Alex Two is free. Finally, finally free. After months of being in space he went through all sorts of nightmarish situations, got doxxed for being a Mafia discord kitten, lost a (nonfunctional) eye, and had his midriff out for an unfathomably long amount of time. But he survived all that. Against every odd and Red's depleting patience, he got through it alive. Can you believe that? Him, who couldn't run a half mile without keeling over? The flimsiest twink in the universe?
Sure, he didn't do it alone. He had his friends, his acquaintances, and his worsties. Not to mention his eternal rival - it wasn't as if he could see into Juli's head, but he just knew that motherfricker was putting on a song and dance too. Ugh. Whatever. But he also had the help of the Pengi he'd befriended along the way. Especially, funnily enough, Pastry Pengi. The little guy was inscrutable at the best of times, but they'd formed something of a bond. He didn't know why. It was like they had something in common that neither of them knew about. But... what could it be?
He didn't know. And he'd been having the strangest dreams about rhubarb ever since the date that should have been his thirtieth birthday. Didn't know what those were about either. Still! What does that matter? Again, he's free! He's free and he's loaded even without having to fence the dang Maltese Falcon. He can do whatever he wants forever. And he accomplished it all without ever saying a single swear, even. Being Alex Two is the best thing in the whole world.
His booted foot makes contact with terra firma for the first time since January. He inhales the "fresh" Los Angeles air, winces a bit, and exhales. All good.
...All good?
Well.
Cinderella's carriage turns back to a pumpkin at midnight. Ashley could tell you that. You can pause a timer. But can you stop it?
Alex Two can't. Even if he doesn't know that timer exists.
So he steps back onto Earth. The flow of his time on this planet resumes. His thirtieth birthday has now, truly, come and gone. He met actual, literal Death and survived. But the nebulous concept of Twink Death? Well, that doesn't exist. If that was all he had to worry about it'd be fine. But. It isn't.
And, as the mystical glow of a long-overdue transformation overtakes him, it turns out that Uglúk was wrong.
For the first time in thirty years... meat is officially not on the menu.
Eventually, you all meet back at the plaza. Maybe some of you stole costumes, or prizes, maybe some of you were ready right at the moment Esmeralda presented the possibility of you leaving, but what matters is that you are now here, all together in front of the door.
Esmeralda doesn’t say anything and simply faces the door, pushing it open and stepping aside. The thing is so large that if you so desire you can all step through together but she stays behind, waiting to make sure everyone has gone through the door.
On the other side, there is no door to look back on. Instead the sun greets you; the star you are most familiar with, rather than all the ones you had seen before. The sky is blue and clear, as if welcoming you back with open arms. Soon, the sounds of the parking lot start making sense to you again, and you hear the chirping of distant birds, the occasional barking dog from somewhere else.
All the sounds around you are so alive (including the Pengi scattering around to hide away from any unwanted eyes strolling by).
[♪♪♪]
You are alive.
Against all odds, against the previous order of the universe, you have gone and survived and made sure everyone else has, too. But that doesn’t mean you have solved every problem in the world, or even in your life. Far from it, in fact. You might have a myriad of problems to deal with, the world is still facing issues like climate change, and so on.
But you are alive.
And sometimes, that’s enough.
… But who is to say your phones don’t get a notification that you just got a decently big deposit of money? (Or a suitcase with a rather generous amount of cash, handed to you by three Pengi in a trenchcoat for those of you without bank accounts). So, hey. Maybe your life is enough. But it’s not bad to get a little bit of compensation for all your hard work, right? As well as the dead having their little tokens back; amongst their things, what you once paid the ferryman of the dead with, it’s now back in your hands.
The parking lot is unlocked. There are RVs for you to rest in before you go if you so wish, but the gates are open. The sun shines overhead. A ship drifts in the vast expanse of space somewhere far, far above your head, containing the remnants of the horrors you have now left behind. Your castmates and the things you thought worth saving stand around you, your grand production wrapped. Life goes on around you, now including your own, as much as you may have at one point doubted it.
This is goodbye and thank you. Your story stays with the universe and with you.
And just like that. It’s over. The grayish sky, made up of too many grains of sand for you to ever understand, vanishes, some unseen hourglass being kept safe elsewhere. Or nowhere at all. Reality had said it’d be fair this once and it seems like they’ve kept their word, after all, having nothing more to say for now. They offer one last strange, not all there smile.
The body they had been occupying collapses to the ground, once again that of the cinema, just like everything else had been before your movies began; as if nothing had happened at all, the woman finds herself quickly gripped by the big soft paws of her friend, who helps guide her into a sitting position and then a standing one, leaning on her much taller shoulder. Relief and concern in equal part are clear in all three of her eyes– no, the relief is winning, and the excitement now, too. Mellow has never hidden her emotions well.
Rubbing her eye with her wrist once as she gets back up, Esmeralda now again faces you all. Gone are the swords on her head and her tools with her bones presumably have gone inside her flesh, rather than outside as they had been. She looks over at Mellow a moment, then at everyone else.
“You did it. I saw, somewhat. Distantly.”
But there is no point in dwelling on that experience, she knows. She turns to walk to the door, pushing it open and walking out, always going at her own rhythm and expecting you to keep up with her rather than wait. So you follow, as do all the Pengi, only to be welcomed back into the plaza where a new, utterly massive door has appeared, made of some dark wood that you know will feel impossibly cold to the touch. Something about it is both uninviting and beckoning.
The rest of the plaza looks slightly different now with stars shooting through the sky, trailing one after the other in starshower so real looking you do not know if it’s Death’s powers, Reality, a feature of the ship, or something else. It doesn’t really matter and you’re too tired to think about it too much.
“It has been… a long journey for you all. And you have suffered plenty at my hands and you did it not for me, but for yourselves, but I wanted to extend my gratitude anyway. Thank you.”
She looks at the sky, tilting her head, then back at you and finally the door.
“Once everyone is ready to leave, the door shall open and stepping through it will take you to Earth.”
Mellow, who has been walking next to Esmeralda this entire time in case she suddenly loses her balance and falls (tail strategically held behind her in case of this happening), turns to face you all as well. While Esmeralda’s face may remain as impassive as ever, the gratitude that both of them feel is reflected in Mellow’s wide, bright smile. She reaches up to wipe something from underneath one of her eyes.
“Thank you, everyone! I know whatever movies you came up with must have been spectacular. Because you made them!”
Even if the wounds that have been caused by these two may take a long, long time to heal– or perhaps never will– you can undoubtedly, assuredly believe that they never had any doubt in you. After all, they have always believed that every single one of you was important, in your own way. It was only up to you to show it.
In the distance, a million stars shoot through the darkness of infinity, illuminating the vast abyss of nothingness above and below as all the movies in front of Reality come to an end, all at the same time, all eyes everywhere watching, feeling, hearing through all it all. All eyes are, quite literally, on you.
At its core, storytelling is all about sending a message to someone, somewhere. It might be a singular person, or it might be just yourself, but everything that has ever been written has had a message in it. Not every tale has a worldview-shattering message behind it, nor does everything need to be a grand parable of some sort. These messages often repeat, too. There are countless ways of saying the same thing.
But Reality, for once, listens.
Your pleas, arguments, songs, movies, ramblings. Your love, hatred, despair, fears and hopes.
Overhead, a galaxy is formed, illuminating everything around it, especially the slow death of the galaxy nearest to it; they are like mirrored fireworks, fading in and out of view as they move around, their sounds lost in the vacuum of the space you are all currently in.
From its seat, Reality in its borrowed body looks at you, into you and past you. It hears and feels everything you show it, no matter how miniscule. It learns of lonely things finding themselves alongside others, it learns of the wronged seeking justice in hypocrisy as they live.
Comets rain down elsewhere, like a torrent rain as it learns of the cowardly and weak standing up, of stories yet untold, waiting to be. It watches new promises be born and break, foolishness and bravery hand in hand.
It stands up, gazing up as it learns of friends in unlikely places protecting each other in the ways they know, it learns of flowers that never needed thorns to be what they wanted to be, it learns of blood and the guts spilled, lessons learned one at a time.
It learns of the turmoil and peace of kings and peasants alike, lives spent together, waiting to reunite, it learns of learned and forgotten lessons, re-learned, engraved, it learns of wanting and yearning and having.
It learns of contradicting individuals caring and caring, something steadfast that binds them together, it learns of monsters who aren’t monsters but people who have found places to belong and people to be with.
It learns of anger and the quiet after, the longing for it, the fight for it. It learns of fighting with oneself to find one’s place in the world, helping people along.
The sky seems to fill up, a gray-ish field of stars covering it up, one dot at a time.
It learns of nuisance, rejection, farewells. New hopes and new dreams, new works. All in her creation a wonder.
All the movies end, your hourglasses gone. And Reality, through borrowed dark-blue eyes looks at you, its smile replaced by an expression more familiar to the face it uses as its own at this moment, its head even tilts.
We’ve made our decision/judgement/choice.
On top, below and all around you, the grayish stars seem to swirl. Reality stands in the middle of what was once the theatre, and all of its eyes stare down at you, almost like stars themselves. There is not a single sound until it speaks again, and the stars begin to drop, like sand filling the sky, carried away by time. It feels as though time flies, literally and figuratively.
We will permit life to continue.
It says evenly, looking at each and every of you all at the same time.
Stories are infinite, so is life. The things life strives to do and be. We will watch, until its natural end/demise/death, we will no longer accelerate such arrival. Congratulations, you have averted your end at the last minute.
child, be strange; dark, true, impure and dissonant || Jeanne
When an ant is crushed under your foot, you generally don’t think twice about its life or which of its colony members will grieve over its death. Some might feel a bit guilty, or actively try to stomp on them for personal reasons, but most will go about their day without so much as a passing sentiment. To you, the ant might as well be a speck in your otherwise massive world.
When a dandelion is plucked from the grass, you either do so because you wish to take the beauty you saw in it with you—a decoration in your hair, a chain formed of its brethren, a salad or tea made from of local forage—or because you see it as a weed, a nuisance to an otherwise acceptable view of nature. Some might leave them alone, knowing that there are pollinators and animals who rely on them for food, or simply because they don’t care to bother with the greenery. It, too, might as well be a speck to you.
Once the scale grows beyond the ant or the dandelion, however, you are more likely to feel some type of way about your actions in connection to [loss].
It could be feeling torn between sentimentality and practicality as you consider giving away a once-cherished keepsake from a friend because you’re trying to clean house, or trying to convince yourself that selling your old keyboard is for the best since you never play it anymore and you need the money, even if you wish you didn’t have to. It could be a dull ache in your chest as you hug someone for the last time before leaving for your flight home, knowing you probably won’t be able to see them until so many years have passed that you’re practically strangers again. It could be muffled tears under a duvet at two o’clock in the morning, throat raw and voice shot from spending the past six hours deep in the throes of what feels like the worst night of your life as your friends try to comfort you from the faint glow of your phone screen. It could be the way you stomp around the room and swing wildly against the wall, a caged animal who’s not allowed to leave home for a whole week because of something absolutely stupid and unnecessary you did that helped absolutely nobody and only brought harm. It could be how your breaths shake as you sit
It could be the indiscernible feeling of (dread? fear?) that runs through you as a pair of empty sockets stare back from the skull in your hands to your astigmatic eyes, still afraid to find out who it once belonged to and from whence it came before it made its way to your hands to be worn over your face.
Other times, it simply feels like everything and nothing is happening to you at the exact same time, like you’re watching from somewhere else entirely as opposed to through your own eyes.
“…”
(Jeanne is caught between two sides of themself as their spiral follows along with what comes next. Their claws dig deep into the armrest of their seat, but the urge to growl stays in their throat. The horror-tinged realization that dawns as Death formally reveals herself gives cause for their ears to flatten against their head, but their body refuses to leap into action or even in its own defense.
Their mind, meanwhile, is pulled in two directions between the grounded rationality they’ve tried to align themself with and the ravenous agitation that demands to be heard. One takes the defensive, reasoning that ‘if you were the one in Mellow’s position, wouldn’t you feel that you could put your faith in her too?’ Whereas the other spits and growls over the fact that ‘YOU WERE SO WILLFULLY BLIND. SHE SPELLED IT OUT WITH EVERY CLAIM THAT SHE COULD HANDLE EVERYTHING THROWN AT HER, AND YET YOU JOINED SO MANY OTHERS IN SIMPLY LETTING THAT BE THE END OF IT.’
…Neither of them get to claim victory in this pointless tug-of-war metaphor, though.)
In the way that Mellow tries to absorb all the vitriol to offset its impact on Esme and her designs, Jeanne begins to wonder if it’s actually Death that is feared, or rather everything leading up to its arrival. As a concept, Death is seen as something negative, as a finality and inevitability; it’s something to work against, something that brings harm. But that’s… not true, is it? It may be associated with punishment or mercy, but it’s not the result of other factors rather than being the cause itself. Death doesn’t cause you to suffocate, bleed out, enter anaphylactic shock, get poisoned, fall to your—no, it… It comes once the cause has taken effect. It doesn’t rip you violently from your existence so much as take your hand when the process is complete. In that way, Jeanne would argue that ‘mercy’ might really be its most apt descriptor.
But Esme, as the personification of Death Itself that stands before them, brings another question to their mind: is it really as impartial as everyone says? Has she ever hesitated before swinging her scythe, before taking someone’s hand, before beginning her approach? Not in the way she halted the path for those among them, but for others throughout time. Did she ever feel tempted to halt the grains for someone, or to forego impartiality and put a person to her blade before their scheduled meeting for something unforgivable? Did she ever feel haunted by the responsibility her existence had set upon her? Did she ever wish that somebody else could take her place, that she could live like anyone else instead of carrying this weight for as long as she’s existed? Did she ever ask a soul about themselves once their time had come, to ensure at least one person would still remember them even when they were no different from the trees that now stood where they once did?
… So many questions, yet they feel no urge to ask them. Not when Esme’s face contorts and a voice not her own addresses them all, smiling in a way that Jeanne’s absolutely certain it knows will put them back on the edge as it holds the hourglass out for them to take. They don’t notice until it moves (FacsimilEsme?… Come on, this isn’t the time.) to hand the next hourglass over to a cast member that their grip on the hourglass is enough to turn their knuckles pale, but not enough that it yields to the pressure applied.
A story about life, about the worth of everything. Is.. Is that what it wants? But what could they—there’s, there’s so much, how can they—they avoid talking about themself for a reason, they can’t just—h-how are they supposed to—
At first, it’s all just static. Bursts of black and white pixels crackling and shifting at every angle, as if this ‘movie’ was exported with the shittiest bitrate imaginable. But the longer it continues, the more that certain bits of static appear to hold shapes in them, like an optical illusion that disappears when you hit pause or stop looking at it in just the right way. Lingering just a bit longer than that, the static begins to resolve into a clearer image.
…Multiple, actually. It seems to depend on which direction one turns, save for one constant: Jeanne in the corner, drawing on a screen tablet as something clings to her shoulder. Jeanne pauses, exhaling slowly with closed eyes before rolling her shoulders in a way that ‘accidentally’ jostles the shadowy fox with a yelp. What the hell, sure. If this is the easiest way for her to tell a story, why not?
“… I don’t know what sort of things you want to see or hear. Maybe you don’t know either, but… We’ll see what happens. Okay?”
[♫♫♫]
In the space above where Jeanne sits, a larger screen flickers to life as the camera crawls to fill its view with it.
The hum of an air conditioning unit and a desktop computer harmonize with each other in the dead of night, taking the role of a backing track to a late-night game session over summer vacation. Jeanne sits far closer to her computer than she ought to, but it’s the only way to see the screen; maybe her habits will change when she finally gets her glasses.
Whisper-talking in hopes her voice won’t travel to other rooms through the vent beside her, she asks, “S-so does– is there a way to not… Make the endermen mad if I accidentally l-look up too high, or…”
Over a low-quality headset, multiple voices chime in.
“You can wear a Carved Pumpkin in the helmet slot, but it’s kinda hard to–”
“Boat.”
“Just swing your sword faster than he can swing his lanky-ass fists!”
A pause. “I mean, I managed to run away, so I think it should beEAAUGH–”
Jeanne doesn’t quite manage to clap a hand over her mouth to stop the shriek as she’s attacked in time before the sound of her dad flying out of bed and nearly tripping on the carpet in the hallway to open her door alerts her to his arrival.
“Honey, is everything okay? I heard screaming, did you have another–” In his half-awake daze, Jeanne’s dad blinks in disbelief just as the text ‘JYOWCH fell trying to escape Enderman’ appears on her screen, followed by a chorus of faint utterances of oh shit through her headphones as she quickly turns her monitor off.
“D-dad, I–”
Her explanation is cut off as her dad tries to stifle a snort, holding a hand across his own mouth to prevent anyone else in the house from waking up. “J-just– it’s okay, just promise y– promise you’ll go to bed soon, okay? It’s, um… Well.”
Following his widened gaze to the clock clearly reading three a.m. by her bed, Jeanne presses her face into her hands before skittering over to quickly usher him back out of her room.
“Iwillpromisethankssorrygoodnightloveyou–”
“love you toOoOoo~”, calls a voice from her headset, earning another soft chuckle from her dad as she pulls the microphone up closer to her mouth to grumble “shutthehellup–” back.
It might be a little mundane, but many aspects of life are. The small things in the odd hours matter just as much as the rest when it comes to the wider picture. In fact, they’re necessary for a good balance, Jeanne thinks. It doesn’t have to be impactful and dramatic scenes with high stakes all the time, now does it?
No, high stakes would be more like… A life or death situation, and the struggle that ensues. Perhaps a little like what Jeanne’s been drawing as the scene plays out. … Don’t worry about how fast she’s been doing this. That doesn’t matter.
Taking a moment to look them over, Jeanne proceeds to save and close the canvases, stretching in her seat with a shaky sigh before looking back up to the screen from before; something else has started to play.
[♫♫♫]
Jeanne is staring down at their dinner, barely moving alongside their other siblings after the loud -SLAM!- of their oldest brother’s door reverberates down from upstairs. They look up at their father, his face clenched tightly together as he bites his tongue to prevent any further fallout from the conversation, and quickly glance back down with closely knit brows as their mother begins to speak again in her usual matter-of-fact tone. Unbothered. Unphased. Unhindered.
“…I never said it was a bad choice. Just that he should keep his options open, rather than… What’s the phrase? ‘Putting his eggs in one basket’? That’s all.”
Pained, their father tries to retort. “Love, I… I understand that, and I’m sure Virgil does too…to an extent. I just… I think he deserves the opportunity to forge his path on his own. It doesn’t have to…”
… Jeanne tunes the conversation out rather quickly, quietly excusing themself from the table before walking up to their own room and faceplanting into bed. They don’t recall when they fall asleep, but they do.
They dream of strings and ‘gentle’ pushes to straighten their back, to tilt their head for a photo, to smile in a way that matches their mother and to follow her movements as she walks through the city and introduces them both as part of the family name that has never felt like theirs on their tongue, of nodding along in resigned agreement to whatever it is their mother ‘kindly’ asks of them to gain the favour of something she herself wishes to tear apart.
When next they wake, it’s an August afternoon, and their brother is already loading up his car to drive away to college and never come back while their mother still resides there. Selfishly, they wish they had slashed those tires in the night, or stowed away in a box for him to find when they were already halfway gone from home.
Even more selfishly, they wish something horrible would happen to their mother, but… The possibility of it coming true is terrifying, so they rescind that wish as soon as it comes to mind. How could they think such a thing?
…There will be people who are cruel and controlling, who think they know what’s best or who assume their viewpoint is the only one that matters, it’s true. It’s because of them that so many feel they lack agency in this world, and that the only way to get it is to take matters into their own hands—no matter the cost. Even if that cost comes by trading someone else’s for your own, and… And even if the results are naught. Jeanne knows that such a thing is horrible, but… They don’t think that means they should allow hatred or cruelty to infect their own heart in the process.
Another set of drawings are completed.
Again, Jeanne looks up from her work, this time stifling a chuckle as she realizes what’s coming. What’s this, then…?
[♫♫♫]
“I’M KING OF DA HIGHWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaa a aa aa a yy y y y y y”
The boisterous shout from Jeanne’s sister as she (carefully, nervously) drives the car around the large and empty gravelled lot in the Ontario countryside in celebration of being a fully-licensed driver nearly causes them to drop their phone as a fit of laughter overtakes, for the third time, as the triplets fail yet again to record the video they decided to make for their brother.
“Not a highway,” mutters their brother without looking up from his own phone where he’s rapidly liveblogging the events to a friend. Adding on as more of a comment than a question, he says: “…Do you want me to take over filming.”
Desperately trying to maintain composure as their sister imitates a comic that’s been shared relentlessly between them over the years, Jeanne wheezes in response. “N-no, it’s– I-I can do it!! I–snrk–I-I just wish he’d… S-stOP PLAYING THE MUSIC SO LOUOUUUUUUUD!!!”
“IT’S FOR VIBES OR THIS LOOKS LAME AS SHITTTTTTTTTTttt t t and I don’t reaLLY CAAAAAAAAREEEEEEEEE!”
The absurdity continues on for a while afterwards.
Well. Sure. Sometimes life is about doing some dumbass stuff with the people you care about, doing it because you don’t care what other people think, or just because you want to remind yourself what it’s like to be carefree, even if just for a little while. Not to pretend like whatever’s got you down isn’t happening, but just… To give yourself a break. Otherwise, you might not be able to relax when you need to most.
Jeanne gets up to stretch, having finished the next set.
It almost seems as if the next scene isn’t coming, but the ‘bitrate’ begins to recover the longer the view lingers.
[♫♫♫]
“…’A monster’?”
For once, there’s a hint of surprise in their mother’s voice as they confess what’s been eating away at them since landing their suspension; a gnawing feeling that’s threatened to overtake them since they caught sight of their accidental-victim’s broken, bloodied nose.
But the surprise is whisked away with a gentle wave of her mother’s hand and a laugh that’s too light and airy to be one she actually means beyond appearances.
“Dear, I would be more surprised if you didn’t feel like a monster. Everyone in our family has felt that way at some point. I know I did after the… Well, the death of my old friend when we were in college.”
A hand brushes through their hair. Apart from the minute shake of their shoulders, Jeanne does not move.
“I felt as though I should have, mm… Done more, I suppose? But all I did was run away as fast as I could and cry for help. My hands couldn’t stop shaking, aha… But thinking back on it now, I don’t think… I could’ve gotten her out of there on my own, even if I tried. I barely made it out on my own as it was.”
Words full of double-meanings, they think to themself as the seeds of doubt take root and their mother gives her best impression of a warm smile.
“There’s nothing wrong with feeling guilty. Just… Remember you have to stop at some point. It starts doing more harm than good, dear.”
Living with guilt, feeling guilty for living… Well. That’s not something that woman would know about, but it is something Jeanne does. Guilt is a weight everyone bears at some point, they think, but what they do with it is up to them to decide as well. It can consume them, it can stifle them, it can enrage them… Or it can drive them forward, enable them to reach out to those around them, and show sympathy even if it’s hard to do it for themselves.
Another set is completed, and… Jeanne stops.
“… I… Still don’t really know what you want to see or hear, but… I hope you can understand, without the words and movement. It’s easier for me, y’know?”
Every screen begins to cycle through each set Jeanne’s drawn, filling the view.
(A drawing of a woman sitting on the ground in a tight three-point perspective. She stares up at the viewer without raising her head, clawing at the canvas with one hand in a way that ‘rips’ through to show hyperrealistic fingers underneath. In her other hand, a thoroughly-used notebook riddled with illegible writing and arrows in red ink sits with her fingers tucked between the pages, as if still clinging to ideas that have yet to be realized that she cannot leave unexplored.)
(A drawing of a woman surrounded by sweeping curtains of black—her hair, really, from how the strands fall from her head—as she peers out from her own false ‘shadow’. Her hands, at first resembling the same type of clasped pose that many fictional princesses hold in their promotional images, are soon more recognizable as hands grasping at phantom weapons; they behave as if the missing weight would be right at home there.)
(A drawing of a man—or mpuppet—littered with rips and loose threads and strings galore emanating from the place a heart would reside, staring out from the canvas as if pleading to whatever will witness him. Despite threatening to come apart everywhere else, it seems he can’t bear to let that heart unravel anymore, no matter the burden it may have placed in the past.)
(A drawing of an upside-down person seemingly caught in a mid-air freeze frame, but a closer look shows them being held in place by faint pink hands. Multiple hands appear to be trying to cover their eyes, but their gaze remains unbroken as it stares back from the canvas, unfaltering, unyielding, and unafraid.)
(A drawing that appears to be two instances of a girl overlaid in the pattern of broken glass, green bleeding along the lines of bursts of white flowers as her human face cowers behind her hands in the shattered pieces. Though it appears her more alien self is mimicking the pose, her hands are clearly not covering her face; they’re reaching out at whoever’s on the other side of the screen, ready to grab should they find some purchase.)
(A drawing that shows the outline of a girl and her bright, kaleidoscopic eyes, pulling the attention of the viewer away from another instance of the same girl that can just barely be made out in the background thanks to the faintest glow from the phone in her hand. Her face is impossible to focus on, but she appears both poised to defend herself at a moment’s notice and curious as to what lies beyond the canvas.)
(A drawing of a woman towering above from atop the edge of a rope, looking down at the canvas with a menacing grin across her face as she holds a hand out. It almost looks as if she’s asking for something, but… Perhaps she’s actually offering it to help…? No, surely that’s a trick of the light. This is the ring, after all.)
(A drawing of a woman surrounded by strips of film that repeat the same burst of Red-Yellow-Blue in sequence, over and over, except for where she grips them tightly to show her face to the canvas; in her hands, they warp to new colours and shapes, no longer bound to a predetermined pattern. Whereas celluloid forces a false grin onto her, she merely offers a determined stare.)
(A drawing of a man akin to a playing card; his eyes are closed and his sword at rest on one side, whereas the other shows him glaring from behind his raised blade. Both versions of him lock arms with their offhand, between which rests a heart that shifts through iridescent hues and a small, blueish orb. Along the blade’s edge, an odd, similarly blueish shape is reflected, but it’s nothing more than a blur.)
(A drawing—or perhaps ‘mock screenshot’ is more apt— of a man in a low-poly, dimly lit hallway, clutching at his chest with one hand and holding something unseen at his side in the other. Nothing else appears to be in the frame with him, but there’s a visibly blue glow just at the edge where he stands, and a fainter pink one from behind the hand at his side. Though discomfort is plain across his face, there is something grounded in there as well.)
(A drawing of a woman done in the style of impressionist paintings, her gaze wistfully watching the colourful skies at dawn from behind the curtains of a dark, imposing drawing room drenched in near-grey shades. Around the edges of the canvas, however, the simulated ‘frame’ shows various scenes carved into its wood of a bat, wolf, and batwolf-like creature frolicking with various others; the hand which isn’t gently pulling the curtain aside rests between those carvings, taking care not to obscure them.)
(A drawing of a man smiling brightly at the viewer as twenty-three thin gaps of light bleed through the shadow cast behind him; looking carefully, however, some glow the same way that your fingers do when you shield your eyes from the sun, letting the warmth fill you without blinding you in the process.)
(A painting of a doll seated in a young man’s lap, with old portraits and cameos of impossible-to-discern people stretching far up the wall behind them. Soot seems to taint the edges of the canvas on one side, but the other is covered by a gloved hand that’s carefully swabbing it clean; it resembles the same hand tucked around the doll, taking care not to damage any faces or details as it ‘cleans’ it for preservation.)
(A drawing of a person curled on their side and surrounded by a plethora of blooming flowers. In some places, the flowers are replaced with thorns, and deep red petals fall across their face and upper body as if to mimic blood. Tucked into his hands, however, something shines through… Winking…?)
(A drawing of a woman beaming down at a koi pond as she points them out to an unseen companion, ever-so-slightly avoiding the gaze of her human form that reflects back at her from between the fish. Her reflection, meanwhile, still holds the same warmth in her eyes, albeit slightly teary; both seem to shimmer like the water separating them.
(A drawing of a person simply seated and staring through the canvas, yet their gaze follows in the peripheral view. Closer inspection of the blobs of colour that compose her reveal words, phrases, full conversations that are too numerous to decipher, yet are identifiable all the same. Every so often, more faint collections of words appear across her face and atop her head, mimicking the appearance of Death Itself.)
Finally, Jeanne turns her tablet around to show the final drawing:
(A… person? That’s what it seems at first, but the canvas keeps shimmering and shifting with static, stuttering between a person folding in on themself with their head in their hands, a monstrous being with teeth bared from behind cracked glasses, and… And a little fox, shifting between the three before settling into a more harmonious composition with all three tucking their tails into each other.)
Alex has been silent for minutes. Hours. It felt like days. Others have spoken to Esme, asked her what was at stake, how this would shake out. They just contemplated. It was no use arguing with Death after all.
Instead, they look out the window, at the eye of the universe. The ultimate audience, the great observer, waiting to see the great film of Alex Zhang’s life. But the thing is, Alex has never been a movie person. So instead, looking at the Universe Eyes to Eye, they reach out mentally and…
Suddenly Alex is no longer in the trial room. Nor are they anywhere on the ship, or any type of soundstage or backlot or anything that would resemble a film set. Instead, they are on a couch on a stage, with a backdrop of a cityscape on a matte painting behind fake windows, with a large executive desk next to her. In the audience are the infinite eyes, a mass still watching, but now applauding with some hesitation. A band in the corner, also made up of humanoid shadowy eye beasts, playing instruments made of the same material as themselves, keeping it up but their body language betraying their confusion at this whole affair. And behind that big fancy desk, another eye-covered silhouette, forced into a humanoid form and a fancy suit, leaning back in its chair and gazing at Alex.
Did they actually force the Great Observer into this? Is this how they are rationalizing their part in this play? Did they bite off way more than they could chew and plaster everyone around them with their brains Scanners style? Who knows? Alex doesn’t.
The host blinks at Alex confusedly for a bit, then realizes it is holding cue cards. It reads them quickly, then finally addresses Alex.
> I don’t believe you understood. We asked you to show. Not… this.
Alex cocks her head, rests her elbow on a rest of the sofa, and places her chin on that hand. There is a bit of a smile, but she doesn’t speak, instead responding telepathically.
<Yeah but that isn’t my thing. Life ain’t a movie. So I wanted to start a dialogue. A conversation.>
> Does it not have a beginning? An end? A sequence of events?
<But that has like, intention and shit. And is way shorter. Life is more like a soap opera or reality TV I guess. Idunno.>
Alex is immediately mentally bombarded with a million film examples that prove her point wrong, the largest and loudest being DOCUMENTARIES screamed in such a way it triggers a nosebleed. They persevere, ignoring the trickle of blood going down their face and staining the dress they are wearing for this occasion.
> Then what is the point you want to make?
<Life is like, its own point and shit. Schroedinger’s Cat. Things are changed by being observed. Idunno it feels obvious.>
Truthfully, Alex has always been a bit aimless. They never had the big “What do you want to do with your life” because they were doing what they wanted to do. Everyday, idle interactions. Little things. Connections that were both fleeting yet deep. Friends who they could not see for a decade and pick up a conversation like it was yesterday. Making the most of a tiny small town.
The universe listens.
> You do not want roots. Burdens. To do what you do not want. But you want connection. To be connected to another is an anchor in itself.
<No it’s like.> She vaguely gestures.
They do not want to be tied down to one thing. But they want connection. To be known. To be understood. To love and be loved. But the pain. the betrayal. They still reach out and yet they can’t help but feel like they are…
*Alone*
The presence behind the desk is gone. The studio audience seats are empty. The band pit is desolate. All of the lights on stage are out, except a spotlight on Alex and their couch. Sighing, they get up, exit stage left, and waiting in the wings is their car. They get in, start the engine, and a shutter door opens to pure white as they drive off. As they go into a white void, their phone resting in the cup holder starts vibrating like mad as a million messages pop off. Everyone asking how she is doing. What plans she has. She smiles.
Maybe she just has to cast those connections wide enough and one will stick. She has time.
No live organism can continue to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even puppets and penguins may be supposed, by some, to dream.
Reality itself, not sane, looks at Tomie Katsukawa through the eyes of its unfaithful servant and waits for her to make a pitch.
She ought to hock up a gob of sunsets and kisses, right?
That’s what people like. The bigger the audience — a senior screenwriter once told her — the dumber you need to assume they are. The universe being the biggest audience of all, she should logically assume it wants bromides on the level of a Mike Flanagan production.
And she learned through the endless rewrites of Blade that she had this sort of pablum in her, same as any other hack. With sufficient throat-clearing, maybe a saltwater gargle, she could cough a stringy lump of treacle into the extended hand of the cosmos right now.
She could cue the orchestra.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
She could say something that would appeal to all four quadrants of the Hollywood profit model. Boys and girls, young and old.
In the infinite black of space, a white cursor appears in the air above her head, blinking and then shifting horizontally through the void, trailing letters in its wake. Tomie’s voice speaks the words aloud, but her lips don’t move at all.
In the margins of the script, stars begin to lengthen toward each other.
Each star expands in a perfectly straight line until it joins its neighbor at a right angle. Empty storyboards glow in oblivion. The susurration of a pencil on paper fills the empty air.
STORYBOARD 1: Her tall corpse and Ashley’s short one sit together, shoulder-to-shoulder in front of her laptop, and watch the movie that she ruined her life over. The storyboarded shot is mostly shaded in with pencil, dark except for the light of the laptop, but there are flush-lines of exhilaration on Tomie’s face. Her eyes are fixed on Ashley’s reaction while Ashley’s attention stays on the screen.
STORYBOARD 2: Red Revenge looks at her across a diner table and breathes fire back into her for a moment. The scene is set to be shot over Tomie’s shoulder, so she didn’t have to draw her own expression; instead it’s just Red’s chin thrust forward, challenging. The reverse-shot will catch Tomie wide-eyed, a veteran egomaniac sighting of someone other than herself that she’ll be embarrassed to disappoint.
STORYBOARD 3: Close-up on two freckled hands tapping away at a note on her iPhone. These belong to Tomie, but the names she’s trying to save from historical obscurity do not. No normal person has been named Estrild in hundreds of years. But someone other than Leofweard of Heallwick should know that his sisters Estrild, Lina and Cecilia existed. They were born of his mother Clarice, and they were beloved of Clarice’s mother Elswyth. Leofweard marked feast days with them and played with their children and patted Cecilia’s lambs.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
No.
The cursor retreats through that line, swallowing it back up before spitting out:
Wrong.
No.
Tomie’s face flexes in disgust, then in amusement. She looks down at the hourglass, and instead of sugarfluff, she drags up a lump of bile and spits it on the ground:
“Bullshit.”
Her fingers tighten on the hourglass as more cursors appear, hammering out the counterargument.
Life isn’t just sunsets. It’s screwworms, too.
Take it down to brass tacks, cosmically. Put an eye to the viewfinder and look at the world like you’ve never seen it before.
(Your characters don’t need to know the whole truth about the world or the story they’re in, but you do, another screenwriter told her.)
Living things desire to live because they are living already and change is unpleasant. The higher orders of life feel this
existence is meaningful because they desire both existence and meaning badly enough to invent the latter.
Dying is painful, but being dead is not. Usually. Not for the dead person. If everyone is a dead person, no one has lost anything and no one is in pain. Every point is a moot one.
Tomie’s memories are precious to her, it’s true. But they hurt terribly. No joy in her life has ever failed to become a humiliation with age, whether it was the laughter she shared with Josie-and-the-Pussycats or the kisses she gave Kureha Kitano or the red-carpet premiere of The Butcher’s Table.
If she allows that the lives ahead of them will be anything like the ones behind them, she must accept that they will go horribly wrong. Again. Repeatedly.
More storyboards appear, potential future scenes. She meets the Gardenias and they find her rude, obnoxious, arrogant; Luci never issues another invitation. She spends time with Juli and he starts asking her for money, then ends their friendship when she won’t provide it. Amara’s convictions collapse under the weight of mundanity and she shrinks back into herself forever. Alex hurts herself terribly in a stunt, and her mind continues voyaging but her body never recovers.
She can’t help Ashley, in the end.
Myles skips out of Good Times Central with a bluebird on his shoulder and gets flattened by a city bus.
The worst-case scenarios flood the frame until Tomie is completely obscured. When they fade, she’s lying down
on a steel loading table
that’s sliding her headfirst and wide awake into her father’s cremation furnace.
“You know what’s funny?”
Her arms are crossed over her chest like Dracula’s, the hourglass between them. The camera must be rigged to a track above the loading table, because it moves with her as she gets closer to the fire.
“You’re right,” she shrugs, making direct eye contact with the viewer. “Life’s mostly shit.”
Cut away to another angle as her head passes through the loading port and into the flames. Now you’re seeing her body being consumed by that metal mouth from a distance. Shoulders. Waist. Hips. So long, and thanks for nothing.
She catches herself with the toe of her boot and, in one flex of her thigh, forces the loading table to screech back out of the fire.
[ ♪♪♪ ]
Cut back to her close-up. The lenses of her glasses have gone black with soot. The tips of her similarly darkened corkscrew curls glow with little cherry-red embers.
Her grin flashes sharper and whiter than ever.
“So what?”
Swinging her legs over the side, she hops off the slab and claps once. The camera zooms out, and the three-wall facade of the funeral home collapses around her. Reality itself sees the exposed klieg-lights and boom-mics behind the illusion, and it watches Tomie take her soot-blackened glasses off to clean them on her jacket sleeve.
The rolling eyes behind them are blue again.
“Honestly,” she tells the universe. “You’re such a little — what’s the word Juli and Pipes use? Tsundere? Don’t pretend you want to be convinced life is good. You don’t. I know exactly what you are.”
A deferential P.P.A. (pengi personal assistant) rushes over to hand her a pack of wet wipes; she scrubs them black against her hands. The fingers that run through her ash-whitened hair are golden-brown, and their freckles no longer catch the light.
After a quick pat to the pengi’s head, Tomie snaps her fingers. Another pengi pulls up in a golf cart, and she climbs in the back. The camera follows.
“And I know ‘cause I read those reviews,” she informs the universe. “You gave the highest rating to the nastiest kill, and the case at the bottom of your list was the one where the good guys actually started winning. You’re a freak, kiddo. You’re a Lars von Tier-stanning, Overlook Film Fest-attending, Shudder-subscription-having gorehound, just like me.”
By this point, it’s become clear that they’re in a backlot of some kind. The golf cart stops outside a block of new three-wall sets, actors inside.
Each depicts a scene of Hugoesque misery.
Wyatt Seams, beloved friend of Gideon West, is packed carefully into a box and abandoned. A puppet is not a doll, but this one was outgrown like any other toy.
Angel, the young victim of an unspeakable crime, wishes for something better and annihilates another child just like himself from existence. He searches his new home for signs of the boy who would have been his brother.
Luci presses her green fists against her head and sobs as a whole lifetime of repressed terror bears itself out inside her. Everything she was ever afraid of was true — and more, even. More than she ever thought to be afraid of.
Azusa wakes up beside her last hope of normalcy. This hope, who is a man, is dead, and Azusa realizes the thousand compromises that brought her here were worth nothing. She did what she was supposed to do and then ruined her own life anyway.
Piper searches her little underground room for the source of the scritch scritch scritch keeping her awake. She has precious little time to sleep, and this fucking noise is ruining it. She will search all night without ever realizing it’s inside her head, and someone will watch the whole thing on the other side of her in-room security camera.
“Grim, right?” Tomie says as she hops out of the cart. “But it’s all about direction.”
By the time she’s stepped into each scene, Tomie has guided the actors into highlighting the parts of it the material are insane, hysterical, imminently entertaining popcorn bullshit. Consider:
A wizard capable of working miracles, creating life out of nothing, abandons it all to play computer.
A little boy wishes for a new family, and his exceedingly literal pet monster oopsie-daisies another child out of existence. One must imagine them both at least somewhat embarrassed.
A girl who has always felt as though she doesn’t belong on Earth learns that not only is it literally true, it’s worse than she ever could have imagined. She is an alien. Also, she’s even more adopted than she knew.
A woman with all the beauty and charm of a classic vampire-seductress has no desire to seduce anyone. She becomes a femme fatale by complete mistake and feels just terrible about it.
A piece-of-shit junior data analyst at a piece-of-shit music label eats an Egg and Cheese McMuffin while her child torture-victim undergoes complete psychological collapse. This is all worth it, she thinks sagely. Oh, yeah. We’ll knock the Chainsmokers out of the Top 100 with this.
Tomie emerges from the last set flushed with pleasure, shaking the ash out of her hair. It’s still red, but the gemstone color is receding.
“I mean, c’mon,” she drawls. “Life’s got nothing if it doesn’t have stuff for you and me. If you haven’t been seeing it, you haven’t been looking hard enough. Or you haven’t been ready to laugh at it.”
Back into the cart they go, cruising around the big warehouses that serve as locations for indoor shoots.
“Maybe your whole problem is that you just need to lighten up. Admit you enjoy the carnage! If you see the same thing too many times, start ranking! If your favorite characters get their asses beat too often, just remember — that’s the whole appeal of Spider-Man! People love how often he gets his shit kicked in.”
The final set at which she arrives is tiny. A podcast studio with three bearded nerds on one side of the table and an empty chair on the other. Tomie hesitates before putting her feet on the ground. Her fingers curl around the hourglass still clutched in her left hand.
Her restored eyes sting with the memory of how awful she felt here, how angry, and how much worse she made it when she leaned into that unoccupied mic.
All of Tomie’s movies have been about Tomie.
Cradle was about childhood trauma and poverty scumming up the heroine’s insides, making her a living vector of the filth she wanted to escape. Her beautiful new apartment sprouted black mold and drainflies because she lived in it, and she was dirty. Everything she ever touched would become dirty, too.
My Work Is Not Yet Done was a fantasy of baroque revenge against the MBAs of the world, uncreative people meeting creative ends. The protagonist was astrally projecting from a coma; his revenge would never benefit him, and perhaps in the end it wasn’t real. But oh, it was nice to dream.
Tear Her to Shreds was about driving a chainsaw through the heart of every person who ever told a woman she ought to worry about what nice people thought of her.
(Blade was about the unchanging face of evil across time and the a hero who could pursue it through every decade of human folly without growing tired.)
And The Butcher’s Table was her masterpiece. It was her heart. At the time, she’d thought it was the most direct and easy-to-understand project of all: A love story, sincere as they come, about a selfish, temperamental pirate sailing into the heart of hell and pulling her Eurydice aboard a homebound ship. Proving it could be done.
Proving someone like that could be redeemed into deserving love.
Standing here, she tries to breathe through the memory of being crushed by the box office returns and the middling reviews. She tries to find the humor in it.
— it’s much closer at hand than she ever would have liked to admit.
Tomie exhales through pursed lips and takes the empty chair. Closes her eyes. Finds her character — herself, years ago, insides blistering with righteous fury — and then finds what’s funny about the destruction about to ensue.
Her lips curve upward.
She turns the hourglass over and slams it down on the table for action.
“So, anyway,” she complains, leaning into the mic. “I dunno how I was supposed to know that people weren’t gonna take their families to see my R-rated Victorian lesbian pirate cannibal horror-fantasy on Christmas Day. Like, yeah, okay, the violence — but it’s a period piece! Grandmas love that shit! And kids love pirates!“
When the scene is over, entertainment sufficiently mined from the worst decision she ever made, Tomie steps out and walks down the line toward a set of folding chairs. She settles into the one marked DIRECTOR, gesturing for the PPA from earlier to bring her a drink.
“Take it from somebody who got killed by a puppet, yeah? Life’s awful. Death’s worse. Existence is a prank that every living thing is playing on everything else.”
There’s another scene in front of her, but the camera doesn’t pan to it. She doesn’t know what it is yet. She looks at the universe, raises her megaphone to her lips, and asks:
“Don’t you want to see how bad it gets?”
The credits roll.
[ ♪ ♪ ♪ ]
And roll.
And roll.
And then stop. Tomie appears again, sitting in her director’s chair with a megaphone pressed to her lips.
“Hey, I thought of one more thing.”
“Every person on this ship is their own universe. Why should you get to wipe ‘em out just because you’re the biggest, huh? Fuck you, monopolistic prick.”
Lucille, the pride and joy and waste and fuckup of the Gardenia family, has never once in her whole entire life truly and sincerely wanted to make a movie.
Galexi, the hope and wish and unlit star and dotless constellation of Xauronoiaxos, has never once in her whole entire life wanted to carry the weight of a world or a universe on her shoulders.
Yet here she is doing both. She’s a part of the most important movie ever created, and she’s one of those chosen mere months ago as a living-then-dead argument as to why life must continue to live and die,
and her first instinct is to believe there’s nobody in existence worse for the job.
Because as she is confronted by the incarnation of reality itself and told that she, yes she shall be heard by each star in the sky, the weavings within the blanket she’d look up towards and wrap herself in during the middle of the night– all she can think about is–
Egoist and egocentric creature, lessons learned and forgotten, everything one could want and still yearns for more and more, never having enough, always needing all the attention. A delicate eye for one such as her.
and it has to be true, doesn’t it?
She had it all and threw it away before she even came here, yet still had the audacity to ask for so much more as if she wouldn’t throw whatever she gained out to rot with the rest of her dreams. It’s a cycle, one she’s found herself caught in for so long and one she certainly an’t escape, right?
Because she never wanted the spotlight yet she still wanted to be the apple (haha, isn’t that funny) of someone’s eye, wanted to be prized and adored in spite of her flaws despite consisting entirely of flaws and flaws alone, wanted to be wanted.
Even if she never deserved any of these precious things, she still craved them. And when she didn’t get them, she moped and sobbed and threw herself a pity party in a way that put even the most egotistical to shame– because there is ego in the level of self-loathing she had, in the inability to accept anyone’s perception of her but her own.
So how can it be, then, that she’s been entrusted with a task that eclipses each and every task that will come before or after it?
All she can think about is who she was at the beginning of all this. She thinks about how she could hardly get through a single conversation without stuttering and stammering out an insensitive remark that she thought would help, and she thinks about how she never felt like much help at all. Like she was a pitiful thing better to babysit than befriend, a burden that those around her were forced to carry as she screamed and sobbed and melted down in front of them as a collective, and then some of them one-on-one too.
All she can think about is who she was then, and how it certainly must be who she is now. And so she finds herself starting to breathe heavy, too heavy– she’s starting to sweat, and she reaches around as if to find her medkit– and she– she– has an hourglass in her hands and she–
she lives?
She stares at her hands and then her arms as her skin returns, no longer the golden tone of a trophy but the way it looked until the day she died. Then her breath returns, and her heart and her sensations and her humanity– and her hair is no longer bright orange but instead the dark and rich shade it was. She no longer glimmers and shines–
Yet something remains. The X that was emblazoned in her chest after her resurrection remains, though it now looks like a normal scar rather than a symbol glowing like fire. And… this makes her…
This makes her happy, to have the proof of her demise and the proof of her origins embedded into her. Almost as happy as it makes her to just live again, to look and function in the way she took for granted. She wraps her arms around herself and breathes deep and can’t help but giggle as she sways from side to side, unable to contain her relief and glee at the fact that she’s herself–
… relief and glee at the fact that she’s herself?
She’s stunned, then. She comes to a halt, vision losing focus as she considers it. She has never been this happy about being who she is. It must be a lie– it must be a trick– yet she cannot deny it. It’s terrifying, it’s overwhelming, it’s something she never thought she’d feel and there was a time years ago where she thought about taking such an important thing as her life away yet she didn’t and it was taken nonetheless and now she has it back and she–
… she thinks she finally understands.
The worst for the job, the best for the job– it doesn’t matter. She’s been chosen for a reason, and she has always believed in fate, an almighty hand guiding her towards where she’s meant to be. She cannot figure out whether the knowledge she’s gained today disproves fate as a whole, but she can figure out that it doesn’t matter because whatever the truth might be she’s here.
She’s here.
And she has never understood or appreciated life as much as she does now.
So she lets the feeling pour out of her, hoping it radiates, then decides to take matters into her own hands. How can she show the Audience that life must continue? How can she do something only she could do, only she and not anyone else who exists?
Well. There’s only one way she can do it.
She just needs to do it!
And with that, Luci clears her throat. Then, for whomever might be watching in this room and outside of it too– she begins to speak.
… I’ve always been scared of my thoughts.
Ever since I was young, I thought they were… wrong. Bad. Cursed. And I often found myself fixated on the past, on the ways I’d messed up and how that meant I’d mess up again. The present was always too much to consider, and… the future was even worse.
I… didn’t think I had a future anymore. Not until… not until I came here. And not until I met… all of you.
… so… I-I’d like to…
I’d like to thank everyone. By sharing my… my real, unfiltered thoughts about…
About how I’d like to share my future.
Then there’s a screen next to her, and a projector that beams a video onto it. It’s the first of many, and it’s just her waving at everybody.
… t-this is the only movie I’m ever gonna make.
I hope y’like it.
She knows that, for once, she likes it. She likes what she’s making. Oh, geez. She really does.
So–
(~Amber! Ah– uhm– honey! The radio– turn it up– it’s about time she finally gets this one– Lucille? Lucille, I want you to hear this, it’s…
She stirs, she looks at Mom with a tilted head and a curious smile. She is 7 years old and is beginning to recognize that there is more to music than sound and babbling, and there is so much to explore in these things called lyrics and also she doesn’t hear Mom this excited very often at all.
~This is… I-I used to listen to this all the time when you were younger, I liked it before and then, well… now I love it, and it’s cheesy and it’s for old people like Mama and I but– but it’s… y’know, it’s always been your favorite color– Amber, sing it with me–
And she didn’t know it then but of course it was a bit more than her favorite color. She recalls her mothers taking a breath and smiling with something she didn’t recognize until now before singing–
~Look at the stars, look how they shine for you–)
let’s take a look at what the child of the stars has created.
[♪ ♪ ♪]
WHY LIFE IS WORTH LIVING
White text against a bright yellow background.
Lucille begins to speak, and as she does beautiful, life-like illustrations start to appear on the projector. Illustrations, of course, of the future and all the things Lucille wants from it and all the people she wants to share it with and plot twist–
Everyone here is a part of it, in some way or another!
A-And, uh, sorry in advance if I mischaracterize you!
First is Jeanne, and you see Lucille meeting up with them and the RGBeasties (though she has to take the artistic liberty of imagining Total, Ruth, and Nick as silhouettes– appealing and likable ones, though!) at a convention, and Lucille is holding a plush of a little jade rabbit in her arms with a big smile on her face. Then there’s another image of Lucille getting to meet Jeanne’s siblings and father (these silhouettes are even better) before going home to tune into one of Jeanne’s streams, one attended by eager and devoted fans as well as a friend made in the middle of space.
Because… if we live, we get to feel, and– and feeling can be difficult. Really difficult. It can make you so mad you can hardly control yourself, or it can make you so nervous you struggle to get through something really stressful, but– but that’s part of why it’s… it’s wonderful, too. Because you also get to be happy when you learn things about a new friend, and grateful when they let you see both sides of them… l-literally, in Jeanne and I’s case, ehheh!
Next is Red, and you see Lucille joining her on a trip to go see some joshi wrestling and you see Lucille blushing and burying her face in her hands as she rambles to the tough and badass and awesome women in STRAW– while Red laughs and pats her shoulder. Then you see Lucille standing by a whiteboard with a marker in her hand, and on it is written BIG IDEAS SO FAR. You can see she’s written out various goofy ideas for Red’s next business endeavors, and you can also see she’s wearing a pin that says PROUD EARTHLING. Red is across from her, sitting back in a chair and explaining – as indicated by a speech bubble – why this next idea’s gonna hit the jackpot… even though she’s already hit the jackpot with all the money she made off of Celluloid City Crisis.
And living means messing up, but it also means meeting people who’ll you’ll mess up with in a big way who will still forgive you even if y’don’t really deserve it. Life is worth it, ‘cuz we get to know people who kick ass and take names while also dispensing words of wisdom and showin’ us why we should never give up on pursuin’ what we want.
Then there’s Alex – formerly known as Foodfight – posing for a selfie in the mall with Lucille, both of these Southern flowers giving the camera an unrestrained and honest smile as they balance the bags of stunning and perhaps even scandalous clothes they’ve got hanging off their arms. Then you see Lucille engaged in an intense and epic bake-off with Alex, both of them trying to outdo the other in whipping up a delicious cake– and then you see Alex has obviously won, and that Lucille, grinning, has given them an apron that reads MOST SLAYFUL CHEF OF ALL TIME.
And living means feelin’ like a fish out of water when you go to certain places, a-and then the nice part about that is y’get to find other fish and kinda… flop around with them? U-Uh, this analogy is gettin’ kinda strained, but– but the point is, life is worth it ‘cuz you get to know people like Alex, who support you and treat you with understanding and kindness, and go above and beyond to ensure your comfort even when it inconveniences other people.
Then you see Ashley and Lucille at a festival, and of course Ashley’s participating in some axe throwing while Luci, albeit sweating nervously, still manages to grin at the camera and it’s a sincere one too. Next there’s the two of them at a convention, with Lucille dressed up as Princess Ariel and Ashley dressed up exactly as you might expect, the two of them carrying a comical amount of plushies. Then there’s the two of them singing a song together as they tear a shirt with the Walmart logo on it to shreds.
Livin’ means bein’ tricked and bein’ scared but then, if you’re willin’… workin’ past all that, and seeing someone y’never saw before as, well– who they are, and realizin’ who they are… is a friend, and… someone y’wanna keep around. It means gettin’ advice from someone y’told yourself you’d never listen to, and realizin’ you shoulda been hearin’ them in a way y’hadn’t, and… and choosin’ to spend all the time y’got left with ‘em tryin’ to make up for it, ‘cuz… y’know, they’re worth it.
Then there’s… this one’s just a black screen, captioned: “NO FOOTAGE SHOWN HERE OUT OF RESPECT FOR PIPER’S ISSUES WITH BEING PERCEIVED /gen, AND ADMITTEDLY ALSO OUR MUTUAL DISTASTE FOR EACH OTHER”
… living means sometimes you’ll meet people who break you. Who make you feel like your life was a waste, and you’re as terrible as they say. But then… then if you keep living, or– or existing, you… you can prove them wrong. Or even prove them right in some ways, but learn to embrace what they got right rather than suppressing it, and… even listening to them when they say some real shit, then swallowing your pride and adjusting as a result.
A-And it means… maybe one day, finding something like… peace, with them. Because life is all about, well, just… moving on.
Next is a glimpse at a poke place in Ktown, where Luci and Amara have met up so that Luci can finally try it out– and the smile on her face tells you that it’s exactly as good as Amara hyped it up to be. Then you see Lucille excitedly holding up one copy of a new Pokemon game, while Amara holds up the other version. There’s Amara (and is that Ashley in the background?!) helping Luci dye just a few strands of her hair, the color a warm purple– and there’s a smile on Amara’s face, maybe even one of peace.
Living means you’ll meet people who just kinda confuse you for a while even if y’like ‘em, until one day things click for some reason or another and you’re able to– to help them, even just a little bit, and… that makes it all so worth it. It means… it means sometimes you keep goin’ to honor people who couldn’t, even if y’never met ‘em, and it means, y’know– forgin’ bonds that might be hard to put into words, and might not be the closest or warmest, but… but bonds y’still want to last a lifetime all the same.
Then you see Alex Zhang driving a motorcycle, with a wide-eyed and smiling Lucille sitting in the seat behind them with her arms wrapped around them for safety and for friendship. Next it’s Alex’s birthday, and Lucille’s arrived with a gift: a model of a Gundam in mint condition, a Perfect grade one for that matter. Then finally you see the two of them working together on a Lego set, Lucille grinning from ear to ear with her arm around Alex– the gesture unrestrained and devoid of any residual fear that the touch of the other might’ve caused once.
Life i-is worth it because sometimes you’ll make an amazing friend and then there’ll be a wrench thrown into what the two of you got, a wrench thrown by somethin’ neither of you did, and… and together, if y’really wanna, you’ll dig that wrench out and get rid of it and maybe even appreciate each other more than you ever did before. And I– I never thought I’d be able to tinker with the inner workings of a car, never in my whole life! And… and thanks to them, I did, and now I can learn more about that if I wanna, and… a-and that’s why we gotta keep livin’, because… we can do things we never thought we could, so long as we got a helpin’ hand.
It’s Esme–
O-Oh frick I forgot to uhm–
She whips out her phone and votes, and just to be clear, the screen reads SPARE.
What was I sayin’–
It’s Esme and it’s Lucille together on a rollercoaster at a theme park far more grand than the fun fair, and of course Death herself looks unphased while Lucille has her hands up in the air and a grin on her face because she knows Esme is having a nice time and likes to be with her. Then she’s with Esme at an ice cream parlor, and Lucille’s clearly and comically enduring a brain freeze while Esme gives the camera a thumbs up. Then Lucille’s sitting next to Esme at a desk, one covered with art supplies and a big scroll of paper– and she’s encouraging Esme to draw by giving her all sorts of silly ideas.
Life is worth it because even if we’ll all die eventually, isn’t it pretty lovely that we get to be anyone at all? That we get to learn so much from other people, and be a part of the world, and a part of somethin’ so much bigger than we can comprehend? And– and because even if you’re just a speck of dust in the grand scheme, you can still feel like something that matters, can be someone that matters, and sometimes what it takes to realize that is a little help from a friend who’s also a law of the universe, but more than that, is… a friend. … s-so, please spare her, I’d really appreciate it!
It’s the screen splitting into two diagonal halves and one half is Myles getting a postcard from America, and Lucille getting a postcard from Japan and then from somewhere in Europe. It’s Lucille visiting Myles and Wyatt’s new home so she can help the two of them finally 100% Olympus Mon, and it’s her bringing Myles a housewarming present of the highest quality pipe cleaner elephant with googly eyes that you’ve ever seen. It’s the two of them standing on a bridge and skipping pebbles across it together and as indicated by a speech bubble it’s Luci saying thanks for trying again with me, Myles.
Life is worth it because y’can always make amends, and can always find your way back to someone even if it feels differently than it did at first because– because isn’t that what’s beautiful, though? For a bond to deepen even in a way that might hurt and might strain, to know each other more than you ever thought you could and somehow through all the stumblin’ and tears, at the end– not regretting it, and choosing to keep going? And– and life is worth it because, hey, even two of the biggest nervous wrecks in the whole universe can find themselves and find love!
Then there’s Tomie and Lucille but not just the two of them– they’re having dinner with Luci’s moms, and it’s obvious they admire Tomie just as much as she admires them– maybe even moreso actually after hearing about all Tomie did to look after their daughter. It’s Lucille sitting on a couch with Tomie and finally watching her goriest and grittiest flick and having to look at the screen with her eyes peeking out from between her fingers half the time while Tomie laughs and pats her back. It’s the two of them at an animal sanctuary where Tomie’s got a baby pig in her lap while Lucille weeps with joy at the sheer preciousness of the sight.
Life’s gotta keep goin’ because– because no matter how messed up and how cruel the world can be there are people who’ll keep an eye on you and protect you as best as they can, even if they’re people who have a hard time admittin’ to themselves just how great they are, so– so that’s why we gotta keep livin’, ‘cuz– it means we can make the lives of those we care about better, y’know, whether that’s just by havin’ my moms help’ Tomie get into any room she wants to be in or by just… spendin’ time with her, laughin’ with her and cookin’ with her too– y-you see what I’m sayin’? Life’s worth it because if I’ve been given such a good life, I wanna use it to make the life of the people who I care for and who I love, y’know, better!
Next you see, standing outside and under a beautiful night sky, Lucille in Axosesian form with Wyatt in puppet form sitting on her shoulder so that he can get a better look at the stars, the real stars that he knew she loved so much and could now finally share with him. Then in this next part they’re human, and Wyatt’s pushing around a big shopping cart full of exercise equipment including Speks and all types of fun orbs and devices and tools that’ll help the two of them put together even more routines. And then she’s accompanying him to an art exhibition dedicated to the legacy of Gideon West, and then he’s accompanying her to a planetarium where she looks at a diorama for a little too long until he makes her laugh and brings her back to reality, and then she’s asking how his vacation with Myles was and can she visit them again soon?
And life’s worth it because of coincidences, y’know how sometimes you’ll cross paths with someone who you never would think y’got so much in common with but then the stars align and you get to find out you do, you really do, and… and even with how much tragedy it takes for both of you to find that out, you don’t– I-I could never regret it, you know? I could never say that painful and awful part of my life and his life wasn’t worth it, because it helped us forge a connection that’s unique and just for us, and it’s deep and meaningful but really silly and fun, too, and– and isn’t that what it’s all about, really?
Then it’s Lucille finally getting to see Angel’s collection of dolls, the customized ones and the ones that went untouched too, meeting them one by one and not only that but getting to meet his family one by one too, his dads and his little brother– and then it smash cuts to Angel meeting her family and saying a morbid fun fact about sea creatures that makes her mom wince and her mama cackle. It’s moving into her new apartment with Mellow and inviting him over just so he can see that the model of the solar system he returned to her now sits atop a shelf, right next to a collage she’s put together on the wall including photos of her and Angel doing things like drinking tea and watering plants in the Gardenia’s garden. It’s playfully asking Samantha what she thinks of the performance Lucille just gave at poetry night, and eagerly awaiting Angel’s translation.
W-We gotta keep living because even in the most stressful and scary situations you can find calm and ease and it’s– it can be because of someone you didn’t think, at first, could ever become such a comfort to have around– so comfortable you actually want to hear all the unsettling observations he has to say, even though that’s so unlike you, and it’s just because he means that much to you– to me. Life’s worth it because even when he saw me at my worst, Angel still wouldn’t let me drown in my own misery, so– so please, even when it’s hard– we can’t just let life pass us by, and we can’t just push people away, a-and that’s life, isn’t it? Oh, and we gotta keep livin’ so that even the most incomprehensible of beings can somehow make friends with the simplest ones! Everyone can share the gift of life, not just people!
And next it’s her and Azusa at a club, Lucille’s got her arm around the other’s shoulders and you can tell such a daring endeavor took some coaxing on Lucille’s part but you can also tell it was worth it by the look on Azusa’s face, and then it cuts to Lucille’s apartment where Azusa’s sleeping over and the two of them are recounting the nights events and Lucille’s convincing Azusa to just text the girl damn it! and then the two of them watch a movie, ostensibly some gay cult classic, before falling asleep halfway through with smiles on their faces. And then it’s the two of them at a cafe having a discussion about a fanfic the two of them are keeping up with, analyzing it as if it’s Shakespeare before Lucille insists on finding something Azusa can eat and she won’t take no for an answer. Then it’s Azusa meeting her moms and being introduced to them as Lucille’s best friend, the one who never left her side even when Lucille had to drag her back and remind her she isn’t made of stone but in fact made of love.
And– and life is so worth it because weird girls get to meet weird girls, and sometimes you end up in a situation where you shouldn’t make friends but you just can’t stop yourself from leaning on and trusting and cherishing someone who does the same, and eventually you start to recognize it and start to get that you’re there for each other and it’s a two-way street and when she pulls back you pull her back in, and– and so life is so important because in some way maybe it’s always a struggle to keep going but when you do you’re– I’m rewarded in laughing with her and crying with her, and it’s a gift, so then isn’t life a gift too?
Then it’s holding Juli’s hand as he knocks on the door to the home he left behind, after having helped him find the courage to return, and soon enough she’s hearing silly stories about his childhood from his abuela and finally getting to meet the other Luci (and they’re silhouettes but only for now, soon enough she’ll get to know them as they are) and then scolding Juli later in the evening for running away from such a wonderful gal before hugging him and letting him know she’s so proud of him. And then it’s the inverse with Juli getting to meet her moms, and him and Violet hitting it off in the way only two diva’s could before Juli finally gets one of his posters signed by her– and is encouraged to visit again soon though maybe not when her uncle Noel is around, then Luci giggles and says imagine lil’ Juli learnin’ that this would happen to him one day! And it’s Lucille learning how to crochet a Friendship Hoglet to return the favor, then it’s the two of them tired after a night on the town and her looking at him and saying for no reason but to make sure he knows– aren’t you glad that you promised to change for the better, and that both of us did it together?
And life has to keep happenin’ because sometimes you’ll think you can’t stand someone and then it turns out really y’can’t stand to live without ‘em, and– and bein’ alive gives you the chance to see someone in a new light and it helps you see yourself in a different way too, because they change you– he changed me for the better, he– Juli, he’s helped me accept myself and see myself as more than a total loser, he’s given me hope and given me so much of his heart and his love in a way I never coulda asked for, and… a-and so how could y’possibly argue against life when it means he gets to mess up and then gets to fix things? Fix things with me by his side, and… be happy, really happy, and– if the struggle and the pain of life is what it takes to really appreciate the significance of that, then I’ll take it every single time.
Then you see the interior of a museum, one containing all sorts of relics of centuries gone by– and smack dab in the middle of it all is Leofweard with sparkles in his eyes and a smile on his face as Lucille points out pieces here and there like a sword and a shield and things Leof has probably seen before but now she finally gets to see it with him. Next is the two of them sitting beneath a tree in a forest clearing, looking up at the sunset as Lucille asks so did the sanctuary live up to the hype? and Leof answers with a hug, then it’s Leof meeting her moms and before he goes Amber stops him to say thank you for protecting our little light. Then it’s Leof leaving this time with Morgehaet in hand–
… o-one sec, I… I just want to… imagine what it’d be like if he…
She wipes a tear from her eye, smiles, nods, keeps going–
–and then it fast-forwards to him returning and knocking on the door to Lucille’s apartment with a drawing he’s made of Butterpaw, her Warriorsona, and funnily enough she’s munching on a stick of butter as she opens the door then drops it as she sobs and tackles him, and then he sits inside on the floor with her just as he did all the way back then and he tells her stories about all the faces she’ll never quite get to see but now know all about her. Then it’s the two of them (and off to the side, Juli wearing something gaudy) at a Renaissance faire, and Lucille’s finally got a sword in her hands– he stands behind her with his hands guiding her own in the act of slashing a training dummy– then it’s her returning the favor by teaching him a new trick on his iPhone, and a few days later he’s FaceTime’ing her and she can’t stop herself from bursting into giggles at how funny the angle of his camera is making him look. It’s Leof reading her first new poem she’s written since she returned home and beginning to weep as he realizes it’s about him and Aylwine, then it’s him joining her family for the holidays, then it’s him just being there with her doing the most mundane things like going for a walk in the park or trying something she’s cooked or going on a trip to the beach and it’s just him, with her, not forever because it shouldn’t be forever, but sometimes, and that’s more than enough.
Life… life is– life is wonderful ‘cuz it’s– it’s like, y’know, impossible things happen somehow and they change you in ways you never could’ve dreamed of, like… like King Arthur gettin’ sent to the future and meetin’ you in a killing game and becomin’ a brother to y– … to me. To me, and– and life hurts sometimes too because y’gotta– y’gotta let go of people, ‘specially the ones you love more than anythin’, but– but even when it hurts life is worth it because it never has to be goodbye, not really, it can just be see you later and whether y’do or not, they’re always there with you. Like how… how he’ll always be there with me, whenever I do somethin’ brave, or whenever I’m strong, or whenever I’m selfless, because I didn’t know what it really meant to be any of those things until he taught me.
Then it’s the hustling and bustling streets of New York City, and the camera pans up from following two pairs of shoes to show you that it’s Mellow and Luci walking along the sidewalk hand in hand. You see them go to a pizzeria, then you see them in a big Broadway theatre watching none other than Les Miserables, then you see them in the sanctuary carving their initials into a tree right beneath the same spot where Lucille’s mothers did the same, just as she told Juli she wanted to do someday when she found The One. Next it’s Mellow introducing herself to Luci’s moms and Violet frantically asking what do you mean you’re also an alien?! before her and Amber watch in awe as Luci and Mellow both shift into their alien forms, the two of them laughing too hard at their silly little reveal to get any words out for a few moments. Then you see the inside of an empty apartment, and the door is unlocked by Lucille as she leads Mellow in and says with tears in her eyes– Melly, we did it! … then you watch, at double speed, as the two of them go through the arduous ordeal of bringing in and unpacking bags and boxes with some help from, undoubtedly, multiple people that are present in this very space and time.
Life is like…
Life… is worth it. Because… y’know. Because of love.
And because love is… is worth all the… difficulty.
–and then it’s Luci waking up shaking and sobbing because she had another nightmare, her third one this week, and hiding away in a corner and then Mellow’s sitting by her side though a little ways away and holding a paw out for Luci to take and after a few minutes she does even if she can’t quite look at Mellow yet and even if she murmurs I don’t know when I’ll be able to trust you again. Then it’s the two of them going out on a date when Luci notices a fire extinguisher somewhere in the restaurant and it doesn’t always happen like this but sometimes she just has a bad day and so she starts to hyperventilate and Mellow takes her outside and takes deep breaths with her and there isn’t a word said for a while but eventually Luci says I don’t know if it’ll ever go away and then pleading please don’t ever go away before they embrace and they kiss and she knows that despite how long it might take to really and truly trust the woman she loves again she’s able to trust that Mellow won’t turn her back on her, not unless Luci asked her to, and they both know Luci could and maybe they both ask themselves if she should, but of course she won’t and of course she was never going to.
… life is worth it because… sometimes, you’ll spend your whole life believing you will never, ever find the one. You’ll dream about it, write about it, cry about it, and it still won’t happen and you’ll believe that’s just how it is because you’ve done something or another to warrant this kind of suffering, because– going unloved in the way you crave is… is what you deserve, because if it isn’t what you deserve, then why can’t you have it– and then the answer is… is simple. It’s just because the stars haven’t aligned. And then one day they do. And then you…
And then I found her, and then I fell for her.
It’s Lulu and Melly slowly floating down from above until their feet touch the ground of what looks like a cloud except swirling with impossible colors and lights, and you know that this is Xauronoiaxos or what it used to be or maybe what it still is. It’s Lulu following Melly as they arrive on Fortuna, and finally getting to hear their language and see their sights and try to let go of the rage she feels towards the whole damn kingdom for how they hurt Melly. It’s Lulu and Melly staring at the camera with a fish-eye lens until you realize in this shot the camera is a bubble and the two of them grin as they pop it. It’s–
Huh!? It’s Azusa helping Luci into her dress as she gets ready to walk down the aisle and be legally wed to Mellow, her loyal knight turned loyal wife?!
W-Wait! Wait, that’s way too far ahead! That’s– that’s so embarrassing! Don’t look at that part! Frick! I-I promise it’s just me bein’ a romantic, d-don’t let it distract you from my overall point about rebuildin’ trust and everythin’– what was I saying–
She clears her throat,
Y’know, I-I fell for her, and– and she spoke in a way I’d never heard before that felt like music to my ears, and she was so fascinated by me and what we had only grew deeper the more I learned of her soul and what she learned of and she– she wanted to protect me and spend the rest of her life with me and then– then she… she broke my heart, and she made me cry, and she betrayed my trust, and she… and…
And I am still choosing her anyway.
Because– isn’t that life?
I-It’s finding the love you always wanted and then when it gets tough, y’don’t let it go. Y’just hold it closer, and whether it ends bad or not– you– I don’t… I don’t care.
All I care about is… tryin’ again, with the girl I love. All I care about is makin’ my second chance at life one I spend with her.
She takes a breath, nods, and her words spill out quicker than before–
And life is worth it because of family,
And you see Lucille collapsing into Violet and Amber’s arms, all three of them ending up on the floor as they cry until they start to laugh and Luci has so much to tell them. It’s Luci being thrown a welcome home party, one attended by at least three dozen folks and maybe you ask yourself huh so that must be the aunt who gave her that stress mushroom toy or is that Amber’s little sister, I swear I saw a show she directed once or just how much love did Lucille never truly realize she’d been given by so many people and you already know the answer– you know and she knows that it’s more than she can put into words, and she’ll spend the rest of her life accepting it and giving it back better than ever before.
Family, even when they’re… even when they can’t be with you–
And you see Lucille and her moms looking up at the night sky, and you see see Lucille gently rest a finger against the birthmark on her cheek before resting it against the birthmark on her other hand, and then you hear Amber say I wish we coulda told you about them so much sooner and Lucille finally getting to say no, it’s okay, and– and thank you, remember, they wanted me to thank you and– and finally understand just how much you and Mom have done for me– and it’s the two of them embracing before Luci thinks aloud I wonder if they’d be proud of me and her mom gently correcting her with they /are/ proud of you, right now as we speak and then she waves at the stars and calls out hey there, Druxin and Eniloxa, and Luci waves too.
Family, because friends can be family too.
That’s– that’s why…
She braces herself. She speaks.
That’s what I got to say.
Life is worth it because we get to meet people, and we get to love them.
That’s my final ans–
Suddenly the film stops and it isn’t supposed to, as indicated by the surprise in Luci’s face. She looks between it and the projector, furrows her brow, then moves to try and fix the malfunctioning device before there’s something on the screen again:
you’re forgetting someone.
… h-huh? Who?
This doesn’t make sense. What more can she possibly say? Isn’t this it? Isn’t that the point? But then–
what about
… oh,
you?
Oh.
The projector switches off but the question stays on screen. She sits on a chair that’s appeared between her and it, stares at what’s being asked of her and has to say it aloud for it to make sense–
… why is my life worth living for–
just for me?
She knew this part was coming.
It’s why she kept switching perspectives throughout her monologue, why I became you or we because it was so difficult to recognize her own individuality and impact and it still is because how could she? She’s never done it. Never, not once in her entire life, has Lucille been able to sit down and look at herself and think about all the things she’s done and feelings she’s felt and thoughts she’s had and say that not in spite of but because of it all she l–
lo– …
…
Okay.
Here’s…
Here’s me, all of me.
And…
Here’s why…
I’m worth it.
[♪ ♪ ♪]
There’s a new movie playing now but this time it’s all real. It’s the past, it’s memories dug up from the deepest depths, it’s her life up until now– all through her eyes.
… when I was really small my moms gave me my first medkit. I didn’t get why I had to tote it around all the time and I thought that even with the pretty purse they were givin’ me for it I’d look so stupid and kids would make fun of me and– and sometimes they did.
You’re Lucille and you’re walking through the hallway staring at the floor and trying to shrink yourself even though you’re already the tallest in your grade. Kids are laughing nearby and you don’t actually know whether it’s because of your medkit or not but you assume it is and this is the beginning of a lifetime of assumptions that you are being watched and mocked at every turn.
But… but they insisted. And it took them tellin’ me to my face for me to realize that I was– I was… delicate. Fragile. Not just mentally, not at that age, but– but my body was. My inhaler and my bandages and my EpiPen– they… they told me I needed them, needed them, because… if somethin’ went wrong and they weren’t there… they didn’t want me to get hurt. And I was so upset about it that I ran into my room and I hid away until my mama came in and sat next to me on my bed while I was cryin’ into my pillow, and she said Lucille, I want you to understand that no matter what you’re told by anyone else in the world– you’re perfect.
You’re sitting alone at lunch, you’re maybe 6 years old, and you’re alone not just because nobody wants to sit with you but because all the feelings of so many people around you are so overwhelming today in particular just like all the noises and sounds and lights so you just play on your DS and you’ll cry about it later, because it’s just another reminder that–
Still, y’know, I-I knew I didn’t… belong. I knew that… the world was a pretty… c-cold place. Even if my moms protected me from it, sheltered me from it– I-I understood that someone like me wasn’t meant for Earth. Someone like me, who’s always been so… scared, and confused, and– s-small.
You’re 7 years old and you’re banging around in your room and screaming and your mom runs in and she calms you down and eventually as she holds you close she asks sweetheart what’s wrong? and you say I stepped on a bug and then for the first time you say I think I’m evil and I think I’m going to Hell and eventually you feel a teardrop fall onto your head and it takes you years and years to realize it’s because your mom thought the same thing at your age and she would continue to spend every day trying to stop your mind from resembling her own. It would not work, not until after you died.
… but. But, still– so many people fought for me. My moms worked… r-really hard to teach me to stand up for myself and… and encouraged a lot of hobbies and interests and– and stuff like that. My extended family did the same, y’know, and– and teachers, and neighbors, they always liked m-me for some reason, and… a-and eventually I made friends my age who did the same, but– but I didn’t get why they liked me. I didn’t like me. I-I was so young, too young to feel so much hatred towards myself. But I still did, because I couldn’t understand myself, and… and it was like that for… a long time.
You’re in middle school now and you’re hanging out with friends after school and then your vision loses focus and you just sit there staring at nothing until someone asks if you’re okay and you say I don’t think I’ll ever be okay and, well, that’s true for the rest of your life, your first life. Next you’re at a birthday party being thrown just for you and you’ve got gifts and cake and suddenly you break down sobbing because you can’t even properly appreciate it because you know you’re not worth it, you’re not worth all of this, you’re not worth so much love, and you run away from your own party and they find you curled up in the backyard staring up at the sky and begging some higher power to take you somewhere else, to the place you were meant to be because you know there’s a place for you out there, a softer place, a warm place, a place where you aren’t a burden.
I-I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do with my life because I didn’t think I had a long time to live, n-no way I’d make it past 21, and– and I thought I’d always pale in comparison to my moms who, who were changin’ the world and makin’ it better and I was just their weird and messed up daughter and– and even though they always said they were so proud of me and loved me so much all the time I-I… I honestly wished they weren’t proud of me, that they hated me, ‘cuz– bein’ a failure like that would’ve been s-so much easier if they did.
You’re 14 and you’re seeing a psychologist and you overhear her tell your moms I just don’t know how to help her and you never see her again after that but you never forget what she said, then you’re seeing a therapist and you just lie to her until she thinks maybe you’re better and it’s the only proof that you could’ve made for a pretty great actress if you wanted it. You’re 16 and your lockscreen isn’t a person it’s Cynthia from Pokemon and it’s so funny that you end up crying about it. You’re 18 and you’ve been accepted into Columbia and the day you find out is the last day of your first life that you’re honestly, truly happy without any strings attached, because the next day you realize you have no idea what you’re doing and you don’t know what you want to do and you break something that costs a lot of money and it’ll be replaced but that can’t fix the shame you feel no matter how much Mama reassures you that it’s okay, it’s really okay, you’re going to be okay. You know you won’t be. You are correct until you die.
T-Then somehow I made it to… to college, and…
You’re 19 and you know what night it is. This is the night before your sophomore year of college and suddenly you’re breathing heavy and sweating and you think you’re going to die you’ve never felt so much dread and you black out and when you come to you’re in bed and your moms tell you that you’re going to take a few more days off and looking back now you realize that was the closest you’d ever come to awakening as an Axosesian before you were meant to until the night you died. Then a few more days off becomes a week and a month and you don’t go back. Your friends text you and you say you just need some time to yourself and you never get back to them after that. You’d been told by a mentor of yours, one of the most esteemed professors there, that you could revolutionize whatever field you decided to study. You decide that must be a lie. You give up on astronomy. You give up on yourself.
… I-I spent… over two years. Withering away. I wouldn’t leave the house for days at a time, I-I’d just hide away in my room on my computer and fantasize of what it’d be like if I lived somewhere that I was made for. A few months in my moms said I didn’t have to work but I hadto go for walks once a week a-and I did, and I visited the forest I used to love so much a-and I got sad ‘cuz I didn’t know how to love it as much as I used to, because the colors look dull now.
You’re 22 and you’ve returned to community college and you still live at home you just take a bus to and from or one of your moms drop you off whenever they’re not working. You don’t declare a major. You just try to function. You make a few friends, join a robotics club, and fast forward it’s the end of the year and you talk to your moms about how you don’t think you’ll ever fit in, and they reassure you otherwise but you sense it– sense so much guilt from the two of them as if they’re hiding something from you, and you don’t ask about it but you hold onto it and it stabs into your palms as you clench your fists and the bleeding never stops. Then you have a family movie night, and you have ice cream. And it’s nice. The next day you go to a cafe ran by a woman named Hayami for their weekly poetry night and you share something you’ve written and people are crying in the audience and Hayami comes up to you and takes your hands and tells you that you have a gift and asks you to please come back again next week, everyone would like to hear more. You never go back because that way there would be a few less people in this world you didn’t let down by showing them you as you really are.
… then I decided– I-I wanted to try somethin’ new, and… maybe it’d be fun, so I tried out for this movie and I somehow got the part and my moms let me go, a-and I think it’s because they knew it’d convince me I never wanted to act, and they woulda been right whether all this happened or not. And I c-came here, and eventually I died, a-and someone killed me, because I’m– I’m a– I w– was? I–
Doubt comes in. You– no, Lucille, it’s just her this time, she starts breathing heavier and heavier and the sensation of it is startling because she forgot what it was really like– after her death any gasps or sighs or deep or shuddering or wheezing breaths were at least on some level conscious, an attempt to cling to normalcy, and now normalcy is back and it’s telling her she needs to stop right here and now because she’s always been right about this always been right about how awful she is and how much she’s hurt people just by existing and living and dying and coming back as this excuse of a life she is and always has been and always will be this testament to how maybe life should just die after all–
Because I’m a bad– p-person–
Suddenly in the top right corner of the screen you see Evil Points: 0 and then you’re a toddler and you kick a rock because you’re frustrated and then it’s Evil Points: 1 and then this keeps happening. You remember every single little thing you’ve done that you’ve convinced yourself was unforgivable and bad, and there’s so many that each scene plays quicker and quicker until you can’t comprehend it and it’s Evil Points: 27,159 and counting–
But then
but then.
Then,
suddenly–
[♪ ♪ ♪]
Suddenly you’re sitting next to Jeanne and comforting them then you’re apologizing to Red with cupcakes then you’re defending one Alex against people being mean about him defending you at the party then you’re telling Ashley with a smile that she’s the best rival you could’ve asked for then you’re finally lifting a weight off of Amara as she finally tells you about the sister she saw in you then you’re with the other Alex days after their body was forced to shatter yours and you’re embracing them then you’re reaching out to Esme with gratitude and friendship despite it all and you’re making a poke bowl for Piper as you work together to cheer Amara up–
… and then I confronted all of this.
And I listened to the people around me.
And I realized…
I-I realized–
I’ve helped people–
A-And I’ve– s-somehow, here and there– I’ve been s-selfless and kind and generous and forgiving and loving and– and I’ve made people laugh and made them feel safe and made them feel seen and heard all their troubles and gave all the advice I could and–
Then you’re finally taking Myles’ hand and sitting down on a bench and deciding to build the bridge again and you’re making sure Tomie knows that she’s more dedicated to helping people than she’ll admit and you’re confiding in Wyatt that you’d do the same thing as he did and making sure he knows he isn’t alone in that regard and you’re taking the apology Angel is giving you and admitting you didn’t really need it at all and you’re just happy to have him as a friend and you’re making sure Juli upholds his end of the deal to grow and be better and make sure he knows you’ll do everything you can to leave here with him and sitting by Leof in the fog as he hears the laughter and joy of a time he was torn away from and with tears in your eyes you’re asking him to finally introduce you to everyone he loves and you realize you’re one of those lucky and loved souls too and you’re telling Mellow you’d do it all over again and you love her and you can’t forgive it yet can’t trust her yet but one day you will if she takes your hand and you’re pleading with her let’s go home–
And I…
… I-I always… have.
I’ve…
I’ve always been…
Lucille is just staring at the screen from where she sits right now and she’s crying and her teeth are clenched to hold herself together as tears fall and she hiccups and sniffles and it’s all catching up to her as she realizes–
I’ve always been enough.
Then you’re helping a new friend study and being as patient as can be and they tell you they finally get this equation and then you’re working up the courage to tell the barista she’s really pretty and she smiles and tells you that made her day and then you’re typing in chatrooms showing support to people having a difficult time and messaging friends you know are going through something so they know you’re there for them and then you’re doing community service just like you were raised to and the organizer tells you they couldn’t have made it through the day without you and you’re getting younger and younger and realizing just how kind you’ve been, how gentle you’ve been, how understanding you’ve been, how accepting you’ve been, how forgiving you’ve been–
How you’ve been all of these things,
for anyone but yourself
and now you’ve been given a second chance to try and do that
to try and finally–
–and your Evil Points are decreasing by the millisecond down from five digits to four to three to two to one to but here’s the thing here’s what you finally understand,
There weren’t ever any Evil Points at all!
They’re just– Points!
You are not evil, you are not good, you are just you, and you are Lucille and Galexi and Folie and Galuci and Lulu and Ducks and little light and so many more letters connected together connected to you that make up this one wonderful and miraculous being who is just that. Because you–
Because Lucille never quite let it go even after she died she still believed somewhere deep down there was karma left to dispense and she still had to pay for something or another but as the points go up and then go down it strikes her that she could have a million Evil Points and it wouldn’t matter not one bit because she’s always rigged the whole thing against herself since everything she did was evil and bad because she was evil and bad so it was an inherent thing but–
But now here at the end of all things she comes to terms with herself, with every atom that she consists of, with every tear she’s shed and laugh she’s had, with good and bad and settling somewhere in between and outside of them too and that doesn’t mean her journey is over in fact it’s really just begun but what it means is this is the end of a 24 year long chapter of I hate myself and I always will and a new lifelong chapter of today I’ve finally figured out what it means to–
("I wanna tell ‘er I’m sorry, and I love ‘er, and I’m tryin’ to change.”
One brother admitted.
“So kinda like I did with you. Though I reckon I didn’t say the love part aloud, did I?”)
And I,
(“My telling thee that thou caused it is… I do it out of love.”
The other brother explained,
“this is love. I only want for thee to keep growing.”)
I’ve always…
(–”I’m sorry,”
Melly whispered,)
“I love you too.”)
I’ve always had love.
and then
you’re in a pod
and you are scared and confused
and you’re crying because all your tiny little self knows is that you want help
and the pod door opens and you hear words you won’t remember until this very moment.
~… Violet. Violet, look at… look at this.
~I. … I. … what do we. What do we do.
~I-I can– l-let me–
and you are lifted out of the pod and this is the first time you are in your mama’s arms and she says
~What we do is, u-uhm.
and she kisses you on the forehead and she answers the question when she says to you
~We– we love you.
and the other figure cups your cheek and the first words your mom says to you are
~… welcome to the world, wonderful, wonderful you.
Then the screen is a mirror and Lucille stares at herself, her human self, and then she shifts and she is an Axosesian and she realizes this is the first time she has gotten to see herself in this body as she’s meant to see herself in this body–
This is the first time she’s gotten to see all of herself alive and breathing.
And as an Axosesian her sphere of a head no longer glimmers with gold, instead it’s an almost translucent white but the smile on her face is so very visible. The rest of her no longer shines with gems and all that, she’s just– a color like green, some spots darker some spots lighter, but all the way it’s meant to be.
She’s the way she’s meant to be.
A-And life is worth it because even–
Because even a girl like me can look in the mirror and say– and finally, finally mean it–
She pauses. Then, she whispers in Senxias–
… I’m beautiful.
I’m–
I’m beautiful.
Then a hand comes to rest over her heart–
… life is worth it.
Because I finally….
and home is where the heart is, so–
then the mirror is a screen and there’s
there’s coordinates.
Galexi remembers these coordinates now. They’ve always been with her. She just hadn’t lived long enough to recall.
She knows–
She knows that these coordinates tell her where Xauronoiaxos is.
She knows–
That it’s still there, just as she hoped and believed against all odds, and it’s waiting for her.
~But when we reunite, our little Galexi, we will have so much more to share with you. It’s only a matter of time.
And Lucille gasps as the screen becomes a mirror again and she starts to laugh until she starts to sob overcome with joy and love and gratitude and hope and all these beautiful things she never thought she was worthy of but now knows she has been all along and she shifts back to human then to Axosesian over and over again until it doesn’t matter which form she takes as she says this last little thing because no matter what it’s the truth.
~Love is the language of the universe. We speak it as fluently as you. Please, love her with your whole heart every single day. She is our hope, she is our future, and she is our joy. We know she can be yours, too.
I.
~–… I think all you’ve ever given her is love.
Life is worth living,
~–… I love you more than anything and anyone, Lucille.
Leof holds his hourglass, and just like he grits his teeth, his grip on his own life tightens. Every single part of this body that’s still his but isn’t fights against the notion of stories. Stories. He’s so tired of stories, so tired of his life being a story.
Can’t he just– be? Isn’t that enough? For once, can’t that be enough? To just–
To just– just–
‘Where I am from — when I am from — I have made enough of a reputation for myself that people like to… Tell stories. Good ones, thankfully, but– it is not rare for me to hear of some grand feat I accomplished on an adventure I never had.’
He told Lucille about this a long time ago, back when they were still Folie and Inkheart.
‘It upset me a great deal when I was younger,’ he’d admitted. And then he’d said, ‘Life was just kind enough to let me grow older, and with time, I have made my peace.’
That peace he made– when did he lose it?
It’s hard to say other than at some point after experiencing the discrete mundanity he’d been missing for years. It’s exactly as he told Amara; he really has enjoyed this time spent being no one of great importance.
But that had already stopped being true well before he said it, hadn’t it? Not on the same scale as being written into legends, sure, but he’d already become someone important to Sam, to Ronnie, and to the three curious children who were always eager to spend more time with the knight living in their grandparents’ basement flat. And now, here on this godforsaken ship, there were even more people he’d become someone of great importance to.
They were important to him too. Are important, both the people standing here now and those who aren’t, and this thought alone is enough to spur him forward past the overwhelming fury, resentment, and exhaustion that’s built up over these last several months, reaching for that peace he made for himself so long ago.
Reaching– reaching– and reaching until finally, he finds it again in the sudden recollection of the very first story about himself he ever heard.
[♪♪♪]
“Come thou, Leofweard. Sit with thy mother and help to calm thy sister.”
The gentle sound of his mother’s voice carries through the air, bringing with it a wash of oak gall ink across vellum. In this private bid for existence, the farmhouse that Leof calls home draws itself to life, swaddling the universe in its warm walls as lines of dark brown fill with color.
As the scene settles into itself, Leofweard, four years old, drops the piece of charcoal with which he’d been drawing sheep on the wall and does as told, climbing into the wooden chair in front of the open hearth with his mother. Petite as she is, there’s enough room for both of them, especially when she puts an arm around him and he presses himself into her side.
Cuddled up against her, he places his small hand atop his mother’s rounded stomach. A second later, he feels his unborn sister kick hard — (It’s a girl, his grandmother insisted, and she’s never been wrong before) — from inside their mother’s belly, and then once more before her movement steadily begins to calm. After a moment of this contented quiet, Leofweard lifts his head to look curiously up at his mother and ask a question he’s wondered a few times now.
“Why doth she stop kicking for me?”
“Not for thee, love. Because of thee. She knoweth now that she is safe.”
“Because of me?”
“Aye. ‘Tis in thy name, after all.” She stops, catching herself with a sun-bright laugh. “Ah! But I’ve not yet told thee thy name’s story, have I?”
Leofweard shakes his head, and his mother pulls him tighter against her side as she looks into the hearth and begins spinning her tale with the same gentle ease she spins wool with each day.
“Let us see, then… Thou wert still a small thing in my belly, just like thy sister now. The winter before thou wert born was harsh, but thy father still insisted on keeping snares out to catch rabbits. To keep both of you well fed, he would say, and he would check them every other day no matter the weather.”
As she speaks, Leofweard’s eyes follow hers to the hearth, where the tale she weaves plays out in a child’s imagined bending and dancing of flame into the recognizable shapes of rabbits and people.
“‘Twas one such day, no different than any other until he made for the door. The moment he did– oh, the fit thou beganst to throw was near enough to knock me clear over! Thy father rushed to see what was the matter, and no sooner than he reached me didst thou stop. The very same thing happened when he tried again to leave, and then a third time after that. Come the fourth, I begged for him to forget the rabbits, so certain I was thou didst not want for him to leave us. Smart man that he is, he stayed.
“When he checked the snares at sunrise, what greeted him was not freshly caught game, but the fresh tracks of no less than three giant boars. Had thy father been there when they passed through…” Here, Leofweard’s mother trails off momentarily at the memory, and she gives him a light squeeze. “Our beloved protector, I called thee when I learned. ‘Twas thy grandfather who suggested we name thee as such in the old tongue.”
“I did that?” Leofweard’s eyes and voice are filled with wonder until another question crosses his mind, and his face scrunches up in confusion while looking up at his mother again. “But… So, wait– how did I know?”
“I can’t say. But I felt it then, the special sort of love which liveth in thee, and thy sister feeleth it now. I am certain thou wilt take good care of her the same way thou tookest care of thy father.”
Smiling warmly, his mother places her hand over his still resting atop her stomach and leans down to press a gentle kiss to the top of his head. “Just as we take care of thee, my little sunbeam.”
“…All lives become stories eventually,” Leof concedes to the captive universe.
Young Leofweard and his mother are swept away in another wash of ink, and all around, what started as a single scene is replaced by a childhood hewn in the strokes of a homemade brush.
“Even the most mundane parts become tales we pass along. Especially those parts, because nobody would ever think them important enough to remember otherwise.”
These storied memories melt in and out of each other, dancing through moment after moment of a simple life. In one, Leofweard learns to braid his mother’s hair while his sister’s is still too short. In another, his sisters take turns making him toss them into a haypile. His father shows him how to work the earth, his grandparents teach him why they must take care of it, and he understands his responsibility to the animals they keep without needing to be taught.
Each important significant memory is woven together by countless moments of forgettable mundanity. Running and playing with the other kids in their village, greeting and helping neighbors, song and dance between long hours of work– the simple joy of life being lived despite what hardships arise along the way.
“And yet… It is these small moments that feel so unimportant when they happen which give our lives and our stories their meaning.”
Once more, the ink settles into a single scene, another story now plucked from the collection of Leof’s life and allowed to play out in full. This time, the universe is entreated to a bustling Heallwick, bursting with life, movement, and color. Ribbons and flowers cling to buildings and people in equal measure, and the laughter and song which fills the air further solidifies the festival cheer that has overtaken the village.
This particular story takes place at the village’s center, in which stands a large stone with a slanted but walkable surface. Embedded at its highest point is a sword, only its hilt and barely an inch of dull blade visible. A large group of boys in their early to late teens stands around the stone, taking turns climbing it and attempting to pull the sword free. Gathered around them is a large crowd of villagers come to spectate this little tradition, cheering after each attempt despite them all ending in failure.
The only boy of the same age in this crowd of spectators is Leofweard, about thirteen years old, lanky from a year of growing taller than his cousins, and hair pulled into a braid tied messily by hands much smaller than his. That same pair of hands now rests on either side of his head, his youngest sister, Cecilia, perched and held securely atop his shoulders to better see the festivities.
A man steps forward through the crowd, coming to a stop beside them. Even in Leofweard’s periphery, the man’s silken tunic stands out in a sea of finer wool and linens reserved for special occasions, but Leofweard pays him no mind–
“Hail thee, boy.”
–until he’s addressed directly. Well aware that he’s the only boy not currently at the stone and of an age worth addressing like this, Leofweard turns his head to see who he now recognizes as Heallwick’s manor lord looking back with a smile.
With an obligatory politeness, Leofweard nods his head in greeting. “Hail you, m’lord.”
“Wilt thou not try for Morgehæt with the rest?” the lord asks with visible intrigue.
“Nay, m’lord.” Leofweard smiles now himself, eyes returning to the stone when Cecilia rapidly pats his head to direct his attention back to it as the next in a line of prospective heroes begins his ascent to the legendary blade. “I’ve no use for a sword in the fields.”
The exchange ends with that, the lord’s response a hearty laugh before his attention is swept away in the festivities as well. On his other side, hidden before from Leofweard’s view by the lord’s figure, a boy his age and dressed in silk as fine as the lord’s stares past the man. The look on his face, eyes now stuck on Leofweard’s, is one of quiet awe.
“Hidden within these insignificant moments are stories that people will cherish for a lifetime and beyond.”
The scene wipes away, bleeding into a field of grain and two figures: one within and one a short distance away.
“So insignificant a moment was this one when I lived it that I would not come to learn of Aylwine’s part of the story until he showed up at my family’s fields the very next day.”
“Hail you, friend!” greets Aylwine from beyond the field, overly polite in his attempt at drawing Leofweard’s attention.
Being addressed so formally by a boy he only knows as the lord’s son is enough to make Leofweard stop in the middle of what he’s doing, the roots of the weed in his hand partly exposed. He looks at Aylwine with visible confusion. “Hail. Need ye something?”
“Have ye a moment to speak? I– when my father asked you about Morgehæt yesterday, it… I wanted to–”
“Mine apologies,” Leofweard cuts him off, motioning to the half-pulled weed and then to the field around him, “But I’ve no spare time for entertaining the little lordling when there’s still work to be done.”
Despite being given such a curt dismissal, Aylwine takes no offense. Instead, he walks right up to the field’s edge, eyes shining with renewed determination.
“What work? Can ye teach it to me?”
“Um. Can I what?”
“The work! Teach me how to do it, and I’ll help you get it done. Then we’ll have plenty of time to talk!”
Staring incredulously at this boy offering to pull weeds in expensive silk, Leofweard feels the first butterfly of what will become many flutter to life in his stomach. Then he laughs, bright and warm, and motions for Aylwine to join him.
“Aye! Suppose we will.”
Grinning, Aylwine takes a step into the field, and the scene ends in another wash of dark ink.
“Because these… They are the stories that weave our lives together.”
It’s the same as before; lines melt together in the same disjointed, fluid way that memories eventually do in the mind, and the universe is swept into another few years of life simply being lived.
The only difference now is Aylwine’s constant presence, the two boys growing into young men side by side. Leofweard continues teaching his friend the ways of a worldly life, and Aylwine teaches him how to read and write in return. Between hours of fieldwork, of lessons, of two worlds disconnected, they venture into the woods and its clearings to steal moments alone for games, conversation, and as they grow older, for held hands and the shy kiss of lovers still too young to fully understand their own hearts.
“They are the stories that prepare us for worse ones to come–”
The longer the ink swirls and dances, the more chaotic the movement becomes. Eventually, the chaos culminates into the same village center pictured before, no longer full of cheer and laughter. The only life seen now is Aylwine, on the ground, back pressed against the fabled stone, and eyes wide with mortal terror at the frenzied dragon looming above him. Leofweard, seventeen years old, stands at the center’s edge from where he’d been directing other villagers away.
The ensuing flurry of movement and splattering ink is true to life in how quickly everything happens. The dragon reaches forward, seizing Aylwine’s head in its massive claws and opening its mouth. In the same moment, Leofweard’s body moves before his mind can tell it to; he sprints his way up the stone’s slanted surface, thoughtlessly grabs Morgehæt’s hilt, and pulls.
When he leaps forward, the sword comes with him. The back of the dragon’s throat goes dark, sparks meant to ignite its fire dying out mere seconds before they can as Heallwick’s legendary blade impales straight down through its open maw. Both the dragon and Leofweard fall to the ground, and both fill the air with screamed fury as the young man who now holds a sword for the first time in his life wrenches the blade free with a messy splattering of blood. Clambering to his feet before the dragon can right itself, Leofweard gracelessly brings the sword down on the monster’s throat.
Bright light bursts forth from the blade of the promised tomorrow, and with it, the scene ends.
“That give us something to hold onto when those darker times do come–”
New ink quickly begins to fill the empty space left behind. The features of these memories are less clear, more disjointed, quick sweeps and strokes of a brush trying to hurry through.
Time spent forced away from home, enduring grueling lessons in swordsmanship he never wanted to learn from the same old knight who taught Aylwine. A dangerous refusal of knighthood and the associated military service, and Aylwine’s quick-thinking suggestion to charge Leofweard only with slaying the monsters starting to appear in greater numbers, Morgehæt making him the only person capable of it.
A young man, soon to be twenty, seeing firsthand the horrors wrought by greedy men– the human threat now at their doorstep because of his lord’s refusal to help people who aren’t his own– a village that once stood until it was beset by a mighty and terrible dragon whose flame razed everything to the ground– blood and bone and fire and ash and–
The funeral of Aylwine’s father, brushed over quickly before the ink lulls at Aylwine’s official inheritance of his position as lord. The scene melts seamlessly into Leofweard’s knighting, which ends in the traditional fashion of a ceremonial kiss from lord to knight. It lingers a second too long.
“That remind us why it’s all worth it in the end–”
After this brief lull, the pacing picks back up, faster now, more jumbled, chaotic, fluid as the two men travel together. They move from community to community, searching to rebuild trust and peace between their people as crazed monsters are felled along the way. They meet Linota in the village of Fugolley, a brilliant woman who will change their lives and everyone else’s as she helps pinpoint the root cause of the sickness blighting their home and the man responsible for it. Through trial after trial, day after day, they continue ever onward, the land and its people steadily restored to health and peace as more than a decade of tireless work plays out in mere moments.
And in one of those moments, Leofweard, clad in well-worn armor, raises Morgehæt above his head. Beneath him lays a coward, one powerful enough and so desperate to live that he exhausts every last bit of magic he’s stolen to shunt his rightful executioner through time and space– because the wizard Godefridus knows that nothing less will keep Leofweard of Heallwick from finding him again.
“That it always has been–”
Brown ink suddenly bursts with modern saturation as everything moves faster still, more polaroid than manuscript, bright and confusing and frightening. A renaissance fair, two people who can understand him, who believe him, who open their home and their hearts in one of the most terrifying times of Leofweard’s life.
“And it always will be.”
They teach him, and they help him, and their grandchildren teach and help him just as well, and slowly but surely but so very quickly in this overwhelming here and now that Leof rapidly flips through under the gaze of the universe, he finds his footing in this future he was never supposed to see.
“Because stories are a testament to life persisting from one insignificant moment to the next– a beautiful thing, and something that I am honored to have experienced like this despite the cost I paid to do so.”
In a fraction of a second, an excuse to broaden his search for a way home presents itself, and he takes it.
“…But still. No matter how important they are for sharing and connecting our lives, life itself — being alive — it is all too great for any story to ever fully encompass.”
All at once, the frantic painting of memories stops. No more ink. No more photos.
No more stories.
Just Leof, the universe, and a mounting pressure in the air.
“So that is enough about them.”
A pressure that builds, and builds, and builds, so relentless that it threatens to crush even this thing of unfathomable power and possibility. And beneath it–
Leof stands tall, head held high, and the hourglass held tighter than before.
“They are not what this is really about, and they never have been. Ye know it as well as I do. This is about life itself. About living.”
Because what Leof forces upon the universe in this moment is not another story; he’s done with those. The crushing, relentless, and inescapable pressure now pressing in at his command–
[♪♪♪]
This is the weight of being alive.
The hourglass erupts into warm sunlight that coalesces in his palm before traveling outward and across the rest of his body. Everywhere it touches, steel and opal burn away, leaving behind flesh that has stitched its cracked surface back together with scars he will find no shame in wearing.
Blood rushes through his body once more, and it boils.
With it, the pressure rises higher, presses down heavier, and grows– grows– grows, infinitely expanding because the weight he demands the universe shoulder alone in this moment is a burden meant to be shared by every living thing.
A burden he has been glad to share with each person now fighting the same impossible fight as him. For all the suffering they have endured here, the least they deserve is for this all-knowing thing which knows nothing to experience the weight of what it means to live their lives.
“The universe– you would not be what ye are without us! The way ye watch us now, conscious of what ye see and hear and think– are ye really daft enough to believe ye would be able to do all of it without life having taught you what an existence like this is in the first place!?”
It’s the weight of Alex telling him she believed him long before anyone had any reason to, a quiet and simple kindness that would later be used against her; of overcoming that horror and pain so that she might make it back to a place he knows only through the grain of a VHS tape. If he’s lucky, he’ll get to see it in person too while they finally perfect their eight century spanning prank.
Of their other Alex, a walking testament to life’s innate calling to simply live one way or another. The weight of survival in spite of everything, both here and well before, on a farm that instilled in him the weight of being loved– something that Leof knows can be just as hard to carry as the rest.
It’s the weight of Jeanne’s rage, alight with the same fire that has warmed homes and hearts for centuries. She carries with her the truth that fury and kindness are often one and the same, and with it a kindred understanding that has made carrying that heavy truth a little easier for him too. Leof can only hope it worked both ways, and that it has become easier for them too.
It’s knowing that with the weight of being alive comes the weight of inevitable death, and the way Angel cradles both in his heart with such delicate, reverent care. The grace he carries them with is enough to trick you into thinking he must not find them so heavy after all, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. He knows their weight– feels it, just like everyone else. But he does so from a place of true understanding and acceptance that Leof hopes he might one day find himself.
Understanding and acceptance, which are in themselves part of the weight they are all burdened with, some more than others. Azusa hooks a monster’s pelt to her shoulders and drags the weight of it behind her, tricking herself into thinking it’s her own. But Leof has had the joy of watching the pelt fall away behind her, bit by bit, picked apart by the persistence of friends and life’s gift of change– something she has done here in such a lovely way.
It’s an unkind world piling more and more and more onto this already unbearable weight of life, clipping the wings of a girl and hiding from her the sky she deserved for no reason beyond it was hers to have. Despite every terrible, inexcusable tragedy wrought at the hands of the siren named Piper, a spark still flares to life in his heart for every step closer to that sky which Leof sees her take.
It’s the weight of a woman like Red, greater than life itself, a center of gravity that demands life carry her instead of the other way around. And it’s how a woman named Frances carries it anyway — for herself and for others — damn well determined to make sure none of them notice. He did, of course, and he will always be grateful to have heard her call him a friend.
“That ye can feel to grow tired of it at all is a blessing and an honor that we have given you!”
And that blessing–
That honor–
It’s a knife in his side, and how one young woman does everything she can to never again carry this terrible, horrible weight of being alive. She tries, and she fails, and Leof sees that failure in each handwritten note left for him at this door, in each late night of training, in each moment spent trying to understand, and watching as Ashley gave in time and time again to life’s natural want to be lived in company– with several people here, just as happy as he is to help her carry this impossible weight. It’s the weight of being asked to take her with him when he goes home, and how some selfish part of him wanted to say yes.
It’s a man who was never built to carry this weight, because he was never built to be a person at all. Wyatt holds in him a burden passed unwillingly into his hands, and he does so with little grace and a great deal of mess. It’s this mess that makes him just as alive as the rest of them, Leof believes, and it’s that fumbling attempt at personhood which has allowed him to grow beyond the sins he has never tried to run from. As terrible as Wyatt is at carrying the weight of his own life, there is an undeniable irony to just how well and how carefully he now carries the weight of others’ in his fabric heart.
That irony is a shared trait, just as present in Myles, a man who drags around the weight of living while the world at large tries telling him it shouldn’t be his to carry at all; that with his luck, it should have fallen away a long, long time ago. Even now, Leof can feel the blade in his gut if he thinks about it for too long, but even so– to have seen Myles overcome so much in their time here, and to have overcome so much together– if they were to suffer the unluckiness of their lives either way, Leof is happy to have suffered it in such good company. He is happy to have sat side by side after one of the worst days of both their lives, and to have still found peace and comfort waiting to greet them.
Then it’s the weight of Tomie when Leof caught her in the parking lot — saved her — and every single time that she has saved him since. From the beginning, Tomie has offered him a tether to this world, grounding him in a way he so desperately needed. She saved him then, and she has done so again and again with every meal cooked together, every careful explanation of what he doesn’t understand, every offered hand and shared word, every name she wrote down after hearing him speak it so that at least one person besides him would remember. A member of the former living dead himself, short as his time had been, Leof still believed and still believes there is nobody more deserving of this second chance at life than her.
It’s how this weight they all carry will always come crashing down on them one day, one way or another, and how Amara so readily helped him find shelter from it before having ever found shelter of her own. Venom and love both still seep from those cracks running through her, but the love pours more readily these days. And Leof can only hope that by the time he leaves her, he will have held her tightly enough to press some of those broken parts back together before he breaks another himself. He hopes that she’ll know by then how she deserves to embrace her own broken pieces tightly enough to nudge them back together herself.
It’s the weight of Juli himself, first slung carelessly over Leof’s shoulder, then carried more carefully in his arms, until one day it rests both atop and within his chest, his heart squeezed tight by the smaller hand that Leof forced to reach for it. Heavier still had been the guilt, until they finally learned to carry it together, the inevitable pain waiting for them at the end of this love– but it’s a love that Leof would gladly bear the burden of time and time again, over and over, so long as it meant having the weight of his best friend in the bed beside him as they spend each night staving off a mutual loneliness that neither of them have the strength to endure. Juli is a coward, and Leof has had the blessing and the honor of watching him put himself through the horror of loving and being loved for no reason other than so that they might love each other for as long as they possibly can.
A blessing and an honor, two things he learned the weight of when he was four years old and his first sister was born. Then he learned it again, and again– and again. Decades later, he brings food to Lucille’s RV and checks on her, talks to her, laughs with her, and he learns it all again. She takes him to the funfair, insists on helping him wring some joy out of this unfamiliar world, and he spins her around and learns it again. She dies, and they mourn, and they hurt, and with every painful step taken together after, he learns it again, this weight of the blessing and honor it is to call her his family– his little light, always there to bring him home when the dark things tucked away in his chest and his heart are all he can see anymore.
One day, a woman working for Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute Library will stare in curious wonder at a beautifully inhuman figure lovingly rendered in oak gall ink on centuries-worn vellum, because there will never come a day that Leof stops missing his little sister.
And one day, far from now but before he returns home, maybe he will learn to carry the weight of Mellow’s betrayal well enough to make room in his heart again for the first and only person in this confusing future that Leof has felt a truly full and complete understanding with. Even now, nestled between the hurt and the rage, he still feels it; they have both made friends here, too desperate for companionship to let the guilt and the promise of hurting everyone stop them. That ugly truth is its own weight– strong and heavy enough to someday support a carefully built bridge.
“If ye’re truly so damn tired of just existing like this, then stop your whining and do something about it! If Death can choose to live, what the hell is stopping you from living too!?”
A bridge Leof cannot imagine building between himself and Death. The fury in his chest is far too bright, too potent, and he refutes the idea in favor of a different weight he has learned to carry.
He thinks now of Esmerelda’s parents.
He thinks of them, and how they loved their daughter so much that in their desperation, they offered her to death so that she might yet live. And live she did, even if the existence she grew into was one without a true understanding of this gift they had given her.
A gift from two loving parents who Leof refuses to dishonor by allowing the thing that threatens all life be that which takes it. If he wishes to see her gone from the world, then Leof will find a way to kill Death with his own hands, mortal as they may be.
Because mortal hands– these are the only hands with the right to dictate the worthiness of life like this.
“If ye just brought yourself down to our level — if for even one day, ye stopped watching and lived as a part of this existence — ye would understand. Ye would.”
It would. He knows it would.
“And ye would be here at our sides, fighting for it too.”
He knows, because as the weight of life itself presses in with a force as unfathomable as the universe crushed mercilessly beneath it, Leof feels how these people he’s known for mere months of his well-lived life have forever changed him. He feels it, and he understands now more than ever the simple answer to why life deserves to exist:
Because it’s life.
That’s it.
“And if still– still, that is not enough for you, then so be it. Ye can go ahead and forget about our stories.”
There is no plea being made.
No appeal like they were entrusted to make.
What Leof makes is a demand.
“I’ll show you a legend.”
Can Leofweard of Heallwick, legendary slayer of monsters both beast and man alike, really hope to slay the very universe itself?
Probably not.
But he made a promise: that whether he makes it home or not, he will at least have done everything in his power to try.
It Has To Be This Way ///// Ashley ///// The Final Chapter
At Esmeralda’s typical passive discouragement, Ashley is fully ready to go. The malice colors her eyes red, the growl of the hunger within her soul booms through the theater like it’s Dolby branded, her hand spins that miniature axe and she waits for the most perfectly opportune time to strike down Death,
until
wyatt’s question is answered.
‘Not metal or gemstones will remain within.’
The question was more for his sake, as he faces a number of branching fates that would each be miserable for him, but Ashley is facing just the one. She’d posed the question to Mellow and received a weak answer from her, but maybe that was for the better. Maybe Mellow had intended to spare her the cruel reality:
There is no happily ever after for her.
Neither is there a pull of the plug and closure of the curtain.
There is no retaining this form and the endless fun and self-confidence it provides.
There is no staying here.
All that awaits is a series of angry voicemails. Where are you, Ashley? You were supposed to be back today, and there was no one to open the store. I had to come down on my day off— you know I had plans this weekend, right? I told you before you left that I had a fishing trip, and now I can’t leave until you ANSWER YOUR PHONE! Whatever, ha, no use crying over spilled milk, right? Right?? Well, you’ve spilled the milk yourself, little girl. What a pathetic way to dump ten years down the drain, I thought you were better than that. Little ffffucking GOD DAMN FREAK YOU WERE LUCKY TO HAVE YOUR POSITION AT YOUR AGE!! We’re going to have to change the locks on the store, and your ass is getting billed, you know that right? And I know you can’t afford it, I bet you couldn’t even afford the bus ride back from LA. HAHAHAHA!! I BET YOU’RE STUCK DOWN THERE! hhhhhhhhHHHAAAHGHH FUUCK!!!!!!
*beep*
*beep*
*beeeeeeeeeee…*
Ashley can feel her heart stopping, as her grip on the hourglass tightens. Not that she needs it to pump as a titanium woman, but that consolation is temporary, and only serves to grind her pulse to a further halt. Her confident legs give out and lead her to limply fall back into her chair, back down to Earth— the last place she wants to be. Down to a dark forest, surrounding a lake. A certain ‘Crystal Lake’, fitting for the last moments she’ll have with this form.
Her breathing is ragged. There’s a certain sense of perverse delight as she looks beyond the gathering of trees, catching glimpse of individuals wandering alone in the darkness. The cones of their flashlights bob and search, the whispers of their tense conversations bounce off the wood and into DEATH PROOF’s ears.
They don’t even know she’s out there.
They don’t even know the danger they’re in.
Tomie doesn’t know the danger she’s in. She doesn’t know that she’ll be DEATH PROOF’s first victim. Arms crossed, she wanders with a smug disconnect from the terror of the scenario. It’s a scenario she’s intimately familiar with, after all, but she doesn’t understand that the silver screen’s always been there to protect her.
As it’s always been there to protect Ashley. That silver screen may as well be a silver bond bringing the two together. Tomie Katsukawa was someone that she’d always admired, despite never paying much attention to her movies. Someone creatively vicious, someone artistically determined, someone Japanese like her. It’s not until her third watch of The Butcher’s Table, complete with live director commentary, that she gives it the utmost sincerity of a watch and solidifies it as her new favorite comfort movie. Silly to say, but this is her big sister now— the sibling she never had— and she would love nothing more than to build a snowman.
Alex, despite their unique supernatural sense, doesn’t notice DEATH PROOF in the trees. They grip at the edge of their beanie, the heat of the garment leading beads of sweat to trail down their brow. Down their jacket-bearing body. They’re warm, and within this cold forest, warmth is the clearest giveaway to your position.
Alex’s warmth extends outwards, offering itself to Ashley as a gift. Offering a new home, a new job. Offering a chance to start over and on a sustainably easier path, freed from Californian cost of living and that oppressive blue thumb. No string attached, just don’t be weird. That can’t be hard, right? It… feels like an admission of defeat. She can’t accept it.
Seemingly undeterred by the oppressive atmosphere, Angel takes his small strides through the mud, clutching Samantha softly to his chest. He has nothing to worry about with such a powerful partner at his side, right? The axe hurtling through the chilling air comes to bring fear back to his heart.
And Ashley thought she needed a partner of her own. There was a sense of envy that she couldn’t even place, and likely never did, leading her to finding a haunted doll of her own and pretending like she could have the same bond that Angel and Samantha had. A whole wealth of besties around her, and she thought the only solution was a pathetic mimicry. She couldn’t even commit to it, beyond showing off to him.
Leofweard is the most equipped to fight the unseen evil, he’s fought all sorts in his time, but this isn’t his time. He’s a man temporally stranded, and he will die in this forest without ever seeing his loved ones. A 13th century peasant knight, bearing the banner of the death flag. He’s shown his opponent mercy one too many times, and that concession has sealed his fate.
Yet Ashley had wanted him to find his way home, and early. He’d granted her wish to learn battle, and had singlehandedly redirected her from indiscriminate slaughter into honorable displays of her self-improvement. She learned to do things for herself, for herself, not just to lash out against the world. Her gratitude had swollen so large that she wanted to come to the past with him and fight at his side, find the answer to her aggression in a world without the advanced surveillance technology we have today. In his wisdom, he knew that Ashley needs to confront her fears of the modern world and adapt, instead of merely taking shelter behind his pot lid shield.
Though she’d hoped to catch Myles alone, the one most aware of the danger of the woods through repeated experience, and the one whose fear shakes the trees the hardest, he’s hand in hand with Wyatt. The two can band together, watching each other’s backs, keeping each other calm through their shared touch. But don’t they know? Those closest are the ones most readily torn apart by DEATH PROOF.
Wyatt’s arrow comes screaming past Ashley’s head, and she launches back with a grin. This is the fruits of everything she’s trained for, an equal match with a worthy opponent. An opponent that had started out this whole mess with a nervous flick of silverware, now fights with purpose and resolve and respect. While he fights for a lot, he fights too for Myles, almost as much as Ashley fights for Myles as well. She fights so that he can fear her, and on her own terms. So that he can rest his head, and so that she can wear a hat, striped shirt, and clawed gloves, and torment his dreams. Her angle is no longer just cruelty for villainy’s sake, but for self-actualization. Maybe the difference is negligible for the one on the receiving end, but Ashley’s shift in attitude has mostly been horizontal anyway.
A beast stalks the dark woods, but it is not just DEATH PROOF. Jeanne panickedly stumbles through the overgrowth, arms wrapped tightly around their chest, containing the feral impulse within. However, their containment isn’t perfect. The scent bleeds through, catching the killer’s nose and leading her straight to her next victim.
Ashley finds this victim within the fog, a swirling of gas meant to terrorize the living yet finds no fear within the dead. Proudly, she steps forward to her certain demise, wearing the same smile as always. The intensity of this battle, against a monster with no capacity to hold back or plead for peace, is exactly the kind of high she chases. This is a creature stronger, faster, sharper, yet she does not fear death. She is
DEATH PROOF places a grim hand on a branch, pulling it down and straining the bark, as she eyes her next victim. The young man Alex is going over his lines out loud— he’ll try to reason with the killer. He’ll put the confidence he has in peace against an unstoppable force of nature, and the futility of this effort only serves to bring him to the dirt. Cowering, whimpering, holding on to the only response he knows. His only means of struggle against the inevitable.
It’s an effective response. When Alex gets the upper hand (by doing nothing) and traps Ashley in a corny, buttery prison, she’s made to listen to his preaching in full. She’s furious, but she knows she’s been bested, and she cannot bring herself to think lowly of him for his efforts. It’s a valuable lesson, that even the weakest target should be taken seriously, and she turns that rage into a further eagerness to kill.
The vampire believes herself invincible in the dark night, and Azusa’s steps take on a subtle confidence. Like many others, she’d conquered the hunter of the woods before, but that was on her turf. An open concrete field. These woods and this lake are DEATH PROOF’s domain, and she will soon learn that the Beast of Ikata is far, far from home.
Much like Tomie’s presence, Azusa helped Ashley to feel at home. Where she grew up, there was basically no one like her. Her parents had moved out on their own without wholly considering the effect it’d have on their future child trying to fit in. Even beyond that though, the moment vampiress Azusa agreed to a duel was evidence that Ashley’s horizons could always continue to expand.
Though he walks with full expectation and eagerness for a barrage of knives coming his way, Juli’s doom is sealed with an axe. He’s got an outward bratty confidence that hides his insecurities, a typical asshole character that’d get the worst murder in order to wring out the biggest cheers from the average audience. He may expect this fate, but he will never see it coming.
But there’s so much more to his fleshy innards than merely peeling back the skin to view them. He’s said it himself, but their two souls are alike, in a twisted fashion. Two people who came into this test determined to be the villain, who were stopped at every turn by those who could see the good in them. And so Juli went from Ashley’s most mistrusted to one of her most trusted— the bearer of their blood pact. She’ll be there to take his life some day, but for now, he can live to see the sequels.
The audience’s ire for Juli is nothing to the rotten attitude of Piper. The backing sounds of breathing grow rougher as DEATH PROOF’s fuming rage observes the siren’s cocky self-righteousness. The view even begins to tremble, until it launches towards its prey.
Watching Josie’s transformation had been so fascinating. Ashley’s cruelty is a product of revenge against the world, and here is someone seeking that same revenge against the world. Piper’s means of exacting this was spiteful violence against innocents, just what Ashley sought within her own villainy. Yet these two never found a way to connect— Piper held herself like one of the many awful customers in Ashley’s time, and Ashley was always watching. The only way these two could ever see eye to eye is intertwined in a bloody struggle.
Red Revenge is the one holding her arms out, shouting for the killer to come try her. She’s too tough to be brought down, right? The camera doesn’t even give her the dignity of showing DEATH PROOF’s face, and that acknowledgement from the audience is all that’s necessary to presume how this encounter goes.
Red wasn’t quite Ashley’s first blood, but hers was the first that felt earned. The wrestler’s pride kept her from considering an attack from behind, and Ashley took much needed validation to even continue her rampage. It tasted good, and that taste brought her all the way to where she stands now. The two are well overdue for a rematch, come to think of it.
‘I don’t belong here’, thinks Luci. She repeats it out loud, again and again, breath foggy with stress. Just when she thinks she’s alone, the howl of DEATH PROOF’s laughter rips through the branches, reigniting the fear once again. Keeping that flame stoked is the only thing keeping her alive right now, after all. Don’t rest. Don’t take a breath. You could blow out your only salvation.
Yes, keep stewing in your fear. Stew until you boil over. The sensation of being blindsided by someone snapping in rage and pulverized to death probably ought not be so entertaining, but it was. It was the twisted confirmation that the heroine should win and the cruel should lose. Maybe that’s what this was all about for Ashley, becoming the villain and being passionately pulverized for it. Luci did her this solid, and she could only return in kind by passing her the truth of how she doesn’t belong here, yet does at the same time. Somewhere where she can be loved by her peers.
A sense of bravado hides the terror within Amara’s heart. She walks with faux confidence, arms swinging rigidly at her side, as she repeats to herself that she’s ready for anything. She repeats to herself that she’s got nothing to fear, she’s been through worse after all. She repeats
Ashley sits in a chair by Amara’s bedside, leaning forward and gazing at the sleeping woman. The paint on her nails has dried, the heat from her laptop from the screening of Katsukawa’s The Butcher’s Table has bled away, and the scent of crushed tomatoes has finally subsided. Calm has finally hit, after a long night having the most fun of her life. Ashley’s presented herself as someone to be feared, and though she can taste that fear in Sleeping Beauty (though she’s dressed in a different Beauty’s yellow gown), the girl still finds enough comfort in her to rest. Amara finds enough comfort to
~‘…Ashley’
What?
[♪♪♪] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9SAUq5-V7o
Piercing through Ashley’s haze, piercing through the shuffling of wind and wildlife in the trees, piercing through the warm silence of the RV, Amara’s plea reaches her.
~‘ASHLEY!! I have to– I have, I have to show her what a normal sleepover is like!! And, and maybe we can still, stab some– stab some effigies or, or whatever– but! We can paint each other’s nails again!! And watch horror movies and she can laugh at me f-for getting jumpscared!! And, I can tell her, how–’
~~‘I love you, girl!!’
–It was never a romantic proclamation. It was a new feeling for someone who had resigned themselves to nihilism, to misanthropy. That nothing mattered, and no one mattered. But Amara mattered. Amara mattered more than anyone else had to her up until that point. Amara mattered more than her cheating father, more than the mother who ran away at the first sense of abandonment, more than any passing ‘friend’ made in her childhood, than any coworker or customer she’d watched the secret lives of. Amara was someone Ashley genuinely loved.
And just as Ashley had sensed the fear underneath Amara’s bravery, she senses her own fear underneath her own show of character. Fear of an unrealized being, of an eternity in a living prison. Piercing through that fear, piercing through her Ten Year Walmart placard, piercing through twenty-four long years of negative reinforcement, sixteen hands reach out to her, to bring her back to life. Some eagerly, some with fear and trepidation, some proud, some with a touch of disgust, but they’re all there.
DEATH PROOF Ashley accepts the boon and is invited out from the dark, into the light of the moon spotlighting a clearing in the trees. The barehanded grip on each of her two handaxes carries a misplaced leathery sound effect, as she stands across from Death Herself and her smiling cohort, Mellow. She smiles back, because even their hands had been there to help, and points grimly with one of her weapons.
“The point of all of this is to make the point yourself, even if it doesn’t exist in the first place. Carve it out of stone, if we have to! Because even Death has a weakness that can be exploited.”
Esmeralda’s typical passive discouragement only served to invigorate her further— the more she’s told it’s impossible, the more she believes in herself as a bringer of death. In that way, Esme has been nothing but the most supportive friend, always offering Ashley a challenge to be overcome.
Mellow’s curiosity and mystical aura was the spitting image of a Disney Princess, and could only serve to invigorate her further— the competition declared by the face in the magic mirror is one she’s glad to meet on the field.
As a girl brought up by Death and Princesses, it is only right that she surpasses both by her own merit. Though it may be a long road ahead, it’s a road she’s got to travel, and a road that she can’t simply forsake to flee into the past.
“And my work’s not done. I’ll stalk Esmeralda to the ends of the Earth and beyond. Back into space if I have to, by the tenth installment. I’ll be the one to put Death in the grave, and even as a… a normal human girl, pink flesh and red blood and black hair, I’m never going to stop. That’s what makes this life worth living.”
She won’t vote for erasure, as that word doesn’t evoke the blood and gore she’s after. She won’t collaborate for a half-measure victory like that, either. It’s hers, and hers alone, by royal right.
