)

(Allen)

10

By the time she's got her viola from the locker, she's sobering up and feeling worse than ever. She dragged Allen out in the middle of the night, and now he's watching her with his sad dark eyes. Worrying.

"You don't have to stick around," she says shyly. "I just want to... get it out."

He shrugs. "I'll stick around.

The NYU music practice rooms (her school ID will get her in--a private agreement between the school and the university) are open all night; some of her classmates come here, for ulterior reasons, privacy being a difficult thing to get in high school. The security guard smirks at them, viola case under her arm or no. (She's wearing his jacket over her dress, almost drowning in it. Warm and snug.)

The song she plays is Fur Elise, and after a moment, Allen sits down at the piano and accompanies her. It's transcendent, her kind of music, not Laura's; the mind and heart and the higher emotions, not the guts and hormones of rock and roll. As she plays, she feels control, or the illusion of control, come back.

"So what happened, Wren?" Allen says, as the last notes die out.

"Nothing," she says.

He frowns at her. "Nothing?"

"Nothing whatsoever." Her face falls, a little. She sits down beside him at the piano bench. She took his jacket off when they came into the practice room, and now she's cold. Maybe that's the reason why she sits so close. "Allen?"

He shifts, uncomfortable. "Yeah?"

"You think I'm pretty, don't you?"

11

I was supposed to introduce her to someone, Laura remembers. Some guy I knew from another school. And then--

God, I don't even remember what I did. Something typical. Something Laura. Something guaranteed to make her the center of attention.

I was young, she thinks. God help us all.

"You are doing something," X says suspiciously. The hallways are twisting. "Do I need to knock you out again?"

"Won't help." She's very very stubborn.

12

If she hadn't skipped French, she wouldn't have caught her. Eddie has a free period at the end of the day for music practice. "What are you doing?"

"None of your business."

Eddie has been weird all weekend; now she's just shut down and cold.

"Is it Mom's business, Eddie?" Laura says, a trifle vindictively, and Eddie shoots her a look of such black hatred that it makes her stomach hurt.

"She's not my mother," Eddie says, shoving clothes into a bag, and that doesn't just punch Laura in the stomach; it drops the bottom out of the world. "My mother's dead. Th-that spider killed her."

"Yeah, but... Ed..." Laura doesn't even know what to say.

Eddie flinches, the flinch of someone on a slow burn who doesn't intend to waste any rage on lesser targets. "It's still alive."

"Where is this coming from?" Laura says.

"It's still alive and I'm going to kill it," Eddie says again.

"Okay," Laura says.

"...okay?"

"Okay," Laura repeats. "Do you need a ride?"

13

X freezes; Laura slithers down from her shoulders. This is not one of X's rooms; it's a room she recognizes, a sewer room. Dank puddles in the corners, and a deep, awful sludgy reservoir off the left.

Ahead of them, visible through a glass sliding door, is another room. This one is one of X's. There's a dead woman in it. Beyond her is a door; it's marked with It's sigul.

"We're here," Laura says. "She's right there. Please. We can't--"

"I cannot go in there," X says.

"X--"

She turns to face Laura; Laura has never seen her like this. "I cannot go in there." A beat. "She is my mother."

Oh. "Okay."

X scents the air. Swivels her head side to side. "Besides."

"It did not go that way."

"Come on."

3.1-3.4

2009-11-26T15:18:44Z

3.1

In the house in Morningside Heights, Alice takes Vanessa aside to talk about what happened; Zora, in silent choreography, takes Simon into the kitchen. Feeding people in a crisis is an instinct. (Really, it's Alice's, but these things are contagious.)

Elsewhere, the house is filling up with allies; in the living room, it's cool and quiet and dim. 'Nessa settles on the edge of the couch, twisting anxiously at the bracelets on her right wrist. Simon's silver; Laura's steel. "I-I don't really remember anything," she says. "I'm s-sorry. I wish I--I want to help." She's on the verge of tears again, and Alice makes quiet soothing noises.

She fishes out her wallet; slips something free. "Let's just talk about it," she says. "Just try to relax." She walks the coin across the back of her fingers, easy and dexterous, ignoring the grumbling in her joints. "Take a breath. Good."

In the kitchen: "I don't know how much 'Nessa's going to be able to tell her," Simon says. "She didn't remember very much." He's got coffee, going cold.

"How did Laura figure out who it was?"

He shudders. "The--the tape. I was recording. The reception and the ceremony. When 'Nessa couldn't talk about it, Laura had me play the tape. We could see it in the background. I--" He shakes his head. "I missed it somehow."

"There was a clown. A clown at the table with her. How do you miss something like that?" He runs his thumb over the bronze cuff on his wrist; the steel chain tangled in his fingers. "He was talking to 'Nessa--"

"It was Ihsan," 'Nessa says; her eyes, at first fixed on the tumbling coin, are now staring into the middle distance. Alice's hand is still now. So is her face. "I didn't understand why she was there. She sat down at my table and she started talking. She started saying..." Pain crosses her face, like a ripple on a pond. "Terrible things."

"They talk for a while," Simon says. "And then Eddie comes up and joins them, and 'Nessa kind of... switches off. And then Eddie leaves the table with the clown, and they... I don't know. Leave the frame." He presses his fingers to his temples; looking green. "I'm sorry, is there a, a bathroom I can use?"

"She said she was dead," 'Nessa drones. A tear slips down her face, silent and unregarded. "I don't know if it was true. I loved her and I don't know now if she's dead or alive now."

"What came next?" Alice says.

"She told me things. She said there are things the dead know. Things they've been keeping back." There's a fey and awful light in her eye. "She told me."

Simon is in the bathroom. The camcorder is on the table.

Zora can't help herself.

It's just like he said; they get up and they walk out of frame. Out of the world. Hardly anything passes between them; a handful of words, and then Eddie goes with him. Why? Why wouldn't--

From the top of the frame, a gloved hand settles on the edge of the screen, and a terrible painted face pops into view, tiny but in perfect resolution. "Hey hey! Whaddya say!"

She feels her heart lurch in her chest; her knees buckle. Oh God, she thinks. I'm old. I really am old.

The camcorder hits in the ground with her; the screen cracks. The clown squeezes out through the crack. She can feel the pain up and down her arm, just like the doctors talk about; cold and crushing.

"My name's Little Billy Grey." At one and the same time, the clown is three inches high and very very tall. "How do you do?"

In the living room: "Then what did Eddie say?"

'Nessa's voice is flat; her Brooklyn accent is just gone, replaced by Eddie's Manhattan prep school voice: "She's not the one you want."

"Here's a little tip." The clown ties a balloon to her wrist; she watches her hand float up towards the ceiling. She feels like someone particularly heavy has shoved her in a sack and sat on her chest. Printed on the balloon are the words:

ALL THAT YOU LOVE WILL BE CARRIED AWAY

"Those little girls are mine now. They belong to me. We're going to have... so much fun. Down in the dark. We all float down there, Zora. And if you want, you can come float away with me. But what I'd really like is for you to stay and pass this message onto your girrrrrlfriend in the other room."

"The girls are mine. Say it." His gloved fingers wrap around the balloon. "I've got your heart in the palm of my hand, you lousy dyke, so I want to hear you say it: The girls belong to Pennywise."

"Trust me, bitch: you don't want me for an enemy."

"Okay, 'Nessa," Alice says. "In a minute you're going to wake up. But before that happens I want you to do something for me. I want you to take all those bad things It told you and put them away, all right? Put them behind a door, and lock the door. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Now I want you to give me the key. What's the key, 'Nessa?"

"The key is ataba."

"Good. Give it to me now." 'Nessa holds out her hand; Alice takes it. There's the illusion of weight passing between them. "What's the key, 'Nessa?"

"I don't remember," she says. "You took it."

"Good." One more burden to carry. "Good. Time to wake up now."

Zora's lips move in a pale face.

"What was that?" the clown says. "I couldn't hear you."

"You were my enemy," Zora growls, "from the minute that girl came into my house. She is mine. They are mine and they always will be. So why don't you go take a flying fuck--" The words are spit out between trembling lips. "--at a rolling donut, you happy asshole? Why don't you go take a flying fuck at the moon."

"Oh, you bad little--" His hand tightens on the balloon, and that's when Simon cracks him in the skull with the coffee pot. There's a stench of ozone, and a flash of blue light; for a moment the light hangs around the bracelets, crackling like electricity, and then it's gone. So's the clown.

"Mrs. Bailey? Zora?" He's shaking, as he hits his knees; so's she.

"Doctor," she whispers. "My heart."

"...alice"

"Somebody!" Simon screams. "Somebody help!"

2

The blonde woman in the cape and mask bounces her off the vertical beam of the cross; her nose gushes blood.

"I'm sorry," she says again; the woman kicks her in the chest, knocking her to the ground. "I'm sorry, I thought I had to choose. I'm sorry."

The woman settles on her chest like an incubus, reaching for her throat; Laura struggles against her hands, wrapped in black gloves with serrated edges. "No one remembers me now," she says, cold and empty. "No one but you. I'm nothing now. No name. No face. It's your fault."

You wouldn't tell me! Laura thinks. Wouldn't show me. I'm sorry. The hands settle on her throat. "I loved you." There are screams coming from the corn now; the wails and shrieks of the damned.

"I don't care."

If she could, Laura would nod now. As if to say: that settles it. Then she reaches up with a struggling hand and tugs off the mask. It's just a small, black bat-shaped domino.

There's nothing there behind the mask; no weight on her chest. She coughs, and sits up, wrapping her hands around her knees. Breathes, even if it's the awful corn-scented air of Kansas.

X comes out of the corn. Her claws are smoking. "Batgirl," she says impassively. Her dress, for the wedding, looks as bad as Laura's. "Not the one I knew."

"Yeah." Laura looks at the mask. "She got--whaddyacallit. Retconned. She never existed. She used to come to Milliways."

X sniffs the air. "I do not think she was real."

"No," Laura agrees. "Just guilt." To no one in particular: "I was young." She crushes the mask in her hand and tosses it aside; it turns to smoke and blows away. "God, I hate this place."

X comes closer. "Why are there children in the corn?"

Laura's face is a steel vault. "There was a town in Kansas. They worshipped this... demon. Killed their parents. Anyone over 18. For... generations."

"You killed them."

"Some of them," she agrees. "The others killed themselves. Or each other. It was my fault." She shakes her head. "God. I was only nineteen myself."

"Fault is not relevant," X says gently.

"No. Of course not. Somebody had to do it." She smiles; it's not a very good one. "And I'm somebody."

You're nobody 'til somebody loves you. Not a cover she's ever done. X retracts her claws; holds out a hand.

"It is time to come home."

3

Wren floats. She's not dead, but it's like being dead. Like rehearsal for being dead, or like someone--

here here she is i think this is here

--someone putting a cloth over a caged bird. False night; instant sleep.

yeah i'd recognize that hair anywhere way to go stan the man

She floats with all the others, a million miles away from her useless body and her useless life, and waits with utter passivity for whatever comes--

can you wake her up

yeah i got it see how she likes this

next

There's a sound like a rocket blasting off, and an utterly foul taste fills her lungs; like camphor and dogshit. Wren Edwina Bailey hacks and gasps for breath; tries to orient herself.

She's outside. There are two people here. Two boys her own age, which is apparently eleven.

Eleven means rail-thin and stick-like; three years of Alice's cooking and X's exercise meeting a bubbling metabolism and a growth spurt winching her higher and higher. Shin splints and envy, as Laura, two years older, fills out and she stays straight up and down. Why eleven?

"Where am I?" The bigger boy, the one with the book, says: "The sewers," just as the other says, "The Barrens."

Where ever here is, it's neither smelly or barren; it's green and sunlight, all primary colors. There's a stream.

The boys look at each other. "Inside your head, anyway," says the smaller boy. He's carrying something like a plastic spray bottle; he tucks it into his shirt pocket. "It put you in here. To keep you out of the way, I guess."

"Why didn't It just kill me?" she wonders.

The taller boy shrugs. "Dunno."

But she does, she thinks. She thinks so. The answer is in the past.

"Who are you guys, anyway?"

The answers are always in the past. The bigger boy smiles; it's an oddly adult smile on that young face. "I guess you could say we're the namesakes."

4

"We're not asking you to get involved," Allen says.

"Good. Because my grandmother would kill me, if you guys don't get me killed."

"Trust me, Dr. Tam," Julia says wearily. "No one wants you to get killed." I'm supposed to be on my honeymoon right now, she thinks.

"Well, obviously nobody wants anybody to get killed," he says with maddening logic. "But it does have a tendency to happen, doesn't it? I just... don't want to get involved."

Julia is not yet forty, but she can see it on the horizon. She's got her father's lanky scarecrow physique and hair; her mother's disdain for things like cosmetics and pink and tendency to speak her mind. She'd long since resigned herself to a life alone; the idea of a man, let alone a man like Allen, was laughable.

He's gentle, and he's intelligent, and he thinks before he speaks. He loves her. He's absurdly attractive, dangerous in a sexy and understated way; younger than her. And he loves her. If there's someone else in love with him--if maybe he was in love with someone else, and came out to Taos to run away from it--well, people come with baggage. This is a good as it's going to get, and it's pretty damn fine.

But if Eddie dies--if Eddie dies today, on their wedding day--she'll lose him. You can't compete with a dead woman. And all altruistic motives aside (and they're there, sure; people without them don't join Tet Security) Julia is like the Baileys in at least one way: she doesn't like to lose.

"Look," she says desperately. "All we want you to do is get a message to your great-aunt, or one of your cousins."

"I don't really have contact with them."

"But you know how if you need to," Allen presses.

"Welll..."

The door to the bar opens; Vanessa bursts in, the tear tracks still drying on her face. "We need a doctor! It's Mrs. Bailey! Please, someone!"

Doctor Tam looks around at them and shakes his head; sighs, and grabs his medical bag. "My grandmother was right about you people."

2.1-2.6

2009-11-25T23:24:43Z

2.1

Alice is making small talk with Michael; the Cat is there, sometimes, as well. He rarely holds still unless he's asleep, but he breezes in and out of their conversation from time to time, mostly ignoring the gunslinger and turning up his nose at the first few deft flirtations. He's just made an arch comeback, his first response (and Alice is watching this with a certain sly amusement--she's watched him work before) when something happens. She doesn't know what it is--she doesn't have Laura's eyes--but Michael does, and she can see him see it, his concentration and focus going somewhere else in a way that's vividly familiar.

"What's wrong?"

"I don't know," he says, frowning. "Mom and Mia just took Vanessa and Simon into the greenhouse, with somebody from Taos. Have either of you seen Laura?"

"Not I," says the Cat. "But here comes one of her other pets. She looks--"

She looks bad. Teta looks bad. "Michael. Where's your mother? Eddie's in trouble and Laura went after her. She went into the Labyrinth."

"Shit!" Alice explodes, her cigarette tumbling from her fingers; the Cat's hand closes on her shoulder, steadying her.

Michael is gripping Teta's shoulder, too. "Why? Why would she do that again?"

Teta is pale; there are faint scars on her skin that stand out when she's like this. "Pennywise," she says, and Michael drains his glass, tossing it aside. "He did something to 'Nessa and then Eddie got involved."

"Come on," he says, his voice harsh with self-control. "Let's get in on this little pow-wow." He and Teta bee-line towards the greenhouse, and Alice follows, but the Cat is suddenly in her way. She has seen a cat without a grin more often than a grin without a cat, but it's still shocking, the way his face collapses.

"What," he hisses, "do you think you're doing?"

"Maybe I can help," she says. Her eyes flicker towards the mountain. "Actually, maybe I should go after her. Maybe I can catch up--I'm faster than anything in there." Queens have to move quickly. "And if not... she told me about Pennywise."

"I gather he isn't very pleasant," the Cat says, his voice tight and fretful.

"Yeah, no. But Laura said there's something about the way young people think that he's vulnerable to. I'm probably the youngest person here who can still do something useful. I have--"

"You have to think about your people," he says. "They can't lose you again. We--"

"If Laura's in trouble, I have to help her." She shoves past him; he reaches out and grabs her arm.

He raises his voice. "This is insane!"

"It's perfectly sane! I'm the--oh you ass--"

"You all heard her," the Cat addresses the Court. "The High Queen is suffering from a temporary bout of sanity. I move that she be immediately suppressed for the good of herself and the land."

"Goddammit, Cat, all of you--"

"Order in the court!" Pop goes the bag.

"Seconded," says the Queen of Hearts, with a tart little grimace of triumph. After a moment she kicks the King, who harrumphs sleepily and adds, "Carried." The Cat winces as Alice, still shrieking furiously inside the bag, is suppressed by a particularly heavy bailiff. There's going to be Hell to pay for this when the chess queens come along and sort things out. For now--

"Treason, isn't it?" says the King, now that he's awake. "I believe the penalty for that is--"

"Just guess," says the Queen, cheerfully. The Cat sighs and rolls his eyes.

"Yes. I confess. Sentence to be carried out immediately." His head vanishes. The King makes a moue of distaste.

"Someone clear awa--oh, and there it goes. Very tidy."

"Very clever," the Queen of Hearts says, suspiciously. "I don't trust cleverness."

"Stupidity now," the King agrees. "That will always see you through."

2

In the greenhouse, an impromptu council of war is forming. (Ingress is Opening ways in from the bar, to avoid the appearance of a stampede.) Moiraine is here; X has come and gone. Allen and Julia (she has, at least, had time to get out of her wedding dress) are curled in front of the lilies, a tense and unhappy unit. But not so tense and unhappy as Vaness and Simon.

"We'll just get some things straight," Alice Bailey tells them. "So we can help Laura and Eddie. And then you two can go and rest. Maybe get you a room here--"

"Like hell," Zora interjects, giving Alice a scathing look. "They'll come back to the house with me." She takes Vanessa's hand, and the young woman folds into the older one, the tears starting up again. If there's one thing Zora knows about, it's mothering.

Michael bangs in with Teta on his heels; so much for discretion, Alice thinks wearily.

"So what's going on? Who's going in after them?"

"X went," Alice says, curt. "We were just getting--"

"That's a good start," Michael says, and Alice pushes over him.

"She went to try and catch up to Laura before she gets too far into the Labyrinth. To bring her back?"

"What?" Allen looks between his two mothers, at Moiraine and Ingress. These terrible old women. Zora flinches away, but Alice returns his gaze steadily.

"Eddie has beaten It before," she says. "We have to let her play this herself. And if there's something that can be done by charging blindly in--well. Ka. Laura is there already. But we can't just keep crashing into that place and hoping for the best. We have to use our heads."

"It's already got Eddie!" Allen says, almost shouting. Julia cringes back as he steps away from her, confronting his mother. Her boss. "Are you insane?"

"That's the trap," Alice says, her impatience clear in her own voice. "That's why it's Laura and Eddie in trouble now, and not just Eddie."

("Wild Bill," murmurs the psychic from Taos, under his breath.)

"He's right." Alice turns a furious glare on Michael. "We can't let It get away with this! Come on! We've practically got an army here already." And now Alice's temper flashes.

"We won't. If we have to tear Derry down brick by brick to get to It, we will, and It will pay." She goes on: "But we don't have an army. An army takes organization. It takes plans, and intelligence, and we don't have any of that. What we have is a wedding party full of Type A personalities and martyr complexes, and if we go out there and drop this on them without a plan, we will have chaos."

"Yes, we certainly wouldn't want people like that deciding what to do," Zora mutters under her breath. "C'mon, kids." She pulls Simon and Vanessa away from the argument; towards the Opener.

"I'm not letting this happen," Michael says, aligning beside his brother.

"No, I am not letting this happen," Alice snarls. "I am not going to watch the entire line of Eld disappear down a rabbit hole in a panic. I will not--" She fights for control of her voice. "I will not lose you all in one day." Her voice drops, confidential and cold and furious; only Allen and Michael hear what she says next. "Besides. You've been drinking."

It's irrevocable; she can see the sting in his face, slowed (yes) with drink. "I'm going," he says. "And you can't stop me."

Alice Bailey can see seventy from here, on a clear day, and today she can feel every day of it. Her hair has passed through steel and silver to fluffy white; she has one arm, the sleeve of her very nice mother of the groom suit an empty pinned-back nothing that still gives her chills of recognition; her other hand is gripping a cane that holds her up when the arthritis savages her hip, as it does today. Sometimes just lately she has trouble remembering things. "I can."

She wonders if she's right. So does he.

She wins the staring contest, anyway; just barely. "I won't go in blind," he says. Promises. "But I'm getting them back alive."

She turns away. "I hope you do."

4

As they slam out of the greenhouse, Michael realizes, suddenly, that Teta has come with them. "You know, if you want our parents to like you, this probably isn't the best move," he deadpans.

"We have to do something," she says. "I can't--I'm with you."

It would be more comforting if his one supporter wasn't a former Dark Lord of the Sith, he thinks privately, but he smiles tightly. "Good."

"So what's the plan?" He eyes the mountain; even at this distance, even on the other side of a couple scotches, he can see the dark mouth of the Labyrinth entrance from here; it looks like it's grinning.

"I..." He shakes his head. "...have no idea."

"If we talk to my mom and dad," Julia says slowly, "maybe they can help us connect with Taos." She's Tet Security, with a little bit of a shine, but her parents are full members of the psychic club. "Or Uncle Walt can. If your mother doesn't cut us off."

"I don't think she will," Allen says. He's looking at the mountain, too. Julia takes his hand.

"Maybe it'll be all right," she says. "Maybe Laura's caught up to them already. Or X--" She breaks off, because he's shaking his head.

The tet is broken. There's no way to be sure. But-- "I don't think so," he says, his face dark and sorrowful. "I really don't."

5

Laura is in the corn now; in the corn again. Stone walls had given way to corn, that kind of country fair staple corn maze, and then the paths had thinned and vanished. Now there's just corn. (Or--ahahahaha--maize.)

She's back in Kansas. God help her, back in Kansas with the dead.

She knows what comes next: next there's a clearing. In the clearing there will be crosses.

(There are.)

She comes out of the corn, shoving through the stalks, whipped and cut by the razor-sharp leaves. Fleeing the children's voices in there. There are bodies on the crosses; she expected that. She didn't expect the particular body in the center.

"Aw jeez," she whispers under her breath. "Ah, Gert. I'm sorry."

Even if this isn't real--she's sorry.

The body raises its head.

6

Somewhere, Wren is floating.

They all float down here.

1.1-1.6

2009-11-21T20:41:07Z

1

The mother of the bride is fixing a safety pin in her daughter's eyebrow when Michael slips in; she smiles and slips out; gives them some time. Her husband is wandering around looking lost out there anyway.

"You look fabulous, Julie."

"You think?" There's a nervous fluttery happiness bouncing off the corners of her face. "This is not--" She fidgets with the bodice of the white dress. "Not really me."

"Promise," Michael Bailey says. He's brought her a glass of white wine, and there's a scotch rocks in his own hand, which he sips as he settles onto an ottoman. "How's it going?"

"Oh. You know. I think dad might have a heart attack."

Michael smiles. "Joe's been through worse than a wedding in his time."

"Oh, and both of your mothers have been by to threaten me."

"Which one was scarier?"

Julie checks her hair. "Weirdly, Zora. I think the Boss Lady was just going through the motions."

"That's a good sign. If you've got Alice in your corner, you'll be okay. You can't blame Mom for freaking out, Allen is the first one of us to get married." At this rate, he might be the only one; but Michael has gotten better at not making those kind of remarks.

"Yeah. I guess." She turns the wineglass in her hand, but doesn't drink. "I don't know. I just wish it was all over and we were back in Taos. I've got a bad feeling about today."

"A regular bad feeling or a real shine?"

She shakes her head. "I dunno. I don't--"

"I dunno."

2

"Eddie, I need to borrow your--" Laura stops in the door, half-dressed and barefoot. And in need of an eyebrow pencil. "You're not ready."

Eddie is in fact not ready. She's arms-folded tucked up on the foot of her bed in a green tracksuit, her flame-colored hair knotted back in a braid. "I'm not going."

Laura groans and leans against the doorframe. "Are you shitting me? We're already here, Eds. Everybody's downstairs. If you were going to bail the time was back in New York."

"I don't care," she says, low and bitter. "I can't watch this."

"It's gonna be better to listen to it? Alone? Budge up." Laura settles next to her on the mattress.

"Look. Eddie. Time for some home truths. I know you're in love with him."

Eddie's poised for a furious denial, but it collapses into a stricken silence at Laura's next words:

"Everyone knows you're in love with him. And maybe there was-- maybe that's why he moved halfway across the country. But he's moving on. He's got Julie now, and Julie is--"

"Julie is a bitch."

"Okay. Yes. I also do not like Julie." Laura sighs and presses the bridge of her nose. "But Julie is who he wants. He's living his life. You have to, too."

"It's not that easy." Eddie is all angles--she's lost weight, Laura thinks--all closed off on herself. "I l--I do. I do, Laura. And I can't just turn that off. I need him. I can't just--"

"You have to." Laura sounds patient, but also tired. Eddie has not put a lot of work into her side of this relationship, this sisterness, in a long time. "I know holding a torch for something impossible is like... genetic around here, but you've just. Got to. Strap on, Eddie."

"I can't." Eddie is pale, one more thing that makes her different than all of them, and now hectic roses flash in her cheeks. "I can't just, just be in love with someone, be ready to spend my life with someone, and then just move on to the next person. And the next one. And the next one." With bitter, pointless cruelty: "I'm not like you."

It's not about intentionality; it's just something that happens. Like the weather. Laura slaps her, hard enough to knock her off the edge of the bed. Her voice is unsteady: "Don't you--don't you dare talk about me. Don't you dare talk when you haven't even tried to understand." She's almost shaking with rage; this is all the stuff they haven't been talking about.

"I loved Ihsan. I loved her a lot. But she wasn't... she couldn't deal with all this and I... I fucking moved on." Don't say this, don't say this.

"You replaced her," Eddie says nastily, scrambling to her feet. "And it was easy, because you already had a back-up. That's not love, Laura. You don't understand the first fucking thing about love."

And Laura's on her feet now. "That's fucking rich from someone who wants to fuck her broth--"

Eddie hits her then, not a slap but a solid blow to the stomach, and the fight is happening, the one they've avoided for years; fighting like they did when they were children, without mercy or quarter, and when Eddie bounces her off the vanity mirror Laura thinks hazily she's a lot better than I gave her credit for.

Both of them--con your vantage--notice the door open; neither of them is fast enough to do anything about it. A small but iron-strong hand winds itself in Eddie's hair and drags her up; when Laura tries to roll up after her, a boot settles firmly on her throat.

"You are both idiots," X says. Anyone who didn't know her well would think she was calm and not furious. "I think it is something about being a gunslinger. Allen is the only one of you with any sense."

"Let go of me you bitch," Eddie screams, and kicks at her; X is impassive. She only grabs Eddie's foot with her other hand, and tips her back onto the bed.

"You will get dressed and come to your brother's wedding. Laura, we will find someone to get the blood out of your dress. When Eddie is ready I will take you both to a healer. Neither of you will talk about this today. Do either of you have anything to say?"

Eddie shakes her head. When X eases her boot back, Laura croaks, "I can see up your dress."

X does not bother to roll her eyes before stepping back.

"You are both very lucky it was not Alice who found you like this."

On that, they can agree.

3

They don't come through the door; they just fade in, starting with a pearly glint of sunlight on white, white teeth. "Announcing her Royal Highness, by virtue of promotion, and by vices too numerous to mention, the High Queen of Wonderland, Miss Alice Little," says the sly, skinny man with the bedeviled hair.

Alice, radiant (the crown helps), swats at him. "Stop it, Chesh. You're ridiculous. And I've given up almost all my little vices," she adds sadly, rummaging for a cigarette in a bejeweled purse.

"It's only the truth," the cat says, plaintively.

"Then you have no business giving it away to the room at large," Alice says. "The truth is rare and precious, and should only be produced when nothing else will do. That's diplomacy."

"Alice!" Laura swoops down on her. "You look wonderful!"

"Well, that makes sense. I'm full up to here with Wonderland," Alice sighs, but it's fond. "I think you remember the Cheshire."

He bows, courtly and a little mocking, and grins at her. "Shall I fetch the refreshments, milady?"

"Do," Alice says, stiffly, formal for formal. He vanishes; she wants until the grin is gone completely before lighting her cigarette and addressing Laura. "He only does it to annoy, you know."

Laura hooks an arm through the girl's, and they stroll towards the shore. "Are you really getting tired of it?"

"Well, it's nice to have a day out," she sighs. "But not really. I still love it. I worry about him though. Oh, he could never live without it, but I don't know. Maybe he was outside for too long to live without that, too."

There's an elusive thought there, something about a mirror image, but Laura can't quite pin it down. Too much else on her mind. "Can you trust him to be on his own?"

"He's been clean for a while," Alice says, doubtful, nestling her chin into Laura's shoulder. "We both have. But... no, not really. Without someone to keep an eye on him..."

The grin is back, with two (virgin) pina coladas; Alice changes the subject. "So do I finally get to meet the famous Teta?"

4

The wedding goes off without a hitch; it's not the first wedding in the history of Milliways where the wedding party's formal wear had built-in holsters, but it's one of the finest. The reception is outdoors, held partly on the deck of an actual pirate ship, and the weather is clear and bright. Laura hasn't seen Eddie in a while, but she's not surprised at that; she hasn't seen Nessa in a while, and that concerns her more. She disengages herself, with some regrets, from a grizzled and rather dirty but still charming pirate who has been informing her that he loves weddings, and that this happens to be boat, and would she like to see the captain's quarters, and goes looking for one of her girlfriends.

The other one finds her as she walks down the gangplank. "I'm mad at you," Laura advises her.

The Jedi looks appropriately apologetic. "I could tell you were in trouble. I felt it. I can't help that."

Goddamn Force links. "You didn't have to tell on me." There's Nessa, at a table near the building, half-hidden among the roses. She looks zoned out; exhausted, probably. She helped plan all of this.

"I didn't want to be the one to break it up. I want your family to like me."

"Eddie doesn't like anybody."

"She likes somebody," Teta says. There's a gossipy note in her voice: "I saw her slipping off with some guy a little while ago.

"What guy?" There's a wrong note there, and a wrong note in Nessa's stillness; Laura speeds up.

"I don't know, some guy. I mean, it's a wedding--" Not stillness; she's trembling, otherwise frozen, and Laura's stomach drops into her shoes. She shoves past some robots, flat-out for the table, upset enough to attract Simon's attention. He clicks off the video recorder and joins the table in time to see Teta do some kind of Force-trick, passing her hand in front of 'Nessa's face. The Latina woman flinches, then bursts into tears.

"I'm sorry oh God I'm sorry Laura I'm sorry."

She can feel all the blood drain out of her face; feel the cold comfortless cloak of her gunslinger nature drop between her and the world.

"What happened, 'Nessa?

"Where's Eddie?"

5

"Simon. Stay with her." She's moving away already.

"Laura--" 'Nessa starts, then breaks down, collapsing into Simon. Teta is following.

"I'll come with you," the Jedi says. "I've got my 'saber, I've got my disruptor, we'll get her back, don't--"

"No." Laura stops, horrified. "You are not going in there."

"I can--"

"It's Hell, Teta. It's some kind of... mirror. Everything bad, everything worst inside of you comes out. You're inside yourself. People die in there."

"Then why would I let you go alone?" Teta shouts back.

"Because of Revan," Laura says, her voice low and sorry. "I'm safer without you."

"Oh."

"If you want to help, go find help. Find X, and mia, and... I don't know. Anybody. It's Milliways." She swallows. "T, I'm sorry, but I've got to--"

"She's your sister." The Jedi puts up a brave face, and not for the first time, Laura thinks it's not fair that Teta can see through her and not vice versa. "Take my disruptor." She pushes the gun on her, and Laura tucks it in her belt. "I'll get help. And, Laura--"

It's a pretty bad attempt at a smile. "May the Force be with you."

6

-WARNING: SPOILERS FOR "UNDER THE DOME" IN THIS SECTION; CAN BE SAFELY SKIPPED-

The parents of the bride are going for a little stroll; Joe McCluskey arm in arm with his own long-ago bride, walking along the foot of one of Milliways' incongruous mountains. "She was so pretty, Norrie."

"She was." Norrie smiles. "I wish Barbie--"

Someone is coming. Both of them feel it. Both of them have certain traces from their past, traces that they passed onto their daughter, that make them valuable assets to the Irina Foundation and Julie in-demand for Tet Security.

Someone is coming, and she is scared, and she is angry.

Laura Bailey runs past them without so much as a hello, none of the smiling cheery persona left to her, just running flat out, and vanishes through a crack in the rockface, a tiny little cave, barely big enough to admit her. Child-sized. If she weren't so short she might have cracked her head.

And if she'd looked up, she might have seen that the sigul over the door had changed; was not the delta that was the normal mark of the labyrinth, that had been there when she and Alice Little braved this place, four years before.

It's different. And oh so much worse. Joe McCluskey recognizes it, and his heart gives a great galloping leap in his chest. Makes him think he may have come at last to the end of a long, strange life.

Oh yes, he knows that sign.

campkilkare @ 2009-10-09T18:59:00

2009-10-10T01:54:03Z

They keep Todd's copy of Rose Madder; Tara has read the cover off of hers. They keep her trade paperbacks of the Dark Tower series; they're nicely uniform, and fit well with the Concordances. He has three different styles of paperback and the ugly, mismatched original hardbacks. (He does keep back his original Gunslinger; she only has the revised copy, having left the old one in a cab long ago.)

"Are you sure about this?" she asks. "I mean, what if we both want the same one at the same time?"

"We both have Kindles," he laughs. "We should take all of these out of here and put in a projection TV or something."

She looks at him again. "Are you sure about this?"

He takes her hands. "Yes."

They load the extra books into egg crates and take them to the used bookstore; an entire surplus King collection and nineteen others.

***

Greg's email says: We're getting the old band together.

She's got a new job. Health insurance and everything. They want her to come away and rejoin this Vannay Institute nonsense, but she's not crazy.

She wears a cross--has since Adamson burned up in a lobby, nineteen months ago--and when the receptionist with the WWJD bracelet asks her where she goes to church she doesn't really know how to answer. She doesn't answer Greg that Friday. Saturday she goes to a baby shower with her sister. On the train, they catch up on the news and then uncertainly try to have a conversation. The last book her sister read was The Secret; the last time Zee watched TV, Ellen was in the closet. Their politics are more or less opposite.

They ride the rest of the way to Westchester in silence.

Sunday she takes her laptop to the New York Public Library. Breathes in peace; breathes out the week.

"Are you alone?" a man says at her elbow. She looks up.

"No," she says.

***

Greg Toman doesn't have a lot of pictures of high school. If you check the index of his yearbooks, there are precious few numbers after his name; in his junior year, when he was out sick on Picture Day, there are no numbers at all. (For his senior year he was widely known as Not Pictured Toman.)

However: the index is wrong. On page 19, there's a photo of the Glee Club. In the lower left hand corner, there's a smudge with its face buried in a book. The title of the book is THE SHINING.

He started the zine in college, adopting the cocky persona of Uncle Greggie on the letter page. He starts corresponding that way. His first beer he drinks (22) he shares with a frequent writer passing through UT. He realizes only after he gets home that she was flirting with him.

Every week he prints the zine in the school library, renting an elderly mimeo machine. Every week he has to get the key from one of the student workers. He's seen her every week for two years, and said a total of nineteen words to her. (He counted.)

The week after his first beer, he asks her out. They're both seniors; on their date, she asks him why she hasn't met him before now.

He marries her anyway.

***

At thirteen, Michael Copeland won a day-glo plastic crucifix for the Bible verses he had memorized.

At nineteen, he got his first C; the paper he wrote in a comparative lit course. Close textual analysis, taking two poems line by line and making comparisons. The Second Coming and The Emperor of Ice Cream. Written in the margins in screaming red ink: No original thought.

At twenty-five, he interviewed with Cal Toren, looking very sick; he put off picking his successor too long. "I envy you," Toren tells him. "You're young. Smack in the middle of the 'my pretty pony' time." He smiles at that; it wins him the job.

At forty-six, he's feeling a lot older; time has run away from him. He's got to make a speech, to open this nice new building Rose Toren and Helen Saldana paid for. He steps up to the podium; he's been more nervous than this, but not when the world wasn't ending.

This is how he begins:

"Oh, Christ. I left the world I knew to watch a kid try to put booties on a fucked-up weasel. Shoot me, Roland, before I breed. "

The ones who crack up are the ones the speech is for. That makes it easier.

(This is how he ends:

"After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.")

***

Parker looks up from his screen when Ethan comes in. "Thought you had a date tonight."

He shrugs and opens up his laptop; Parker persists. "Come on, us old farts have to live vicariously through somebody. You're nineteen and it's a Friday night. Do you really want to be here?"

Ethan scowls. "Shelly read It," he says eventually. "We broke up."

"If you dumped her because she didn't like the book, so help me God, you schmuck--"

"We had a fight," Ethan says sharply. "I didn't break up with her because she didn't like it, she didn't like it and she kept ragging on me for liking it and we had a fight, okay? It was completely stupid, she got all hung on the prehistoric flashback part and a meteor landing in western Maine and how implausible it was and I told her she had no imagination and it just--"

"Escalated," Parker says. Because that's what Ethan does. He escalates.

"Yeah."

"She was a geology major, right?"

"That's no excuse," Ethan mutters.

***

"This is real, Neil." It's still awkward calling him Neil, but he's insisted since the day she turned in her thesis, nineteen days ago. "This is a real job, real work, and we need you."

"I'll provisionally accept that it's a real job," he says calmly. "But all that proves to me is that you're dealing with some rather dangerously delusional people, Janet, and you're beginning to worry me yourself. It's completely impossible."

Janet shakes her head. "What am I supposed to do with impossible?" she demands. "I can argue with improbably, and I can agree with unlikely, but impossible is a wall, Neil. Look." Almost pleading, as if she needs another extension. "If it's possible that there's... ESP, or MKULTRA, or... faith healings, any kind of supernatural at all, why can't a drunk from Maine be channelling true stories? What if it is real?"

"Impossible," he says again. "Just that."

"You just... reject the whole thing."

"I reject the whole thing. Soup to nuts, Janet, soup to nuts. No psychic surgery, thank you very much, and no Billy Graham, and no goblins and ghoulies outside of Mr. King's excellent fiction, emphasis on the fiction. I reject it. I'm afraid I have all the sense of the numinous of a half-eaten turnip."

"Just come inside with me," she says. "Do that much."

He relents. "All right."

She takes him into the lobby.

Eventually, he speaks, sounding older than she's ever heard him. "Well. Damn."

***

Jason Parker was seven, and his dad hung the moon. He's a big man, a rough and tumble man. He built most of the furniture in their house in Maine; they say in Sunday School that Jesus was a carpenter, that he's got the whole world in his hands. Jason Parker thinks of his father's hands.

Jason Parker was seven, when he caught the monkey in the lake, fishing with his daddy, water-logged and soaked with rags. The monkey with the cymbals, and ooh how they ring those changes. His daddy isn't the first to die and he isn't the last, before Jason returns the monkey to the dark waters.

It takes nineteen years until he finds a book called Skeleton Crew, and finds someone else to blame.

***

"Can you sign it to Annie, please?" His eyes flicker from Misery, up to her face, back down to the book. "Annie Wilkes." She smiles, mischievous. "I can show you my driver's license, if you like."

"This I gotta see." She shows him the card: Andrea Imogene Wilkes.

"Tough break on the middle name, too, I see."

"Rich relation of my mother's."

"Did it pan out?" Behind her, the line is getting restive. She shakes her head, and he signs with a flourish, going for the low-hanging fruit: To Annie Wilkes, My NUMBER ONE FAN.

"You made my day, lady."

That's how the dream goes. She's never actually gone to a signing like that. She hates lines. But sometimes she dreams she does; it's the good dream. This is the bad dream:

In the bad dream she calls him on the phone (this is how she knows it's a dream, because in the real world there are layers and layers of people to keep people like her from calling people like him) and she tells him her name, and he calls her a liar.

"And even if you weren't," he says, "it doesn't mean anything, it doesn't matter, make up any name and there's a few of them out there. I don't know how you got this number, you nutty old lady, but don't call here no more."

"It doesn't mean anything. None of it does. I just made it all up."

"Are you sure you want to go back to work, mom? I mean, I thought... maybe in some ways it was a blessing, you getting laid off. I mean... don't you..."

Annie waits carefully while her daughter-in-law sputters out, not quite able to bring up the words time to slow down.

"I'm going back to work," she says, with finality.

"Of course, mom."

Not entirely polite, she thinks, but it had to be done. They'd probably pop her into an old folks' home in a blink if she told them the real reason; any of the real reasons.

Including the most important one; when she's working, she hardly ever has the bad dream at all.

campkilkare @ 2009-10-07T16:59:00

2009-10-07T22:37:17Z

The man--rail thin and a little dirty, but with a gladhanding conman's smile that's impossible not to trust--ask Gene for a light, and Gene gives it to him. This is a nice little cafe, with a nice little park just outside. They have live music like the cafes in Gene's home town (Austin Texas) and Gene likes it better here than in the gay clubs.

Gene would not apply the words culture shock to himself or New York City, but it's a good word.

"I'm waiting for someone," the man says, still smiling, as he draws on the cigarette.

"Who is that?" In Gene's mind, the next thing the man says is you, and they will leave together after this set.

"A girl," the man says.

Oh.

"My sister."

Oh.

"Is she running late?"

The grin spreads. "Very late indeed. And this is a most important date. I'm giving her one more chance." But there's something hollow in that, and Gene wonders how many chances this man is really prepared to give out.

"I have a sister like that," Gene says. Although in truth he stopped giving Diane chances to hurt him long ago.

"She'll be here. This is how the story goes." The man seems certain, but his smile dims, until--

"Sorry, the story?"

--it flames back to life. "Would you like to hear one?"

"All right," Gene says. He's quite lonely, and he would give quite a lot to hear this sinuously graceful young man talk to him for a little while. The man lights one cigarette off the other and starts talking.

***

This isn't the first time, or the fifth, that Alice has run away. But this time no one will go with her. They think she's out of control. They think it's time to give up.

She catches up to Alice in the Bowery; the guitar is sold already, turned into something that's gone in a vein, and she hauls Alice out into the hallway, and then she goes back into the room.

The last time Alice ran away she came here. (She doesn't know many people in this city, in this world.) And Laura made a promise to the dealer then.

She keeps her promise.

Alice comes to the first day of the trial. And the second.

And then Laura never sees her again.

***

"Your sister?" Gene says. He's smoking one of the man's cigarettes and having trouble following the story. "Did that really happen?"

"Maybe," the man says, his eyes burning into Gene's. "Didn't you like it?"

"I don't..." Gene has never smoked before. He didn't expect it to be like this. "I don't know."

"Try this."

***

None of that happened. The last time worked. Alice got into treatment; she got straight. She got better. 'Nessa couldn't stick; Simon did. They settled down.

In time, Laura inherited. Millions and millions of dollars. Alice went to the best of schools. Which of course is where you can find the best of blow. The best of all the designer drugs. Laura is old now, and she has forgotten... oh so many things, and they fight, and Alice goes, one foggy Christmas Eve.

She moves from couch to couch, bed to bed, running out friends, running out of money, sinking lower and lower.

One day she walks into a cafe and she sees her long-lost brother, and they all live happily ever after. They go home.

The end.

***

"Better?"

"But that hasn't happened," Gene says, rubbing his eyes. Trying to think. "Has it?"

The smile flicks out of existence again. "No." He looks away, hunches up, rummaging out a third cigarette. "All right. All right then."

***

The truth is that Alice does go to rehab, and she does get better. For a while. What if I can't do it? she says. What if it's not enough? and Laura says It has to be.

It's bitter cold and January, and Laura is doing the work she does, over in the Bronx when the call comes from Simon that Alice has run away again, for the first time in years. And she's speeding home when she sees her, balancing on the edge of the Triborough Bridge.

Alice!

I'm sorry, Alice says. Her nose is bright red with the wind; on the horizon, New York City sparkles like a frozen jewel. I can't do it anymore. I tried so hard for you but I can't.

And Laura said Oh God, please, no.

But no god was listening.

And Alice said, It's all right. There are other worlds than these.

***

"And then what happened?" Gene whispers.

"What do you think?" The smile comes back, manic and feral, and Gene does not want to go home with this man anymore; now he is afraid of him. "The White Queen woke up."

He stands up abruptly, and saunters out into the park, and Gene realizes that he's been left with the check.

He settles up and hurries out, walking fast, because although the young man with the awful smile has frightened him, he was well-brought up, and he's worried about him. He follows him into the park, which is strange and different at night, in the rain; like some kind of a maze. He comes around a corner and he sees through crowded branches--something.

It looks like a girl with blonde hair. The rain and the streetlights give her a sort of halo--a sort of crown. She's saying something to the young man with the smile.

(You took a lot of finding, y'know.)

And the young man says: "Please don't leave me again."

And Gene pulls back away from the branches, because there is something here that's none of his business, but the girl says something else, and the smile comes back.

And when it vanishes, there's nothing left at all, and no one to see it.

campkilkare @ 2009-10-07T16:14:00

2009-10-07T21:14:18Z

"So... here we are. What do you think?"

"Nice! It's cool. It reminds me a little of Times Square." The crowds; the lights. The sense of a crossroads.

"Yes," Jaina says. "Really very like. Only, of course, you know. Older." She bumps her shoulder against Rose's, muffled through various layers. It's snowing, Rose realizes now that they're out of the subway. "God, you really are a New Yorker."

The Underground, rather.

(It's not the only thing she notices.)

"Down to the bone, baby," she agrees, aiming at the same tone of easy, flirty comraderie. They drift along to a fountain with a statue on top. "Is that Cupid?"

"His twin brother, ectually," Jaina says, exaggerating the Oxford pronunciation in a way Rose has found exceptionally cute in the past. "Anteros." She catches Rose's hand in her mittened one. "God of mature, responsible love. Not quite so flighty and passionate as his brother, but a bit more enduring."

She shines a smile at Rose that's a little hard to return.

Anteros.

Maybe that's the problem. When she first met Jaina Patel, introduced by one of Uncle Jake's old professors, there had been plenty of eros; plenty of sparks and heat. Nights begun with dancing and ended deliriously back at Jaina's flat. But lately--ever since they'd run into someone who apparently knew Jaina from the past, that she'd hustled Rose away from quickly, some ex-girlfriend or something--they've spend most of their nights just in the flat, and increasingly less delirious.

Jaina has a quiet, bookish life as a grad student (or whatever they call it) at Oxford. She spends as much time with Rose as Rose will let her (except for occasional vanishments into the depths of the library) and backs off easily when Rose needs time for herself. To begin with she'd only taken that time off when she needed it, for the real work that brought her here to London, but lately...

Jaina is nice, but she's got another five months in London planned. And she doesn't want to spend it like this.

"You alright, love? You seem distracted."

"Sorry. I'm fine." She shakes her head. "Just tired, maybe."

"Late night? Without me?"

Rose smiles uneasily, and Jaina says quickly: "Only joking. We all need time to ourselves, don't we? I couldn't be having with you underfoot all the time either." She steers Rose towards an entrance to the Underground. "Look, let's head back. You've gone this long without being dragged through the tourist traps of London. Today we can just laze around my flat. I'll make--"

If she says a pot of tea, Rose thinks, I'll scream.

And then someone--someone not Rose--does scream, and everything happens very quickly. The world tightens down to a small, brutal circle.

He took my purse, the old woman is screaming, but Rose sees who the purse-snatcher is; sees him very well, and knows that he followed them along the Underground and followed them up into Piccadilly Circus; sees the knife flicked out in his hand and his collision course with Jaina. She moves whip-crack fast, deadly gunslinger grace, and in the process of disarming him 1) breaks his wrist and 2) sends him ass over teakettle down the stairs to the Underground. The lady's purse drops at their feet, and Jaina picks it up.

Hopefully it will put him out, because she can't abandon Jaina to chase after him--and Jaina is moving now, towards the old lady already vanishing into the endless crowd. "Jaina--leave it," she says curtly, but Jaina's just speeding up, tossing the purse backwards at Rose, and as she snags it out of the air she realizes it's full of newspaper.

And Jaina is sprinting, and tackling, and as the old lady goes down her wig comes off. "Well don't just stand there," Jaina barks, breathless. "Go snag that bastard you threw down the stairs before he gets away! As for you, Natalia--"

Natalia?

The guy with the knife is dead.

Rose straightens up, suddenly a murderer in the middle of a strange city, adrenaline still pounding in her brain. It's not so much that Jaina sneaks up on her as that she has other priorities. "Cyanide pill," she says; it does not sound particularly cute in her Oxford accent.

"Where's Natalia?" Rose asks.

"Left her handcuffed to a bobby," Jaina shrugs. "Damn it, Rose, I'm sorry you had to get involved in this. I suppose..." She looks down at her feet, and the body sprawled there. "...I suppose there's a lot of things I haven't told you."

And as Jaina is saying, Have you heard of something called MI6? all Rose can do is start to laugh and laugh.

"I just... thought I could have a nice quiet relationship with a nice quiet American girl, and I guess I--Rose, are you all right? You aren't feel faint or any--"

There's only one way Rose can think of to shut her up.

And fuck anteros, anyway.

campkilkare @ 2009-08-31T23:35:00

2009-09-01T04:36:30Z

Darling I'm killed

Seven of hearts. Jack of Diamonds. Six of hearts. Six of clubs.

I'm in a puddle on the floor

There are thirteen people in this room. All of them are women; two of them are white. Six of them are playing poker; three of them lean ornamentally against the bar; four of them are seated on sofas, drinking talking about art and movies and politics.

waiting for you to return.

"Cinnamon, turn down that music, baby." Cinnamon is not playing poker. She's wearing a white wrap dress over a rail-thin brown body, and she moves likes a dancer. She turns down the music--

And you bet your life, every night...

--and brings the player who spoke a drink without being asked. The speaker is dark, in a man's suit with a camisole but a necktie. Patterns are shaved into her tight curls. She's the dealer, and she owns the club here on Fourth Street in Santa Maria Embarcadero.

The woman to her left is Chinese, heavy-set, expensively-dressed. She frowns and pulls her hole cards close as Cinnamon dips close with a cocktail, brushing a butterfly kiss against the dealer's cheek as she comes. Two of the women on the sofas are with her.

The girl sitting opposite the dealer is nineteen; legally, she shouldn't be in this club, shouldn't have this beer, shouldn't be holding these cards. Money goes a long way; her beauty goes a little further. This isn't exactly law and order country, anyway. She's wearing diamond studs and a stainless steel ring in the cartilage of her left ear; no other jewelry. A battered leather jacket draped over her chair and faded blue jeans. One of the women standing by the bar (one of the two who isn't Cinnamon) is wearing jeans that are torn and faded, too, but hers came off the shelf like that. The girl with the jacket got hers the hard way. She's a traveller.

There's air conditioning in the club, but it's hot up here. Texas hot, pushing over 100. The dealer turns the river (Ace of Spades), and the women around the table study the cards. Cinnamon sashays (it's the best word for it) back to the bar and the cool contempt and envious nonregard of the other women there.

The Chinese woman folds. The wiry grandmother-type beside her already did a round ago. The traveller tosses in a plaque she traded a thousand dollars for, and the two women past her in rotation swear and fold, their girlfriends moving in to comfort or upbraid. The dealer matches her, though, and then it's time. They call this part the showdown. Cinnamon is holding her breath, a little ostentatiously.

The dealer has a jack and another six. It's a pretty good hand.

The traveller turns over hers. Four, ten. Garbage.

"You bluff very well," says the dealer, kindly.

"Thank you, Carmen," says the traveller. She seems calm; she has a small stack of blue chips left in front of her, and she rises.

"Going already?" Carmen asks.

"A girl has to know her limitations, don't you think?"

Carmen nods. "Cinnamon, cash her out."

One of the ladies from the bar drops into her seat as she rises with her stack; she giggles and asks them to explain the rules again. The traveller suspects she's going to clean them out. The third one, with the long neck and the cheek bones of an anorexic goat, glances at the clock, glares at her lover, and stomps down the stairs; half the room watches the designer jeans slip out of sight. Her lover, hard-jawed, sharp-profiled, hair tied back in a scarf, studies her hands. Some of the remaining attention is focused around a tensely civil power struggle between the grandmother and the white woman to her left over who, exactly, is going to explain the rules to the plump girl in the glittery make-up who has joined the table. (The traveller revises her suspicion to a certainty.) Carmen has eyes only for Cinnamon, which is inconvenient.

"Here you are, Miss Dean." Cinnamon's English is lilting and faintly accented. Charming to be sure.

"This is too much," Miss Dean says, skimming a few hundred back.

"It is?" Cinnamon's eyes are large and brown and shining; Carmen's lips are thin.

"Yes," Miss Dean says. "It is. You ought to be more careful." She leans close enough to count the onyx chips in the other woman's dangling earrings--ladybugs--and takes her risk. "You could get tangled up in something dangerous."

Cinnamon blinks again, all ingenue. "Like what?"

Human trafficking doesn't seem like the polite thing to say. "Oh, just anything," she says, slipping back from the girl. (Twenty? Twenty-five? She has hard lines in her face, close-up, but that's more sun and hard living than time. Cinnamon will look young right up until she's suddenly old, if she lives that long.)

"And what should I do if I find myself in trouble?" she says, coy.

"Maybe you should find someone to help you get out of it," the traveller says.

"But that's what I have Carmen for," she giggles, and trots away.

Speaking of Carmen--her expression says it's time to go.

She goes down the stairs, through the club (it smells like canned air and alcohol and Ecstasy and sex) and out into the South Texas night (heat and asphalt and the high lonesome nothing smell of the desert) and waits, standing beside a small green motorbike.She counts to thirty, and then Cinnamon is there. "You forgot your purse," she says, and the traveller says, "Jessica Herrera sent me."

Cinnamon shoves the purse into her hands. (It's light; empty except for newspapers.) "I don't know a Jessica Herrera."

"Her mother and her brothers died in a shipping container crossing the river fifteen miles from her. The people who they paid to bring them over sold her to a pimp. A human rights group in Austin got her out. She asked me to help."

"How can anyone help something like that?" Her back is to the traveller, her hand is on the door, but she's hesitating.

"Someone could find the person who recieves the traffic on this side. To start with." She waits, and when Cinnamon neither moves nor speaks, she says, "I know who it is. And I have proof."

"This is a dangerous town, Miss Dean. Maybe you should leave. Maybe you should leave tonight." She opens the door to the Red Queens', and the traveller shakes her head.

"I don't fold." Cinnamon glances back, fixing her dark, liquid eyes on the traveller's cold hazel ones.

"Even with a losing hand?"

"CINN! GET YOUR BUTT UP HERE!"

'Alice Dean' breaks the eyelock. "Sounds like somebody needs you."

She walks past the bike; towards the highway that runs past the club. She's been drinking. The motel is close, and the bike will be there in the morning.

She's up to the parking lot of the motel when the white truck rounds a curve, coming fast, the lights out; she hits the dirt at the side of the road ahead of a chatter of automatic fire that splinters the guard rail.

(She hasn't been drinking that much.)

She rolls to her feet shooting, and the pick-up weaves, brakes squealing, merging with the screams from the cab. She moves fast across the highway and flings open the door, the forty-five still in her free hand. (She took the gun from the luggage compartment of the bike while she waited for Cinnamon; she pulled on her motorcycle gloves the minute she left the lot.) Carmen, in the driver's seat, is unarmed, cradling her lover's ruined head in her lap.

"You killed her, you bitch, you killed her, you killed her, you--" Carmen breaks off into her native language. 'Alice'--Rose--speaks pretty good Spanish, but this is too thick and dialectical and foul for her to follow. She catches the drift, though.

"I don't like slavers," she says impassively. "And I don't like people who shoot at me." She tugs the automatic weapon from Cinnamon's perfectly-manicured and already-stiffening fingers and away from Carmen's angry hands, tossing it to the side of the road. "But I tried to give her a chance. If she'd testified about the people she was working with in Mexico--"

"You KILLED her," Carmen shrieks, and she realizes it's not going to sink in. She wonders what will happen to Carmen's club, without the money to be laundered through. She wonders if Carmen was muscle, or someone Cinnamon brought over--owned?--or just a nice butch girl who wasn't smart enough to ask questions or took the answers at face value.

Somehow she expected to feel better about this. How long until there's someone else, in this town or another one, taking the money and bringing in the containers and shaking hands with the pimps from all over the state? The police will investigate this--and the gangsters will up the ante.

She'd promised Jessica Herrara she'd come here. And she had. Everything else belongs to ka.

"You heartless bitch!" Carrmen is sobbing. "You killed her and you don't even care."

She walks back towards the club and the bike. She didn't leave anything at the motel that she needs, that could be traced back to her. Carmen isn't armed, but she's sitting behind the wheel of a couple tons of steel. If Carmen comes after her, she'll have to kill her. It's out of her hands.

She walks back to the club with her gun in her hand, listening--and waiting for the showdown.

God Grant You Lie Still

2009-08-31T20:47:25Z

There was a time when Kaylee Frye wrote letters to her mother. And then there came a time when she wrote to no one unless they wrote her first, solitary and self-contained; closed for repairs.

Nowadays Kaylee Frye writes letters to herself.

I had the dream again last night.

***

She made it to the wedding; she did not bring Simon or River. She didn't stay long, although the bride (one of the brides) pressed her to a dance before she disappeared.

She did not talk to the mother of the bride, resplendent and happy. It seems like it would cast a pall.

(She hasn't forgotten; she hasn't forgiven.)

***

"I wouldn't be askin' if I had any other choice." She looks different; sounds different. But she slips, at times like this. Time doesn't erase the person underneath. Susannah can understand about that, if anyone can.

"If it was just us, or just me, or just---"

Her eyes flicker up, full of hate and anger. Susannah doesn't care to guess who the recipient is. (What she's learned is: she can bear it.) Kaylee's hands tighten, convulsively, over her stomach.

"My child is gonna know her daddy."

Calm: "Then I am set on."

It doesn't change anything. Maybe it would have, if they were different people. Maybe not.

I'm sorry, Kaylee doesn't say, and Susannah doesn't have to say, I will never forgive what you said.

I lied to you, Susannah doesn't say, and Kaylee doesn't have to say, Yeah, I figured that out. I'm not stupid.

Simon comes back safe and sound. Kaylee lets River take her home. She assumes they talk about her.

***

"I thought she loved me," Rose says, and they speak at the same time:

"It ain't that simple, sweetie."

"It's not that simple, sugar."

The moment is uncomfortable, and then the baby starts crying.

***

I haven't had that dream in a long, long time.

In the dream. the funeral was in St. John the Divine, but in the dream it was in Chicago; in the dream she was staying in the same hotel as she'd come to with Peter, all those years ago. In the dream Peter is Simon is hanging in the closet, and she shrugs him on like a coat and goes out into the Windy City. To the funeral.

In the dream the cathedral was empty--no Rose, no Eddie, no Louise--just a coffin, with a single rose.

"I'm glad you're dead," she says, in the stifling air. "Maybe it ain't right, but now I'm free of you."

In the dream the floor of the cathedral opens like a pit and swallows her, and then it all slips into familiar lines. It's been a long, long time since she had this dream, not since the late days of her pregnancy and the anemia and the mad dreams that came whenever she closed her eyes. Business that's been finished a long time since; her dark mirror panting in her face and dying ugly in the ruins.

Last words: "You can be me when I'm gone." She lies still a long time when she wakes up, and reaches for her diary.

***

The real funeral is small, in a small room in New York City. The Tet Tower. Central air, that dries out her mouth and makes her think of the desert. It's not an open casket; not after what killed her. Rose has a broken arm, and she's leaning on Louise; her father is leaning on nothing, looking at nothing, gone in the distance. Kaylee feels out of place. It's nothing like Mal's funeral, like her own mother's funeral on Three Hills, like Peter's. (He got better.) It's nothing like that long-ago bad scene in the infirmary; nothing like the nightmare in the Dixie Pig.

She doesn't belong here. She's in black instead of white and it feels all wrong.

She goes to pay her respects, a middle-aged lady with a spreading middle and greying hair leaning over a coffin holding the broken body of an old black woman. She doesn't know what she's going to say until she says it. And then it's done; then they're quits.

The end.

***

By the time she gets home, she's limping; she takes down an old cracked mug from the hooks over the sink and she makes tea. In a minute she'll wake up Simon and he'll rub something into her traitor hip, and maybe they will still get up to tricks in the twilight; they're not that old. The wind whips around the building like it's hunting for something.

She takes down her diary and she flips through the white leaves; finds her name written across the flyleaf in schoolgirl script she feels no connection to; no continuity. She turns to the blank pages in the back, her brief scrawl about a bad dream (only that and nothing more) and tries to think about what to write.

She tears out a blank page and writes a letter to her daughter, away now at school. (The very best school, and well-vetted by an anxious aunt. You bet.) She doesn't write often enough; but children learn as they're taught,, don't they? She doesn't write about death and she doesn't write about old friends and enemies and she doesn't write about duty and rage and the ghosts that won't lie still.

Those are the things you have to learn for yourself. She writes about something funny that happened in the market, and her little brother, and about how they miss her and are so proud of her.

***

'You were part of my story,' I told that old body. 'And I was part of yours. Whether we ever wanted that or not.'

'But your story's over now. And mine is goin' on without you. Goodbye.'

That's what I said.

***

Later that summer she visits her mother's grave, her first time back on Three Hills in seven years; only the second time back in twenty. She leaves flowers--daisies, not roses--on the stone behind the home place.

campkilkare @ 2009-08-02T17:36:00

2009-08-02T21:38:20Z

milliways_bar

Active, theoretically:

forced_pilgrim Monkey (Journey to the West)
shadowsusannah Susannah Toren (Dark Tower)

Rarely/By Request:

middle_name_s Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Twin Peaks)
night_hibiscus Yuna (Final Fantasy X)
docgf Doctor Girlfriend (Venture Bros)
gimmeachantD'Hoffryn (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

call_me_ree Irene Tassenbaum (Dark Tower) [demoted to NPC]
no_exile Eddie Toren (Dark Tower) [demoted to NPC]

No Longer Around:

joewithnoname Joe Manco (The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly [dead and retired]
no_prisoner Eddie Dean (Dark Tower) [dead and retired]
highking Peter Pevensie (The Chronicles of Narnia) [dead, sent, and retired]
book_moshi Shepherd Book (Firefly) [dead and retired]

Gone Baby Gone:

head_alien Head Alien (It's Walky!) [deleted]
galefromkansas Dorothy Gale (Wizard of Oz) [deleted]
chazaqiel Chazaqiel the Grigori (apocrypha) [deleted]
ilcattivo Sentenza (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly)[deleted]
howl_alone Kimahri (Final Fantasy X)[deleted]
listen_to_the Coalhouse Walker, Jr. (Ragtime)[deleted]

campkilkare @ 2009-07-25T22:10:00

2009-07-26T02:11:24Z

She had excuses and she chose to use them

she was the victim of unspeakable abuses

campkilkare @ 2009-07-25T17:24:00

2009-07-25T21:25:32Z

We are the ones who will never be broken.

We are the ones who survive.

campkilkare @ 2009-07-24T16:04:00

2009-07-24T20:06:20Z

They're gonna prey upon your weakness; no man's soul is ever spared.
You've got to stand up, yeah, and fight them. Show them what it's all about.

This man is not for sale.

There will be no backing down.

campkilkare @ 2009-07-23T17:11:00

2009-07-23T21:14:07Z

It's another murderous night
Another left hook from hell
A bloody war on the boardwalk
And the kid from Lowell rises to the bell.

Warning for graphic violence and physical assault in the second link.

campkilkare @ 2009-07-22T00:58:00

2009-07-22T04:59:37Z

Don't scab for the bosses, don't listen to their lies. Us poor folks haven't got a chance unless we organize.

Which side are you on? Which side are you on?

Sunday

2009-07-15T02:18:34Z

got a bleak perspective
I'm a streetwise man

Part 1 of... some.

2009-07-01T19:18:22Z

“The age of Pixies, like that of Chivalry, is gone. There is, perhaps, at present hardly a house they are reputed to visit. Even the fields and lanes which they formerly frequented seem to be nearly forsaken. Their music is rarely heard.”

--SAMUEL DREW, "CORNWALL"

She spends three days in Medicine Bow; one more than she meant to, but on the third day a storm blows through, and she decides that Casper can wait. The winds are bad enough--almost enough to take her off the road on the way into town, despite the weight of the ST1300--and she has no interest in adding the driving rain that pelts the motel windows to it. It gives her time to finish The Virginian, anyway. A little ass-backwards, after she's already seen the town and the museum and the odd little pyramid built to the author, but at least she's done it. Copeland will be pleased.

mjcopeland
@rlyrosie what news from the road, o hyperborean wanderer?

rlyrosie
@mjcopeland when you call me that... SMILE lol

The winds keep the weather moving, and the next morning is bright and fair; she heads north. Her roads takes her through the Shirley Basin, and that is gorgeous. She stops repeatedly for photos. There are rock formations in the mountains, hazy but sharp-edged across the prairie. At this distance they look like ramparts. They remind her of the castles she saw in Spain when she was a little girl, almost more cultivated out of the stone than made.

She leaves the bike by the side of the road to get a better angle; she leaves her jacket draped across it with her helmet, although after a little while she wishes she hadn't. The wind. July or not, it slices through her tank top and starts to wear her down after a while. She slips the camera back in her pocket, reluctantly, and moves back along the roadside towards the bike.

Its candy-red finish isn't what it was when she left home. She's into the homestretch now, a handful of states and a handful of weeks left in this great adventure before the next one starts, and neither she nor the ST1300 are quite the same as when they left the East. Achingly empty, animated by the endless exhalation of the wind, the highway becomes (not for the first time) a kind of a holy place, and she wonders if she's really ready to stop wandering. The invisible tether of technology means she hasn't completely laid down her responsibilities, but--

Instinct has her on her face in the dust before she hears the bow twang; training has her rolling up with her gun drawn (a New Mexico concealed carry permit ports into Wyoming, conveniently) before the dust has had time to settle around her boots. It was shooting at her ankles before she threw herself forward.

The creature she has drawn on is less than three feet high, and almost invisible in the grey-green prairie dust; she hadn't seen it at all until it had moved to nock another tiny dart. It has drawn another of them, but not finished nocking. The head is split and wickedly sharp; both points are dark with poison. She supposes if it had hit her (and penetrated her boots) it would've been written up as a snakebite. Another fool from the east wandering into trouble.

"Come on a little closer," she says, her voice high and clear. "Let me see you." Holding still, as he is now, he's almost vanished again.

He grimaces at her--his teeth come to points, either filed or naturally--in what is either incomprehension or defiance. He doesn't move. She doesn't take the .45 off of him.

Closer to, he looks less like a child. He's old, and a little wizened, with exaggerated, heavy features. A sort of goblin. Long fingers and horny nails; wiry, tangled hair the color of grass, and bright Indian paintbrush woven into his clothes. His face and chest are tattooed, bold, simple marks that remind her of cattle brands or the her own tattoo. "Why did you try to kill me?" she asks, not knowing if there's any hope of communication.

He stares at her, then speaks. She's astonished to understand him; after a moment, with no less shock, she realizes he's using the High Speech.

campkilkare @ 2009-05-31T23:24:00

2009-06-01T03:28:19Z

Rose hesitates.

"Hang on. Before I go in--"

X-23 hangs on, obediently; she looks at her curiously.

It is not going to go down as one of the world's greatest kisses; not when one of the parties has all the reaction and participation of a stunned cod. Rose gives it her best shot, though. After a few moments, she pulls back.

"Nothing?"

X-23 shakes her head.

"All right, fuck it." She hops out the car, gun held low by her side, and heads towards the dilapidated house.

campkilkare @ 2009-04-08T21:54:00

2009-04-09T01:54:45Z

Screened post open to anons for a reason...