Participants:
| Scene Title | Chokehold Cherry Python |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | All alone in New Chicago, Gracie finds herself backed into a corner. |
| Date | July 9, 2021 |
Rain has been sporadic, fleeting or brutal and nowhere in between. The winds of New Chicago have been reliably cold, and those who weather them do so with hoods up and eyes downturned. The last glimmer of dusk leaves the streets a web of pitch black threaded with artificial lights in neon and slivers of incandescent through cracks in window shades. A single street lamp casts down a dejected cone of inconsistent illumination.
Rain picks up again, hammering the street in sheets that vanish just as quickly as they arrive. Gracie’s new home is as unforgiving to her as it is to everyone else. At least she's not alone in the experience; if she's sure of anything at this point, it's that she's being followed.
New Chicago
July 9th, 2021
Gracie never worried much about blending into the shadows at the Pelago. Being easily spotted was sort of a boon to her trade. Now? Now, she wishes she could disappear. “C’mon,” she mutters under her breath, “seriously?” This is the second time in two nights that she’s been tailed. Only this time, she doesn’t feel a signature.
Pulling the red patchworked coat around herself a little tighter, she picks up her pace, rounding a corner she didn’t intend to take before. One that takes her further away from her intended destination of the hotel she’s getting one last night at before she has to find another arrangement. She regrets not taking up her local self’s offer to bunk with her and her wife. The awkwardness would have been preferable to this realization she has that the footsteps have also taken this turn. So she takes the next turn with the intent on taking the next and the next, coming to a full circle.
Except this turn has led to a dead end.
Her blood runs cold as she stares at a fence of chainlink and corrugated scrap. Rather than turn back to try and bolt past whoever’s following her — she’s not skilled the way her otherworld self is and doesn’t recognize multiple sets of footsteps against the backdrop of heavy rain — she hustles forward and starts to pry at the rain-slicked metal with chilled fingers in the hopes of revealing the gaps that will serve as hand- and footholds for scaling, only to discover the scrap has been fastened to it. They didn’t want this wall so easily bypassed.
The tall woman whirls around, her hood catching in the wind and falling back, ginger curls whipping about her face. “Look,” she stammers before she can even make out faces, “I just moved here, I don’t even have a job yet, and I have nothing of value.”
A tall, somehow familiar figure stands silhouetted in the mouth of the alley, flanked by two others. “Yeah,” he laughs to a companion, “that's her alright.”
“Hey there, Ariel, you're a hard woman to find.”
The blood drains entirely from Gracie’s freckled face. “Wh- What?” She takes a half step back and the metal wall at her back clatters when she collides with it. She smiles uncertainly, trying to play casual. “Hey… Fancy meeting you out here.”
Her rabbit heart is pounding. She might throw up.
“I was in Delphi, if you can believe it,” Keith says, walking deeper into the dark of the alley on a gust of wind. “Literally just missed you. Too bad, too, turned a really good profit. We could have traveled here in style!”
His friends, faceless in the night, take up casual guard positions at the end of the alley. “Figured there'd be opportunities wherever the convoy was heading, so might as well kill two birds with one stone and meet back up with my leading lady. Shame they've moved on already. Guess that means you're sticking around here?” He towers over her now, all six and a half feet of bad ideas.
And it’s hard to tower over her. When it happens, it’s enough to make her anxious, even without the imposing figure representing some threat to her safety and wellbeing. “I can believe it,” she grants with a flutter of nervous laughter. At this distance, he can see the cracks in her mask, the fear shining through them.
“I hadn’t really decided yet,” she shrugs. “But my… I have family out here.” Gracie finds herself shrinking back a little further, her eyes darting to assess the others at the mouth of the alley, hoping against hope she just didn’t get a clear read and that one of them has something she can lift to get herself out of this. “And they’re expecting me.” Her eyes snap back up to her main problem. “So, I should…”
The only thing Gracie feels emanating from the men at the mouth of the alley is malicious intent. They take turns looking into the street, but mostly their attention remains on her. As though they might get a cut of the spoils.
“Ahhh, come on!” Keith cajoles cheerfully, placing a hand on the wall behind Gracie. “The night is young! You might not have any money, but I do. Let me take you out for a drink and we can grab a room at one of the hotels. I've got way more than just a handful of batteries these days.”
Gracie’s breath catches in her throat, her eyes squeeze shut. “I’m not working.” That’s a line that worked when Valentine was around to protect her workers. That’s not here. “I just want to go home.” Drawing in a lungful of air and the hope of some courage with it, she ducks under the man’s arm and dances back a step. “We can catch up later, though!”
In hell, maybe.
“Woah, woah, woah,” Keith says, turning to restrict her movement with a hand laid across her stomach. “What's the rush? If you don't like the hotels, we could always spend the night in my new truck. It's roomier than you could imagine.”
The men at the end of the alley stand up from their leans, obstructing the exit with clear intent. Behind them, a figure wanders past with a drunken gait, totally unaware of what's about to unfold.
Gracie whimpers and lets herself be pushed back where she started from. There’s no one here to protect her but her. When she looks up at him again, her eyes are blazing with fury. “I said no.”
Keith's facade of pleasantness evaporates. His free hand tangles itself in Gracie's hair, tilting her head back to force her to look at him. She lets out a strangled cry. “You don't get to just run away from me again,” he says, puffing himself up to continue.
“Oh my God,” comes the voice of the drunk woman stumbling back into view of the alleyway. “Rue?”
“That is you!” the stranger continues, seemingly oblivious to the seriousness of the situation. “What are the odds?”
The men at the mouth of the alley spin toward her, one reaching under his coat for a weapon he doesn't yet produce. Keith's attention turns toward the interloper as well, his grip on Gracie's skull relaxing but not releasing.
At once, she’s grateful to be mistaken for her local counterpart and also terrified for this person. Her instinct is to call for help, but this person is drunk, and how could she want to invite the kind of trouble falling down around her head onto someone else? Her heart pounds in her chest, feels it in her throat.
“Please don’t do this,” Gracie whispers to him, keeping her head tilted back to hopefully prevent another yank of her hair.
“Who’s this bitch?” Keith asks, confounded.
“Hey,” Wright slurs, “that's not a nice thing to call somebody, fuck face.” She squints into the darkness to get a better look at him, still appearing to have no grasp of the gravity of the situation. “Christ, fuck, you're ugly as shit,” she adds.
One of Keith's friends makes his move, lashing out to grab the newcomer by the arm. Her reaction is odd: she relaxes suddenly in a way that broadcasts not comfort, but violence. “Remove your hand from my arm,” she says without a hint of drunken slur, “or I will remove it from yours.”
The man balks, suddenly unsure, but makes the mistake of holding tight. Even Keith goes rigid, feeling at some level that the woman blocking his exit from the alley is a threat. He pulls Gracie's head back and down, throwing her to the ground.
She hits the rain-slicked pavement with a grunt, water splashing up at her, soaking into her coat clear up to her elbows. Her head lifts and she watches what’s unfolding with wide eyes. “What are you doing?!” she shouts at this person who’s a stranger to her, but not to the other Rue. “Run!” For her part, she starts to push herself up, but gets tangled in her sopping skirt, staggering and grabbing at the fence to keep from landing right back on her face again.
Wright, for her part, can't remember the last time she ran away. In a flash, she strikes the man's hand away, forcing him into the corner of the building. The other man produces the revolver he'd been hiding beneath his coat. Keith smiles as he steps away from Gracie, closing the distance to the mouth of the alley.
Wright engages none of them. “Hot hot hot,” she calls into the night. The gun is leveled, then pivots suddenly toward a target that Gracie can't see through the press of bodies. She feels something terrible coming, all the way to her bones.
The crushing weight of eternity.
November 8th, 2006
He’s barely been able to process whatever Eddie has been saying. The whipping of the bitter late autumn wind. The thudding of his heart. The feel of the terrible, slick-seeming fabric of the other boy’s coat as his fingers ache trying to hold on for life. Because he’s going to die now.
Eddie’s eye looks like the pale, waning gibbous moon in the sky above them. He’d thrown a steak knife in the air as a child, something he blames other kids for. Only Elliot has been living here just as long, knows better. The other kids got lucky, adopted, replaced with fresh orphans.
“Any last words?” Eddie says in a lull in the wind. So cliche, so fucking trite. Something the bad guy always says for the thrill of being bad. He leans forward, and Elliot’s position tips well past precarious. He can see the frozen ground beneath them. The scattered leaves. The pavement.
Even if he could put the words in order, it wouldn’t matter. Elliot knows he’s powerless. Wishes he was special. Wishes he could reach out, take that one good eye. Take the baseball bat propping the door open to break every one of Eddie’s bones and never stop.
He feels the beginning of the push, the accident, knows this motion will be the one that carries him over the edge to plummet three stories to the ground. Everything feels so slow in this moment. There’s a prickle in his scalp as his hair tries to stand on end in his terror.
Elliot begins to scream.
I'm not going to die here.
New Chicago
July 9th, 2021
It all happens in a second.
Elliot, arms wide, feels it start as a prickle in his scalp that cascades down his body. Down his neck where the hairs stand on end. Down into his arms, into his fingertips where he traces at the seams of it. Where he pulls against it, fingers splayed as though Wright is driving and his hand is free to surf the wind. He strains, the world gives, his hands snap out before him in a thunderous clap. Fingers clutch the air, sink into it.
He begins to tear the world apart.
That familiar rush of power, the reminder that he can be the nightmare of other men. The fold, the growing orb of shattered light and fractal rainbows that dance across and around him. Rings emerge from the dissipating sphere: two brilliant, scintillating hoops crashing over and through each other. Fingernails dig into his palms as he pulls and then throws his hands apart, casting these holes in the universe before him. Overlaying one atop the other to form a shield.
He sees his own face below him and his feet above as the planes of the portals facing him stack into a figure eight. Knows there’s a mirror to be seen from the other side, of those bearing down on him similarly misarranged. A wormhole with two portals a meter across, each of them two-sided. He begins to walk, pushing the wormhole before him like a hellish plow.
The man with the gun, reacting without careful consideration, fires a bullet that nearly makes it to Elliot before intercepting the portal and returning through the other in the opposite direction, colliding with his friend's throat and painting bricks with blood. Wright, unhurried, draws a pistol of her own and shoots the living man twice in the temple. The portals rush past her; she sees herself to both her left and right through them as they surge toward Keith. He's too awestruck and shaken by the unexpected violence to react.
The first portal drops over his head, making the top seem to disappear at first until Gracie sees it emerge from the second hole in space just a few inches above, but upside down. From a lower vantage point, she sees his body extending upward into the sky. The gap between the planes of the portals is empty space, filled in as the top of his head is rotated to pass back through the other side of the first, emerging again from the other side of the second. Now, with something to chew on, both portals scissor to the sides like a cigar cutter.
There's a terrible series of sounds, as though a celery stalk is being wrung like a towel, wet and popping. Blood sprays sideways from between the planes, and most of Keith's head falls to the ground followed shortly thereafter by his body.
The shift in the air was enough to grab her attention, although she hit the ground again at the first sound of gunfire, too terrified to move. It’s like her very blood is screaming at the raw power that she can sense so closeby. She lifts her head to try and see where it’s coming from. It isn’t Wright. There’d been nothing to latch onto when she came staggering on the scene. So then wh—
Keith falls just in front of her and it takes a full second to register that he’s not in one piece. Gracie shrieks and scrambles away from the corpse as fast as she can, huddling up against the wall of one of the buildings, tears streaming down her face as she looks up to see not who saved her, but if she’s going to be next.
Hazel eyes grow large as she blinks through the tears and the rain. “Elliot?”
“Uh,” Elliot says as the rings of fractal colors collide and collapse into an infinitesimal point of light, “yeah?”
“Jesus, Elliot,” Wright says, gesturing at the ground near Keith's still-attached lower jaw. “You popped his fucking molars out. He wasn't even armed.”
“You said ‘hot,” Elliot retorts, “hot, hot.’ Not ‘leave one alive.’ And not having molars is… the least his—the least of his problems.”
Wright enters the alley confidently, not swaying but still smelling of vodka. She extends a hand to the prone Gracie. “Let's get you out of here,” she offers. “People are likely to get cranky about all the bullet noises and dead bodies.”
Over the years, she’s gotten better at pushing through all those but maybe if I could just have a second to put my heart back in my chest moments. Because there’s been too fucking many of them. Gracie reaches up to take the offered hand, nodding shakily.
Forcing herself not to look back over at what remains of the object of her deepest loathing.
“He had it coming,” she tells Wright with an edge of steel to her otherwise tremulous voice.
“Sweet,” Wright says, pulling Gracie up and giving her a once-over for injuries. “Hate it when it turns out they didn't deserve it.”
“It was pretty clearly,” Elliot assures her, “a not great situation. Let's head somewhere we can lay low, this could complicate our departure.”
“Yeah.” Gracie nods again, catches her eyes starting to drift again and turns bodily away this time. Too many times she’s had to walk casually away from something that’s made her stomach turn over, but she can think about that once they’re well away from here and process it precisely never.
It isn’t until she’s stepped out of the alley that it hits her. The last body she calmly walked away from was the father of the woman who just gave her a hand up. Gracie blinks hard and scrubs the heel of her palm over her face, clearing tears before pulling her hood back up over the wet curls that are mostly plastered to the side of her face and the back of her neck now. How fucking south is this going to go if they figure out she’s not the person they think she is and how fucking quickly?
“Where to, Rue?” Wright asks, holstering her pistol. She steps around the bodies without a care in the world, she'll sleep like a baby tonight.
In the street, several concerned citizens look carefully around corners and through cracked blinds, though no one approaches to reprimand them. Elliot gives them a rather uninformative thumbs up to signal that the violence is complete.
“Could go to the office, assuming,” he tells Gracie, “you don't want an escort home. Guessing you just ended your shift?” He never drew a gun, but he's wearing the coat that the man who killed Wright’s father wore the other night. She knows there's room for a holster beneath it.
Oh fuck, oh fuck. Gracie makes something of a show of staring mutely, staring at Elliot with pupils dilated, as though in shock. What she’s doing is taking in the mass of his ability. “A— Actually,” she stammers, looking back to Wright, “you’ve mistaken me for my sister.”
Except she just called Elliot by name.
She glances back the way they came. “You should take his keys. Said he’s got a truck.” And maybe that can serve as enough of a distraction from her misstep.
There's a long pause because, at the very least, surprise twin sister is a novelty. Elliot signs, It may be a lot weirder than that. Wright doesn't meaningfully react to that news, heading back into the alley for a quick looting of the corpse.
“So what's,” Elliot asks, “your name, identical twin of Rue?”
“Ooo,” Wright coos, “keys! Love a free car. Spark plug too, the paranoid fuck.”
“Thought you might,” the redhead murmurs, shifting uncomfortably in her damp coat and dark thoughts. Then she’s looking back at Elliot again, wishing she knew that secret language she’s seen spoken through the subtle movements of fingers. “I go by Gracie.” She eyes him warily. He has to know. Even if she hadn’t seemed to recognize him, it’d be too coincidental, but she doesn’t know what his partner knows, and she isn’t about to touch that subject herself. She extends her hand in formal greeting. “Thanks for saving me from…” She swallows down the tightness and threat of bile in the back of her throat. “That.”
In spite of her best efforts, Gracie’s mind starts to race and she breathes in and out hard, feeling the panic clawing its way up and out of the cage of her ribs. She withdraws her hand again. “I need to get out of here,” she all but whimpers. “Take me anywhere. Anywhere, anywhere, anywhere but here, please.”
Elliot shakes Gracie's hand awkwardly as another torrent of rain washes over them. Wright pats down the other dead men, lifting the revolver, a few loose bullets, and some bills of credit.
“Lucky we followed these guys,” Elliot says as Wright indicates they're good to move. “Heard the tall one asking about Rue at… Tom’s. The two locals said they had a line on her.”
“I was the bait!” Wright says cheerfully, still showing none of the drunken swagger she employed to get a view of the alley. They're headed in a direction Gracie hasn't been, the warehouse district near the water. Her red fur coat and black hoodie are saturated with rain, and she pulls it back to pointlessly wring out her shoulder length blonde hair.
“Ffffuck, I’m glad you did.” The tingle of power when she connects with Elliot feels a bit like the batteries the deservedly dead man in the alley used to make her test. With a heavy exhale, she pushes it out from under her skin, rather than welcome it into herself. Not here. Not now. Not after what she just witnessed. At least focusing on that rejection helps her distance from all that, too.
A breath of humorless laughter doubles as a sniff in response to the cold droplets of rain irritating the tip of her nose. Wright’s coat is red, too. She really did make a good decoy, didn’t she? The irony of Wright playing bait for her here isn’t lost on her. “I thought you were going to break that guy’s arm,” she confesses, trying to squeeze some of the moisture out of one coat sleeve with an equal amount of futility that the blonde applies to her hair.
“That was supposed to be followed up with him shearing the guy's hand off,” Wright laments with a toss of her head toward Elliot. “But then Problem Two pulled his iron and the scenario changed. Would have been fucking awesome, probably could have avoided the rest of the theatrics. I'm Wright, by the way. Like a shipwright, not like I'm just correct. Which I also always am.” Elliot doesn't bother to refute it.
Gracie nods along, knowing that a quick showing of brutality often quells the need for more drastic bloodshed, as much as she hates that she’s seen it enough to be so familiar with its effectiveness. She doesn’t give a voice to any of that, however. Instead, what she says is, “And you’re also really pretty,” like a useless lesbian. If her face wasn’t already red from the cold and exertion and the panic she’s trying to push down, she wouldn’t be able to hide the way she flushes with embarrassment from having said the quiet thought out loud.
“Sorry.” There’s a tiny bubble of giddy, anxiety-fueled laughter. “I’m, uh…” At a loss for words. “Sorry,” Gracie repeats. “I’m freaked out. I’m a little freaked out.”
“You know, I really am,” Wright says, a bit of uptalk seeming to turn the statement into a question. She doesn't know what to do with the admission, though she doesn't fault Gracie for being attracted to her. “Lesbian identical twin sisters, huh? That's some Teagan and Sarah shit.” Elliot chuckles, reminding her that it may be weirder than that.
At the pace they're moving, making it to the warehouse is accomplished in short order. The timing couldn't be better, the torrential downpour has returned with no indication of abating this time. Elliot produces a key and unlocks the door, pushing his way into a small office space. The windows are obscured with cardboard, and the door leading into the warehouse proper looks too badly damaged to open. He lights a gas lantern to fill the space with light.
Once they're inside, Wright wastes no time shucking her soaked clothing, tossing them over a decrepit standing fan without a hint of embarrassment. Elliot sheds his long jacket and shakes it out, hanging it from a hook on the back of the door. “Welcome to the safehouse,” he says, gesturing for Gracie to make herself comfortable on an office chair or army cot.
“Thanks. Seriously.” Gracie barely glances twice at Wright as she starts to free herself from the tyranny and oppression of wet garments. Pretty as she finds her, the dancer doesn’t find much novelty in being undressed in front of when it’s utilitarian. Now, if it was an actual show? That’d be very different.
She sheds her own coat, setting it aside and starting to unknot the drawstring that keeps her skirt cinched to her waist. “Anyone mind if I…?” she asks, gesturing vaguely at the other woman’s state of undress and telegraphing her desire to follow suit. The shiver that runs through her slight frame does that for her, too.
“Of course,” Wright says, not having to tell Elliot to position himself in a way that gives Gracie privacy. She opens a filing cabinet, producing a towel, scrubbing her arms before reaching back in for dry clothing. “Might have something in here that'd fit you, due to our seemingly identical heights, though, obviously, less so other proportions.” She clears her throat, leaving the drawer open as she turns the towel over herself for a more vigorous drying before tossing it on the desk in Elliot's line of sight.
While Elliot also participated in the exposure to the elements, he seems less uniformly saturated owing to the quality of his coat. His hair and face get a perfunctory scrub, and the towel is hung over the back of the office chair, all without a hint of being interested in catching a glimpse of people less-than-completely dressed.
“Thanks. I’m fucking freezing,” Gracie gripes. She strips down as she makes her way to that cabinet to borrow whatever will help make her dryer. Longer than is necessary is spent with her face in a towel, letting it hide the way her expression contorts miserably as another wave of Jesus Horatio Christ, More of This Bullshit tries to overcome her. She leaves it draped over her shoulders to provide a barrier between her hair and the rest of her, lest the purpose of drying off be defeated.
“Don’t mean to pry,” she says over her shoulder to Elliot while seeking approval from Wright before she just starts choosing her own wardrobe, “but did you mean to overkill him as hard as you did?”
Wright motions confirmation to Gracie as she pulls a shirt down over her head. The selection is all utilitarian shirts and pants of unrelated styles and eras. Only wearing a shirt, she begins the process of kicking her damp legs into pants.
“Not originally,” Elliot admits. As Wright said earlier, a demonstration could have been enough. “But I don't bother taking chances when things get hot, and bad people are expendable.”
“Sorry about the…” he grimaces, “mess, though. I was going for a cleaner cut, but…” He shrugs. Sometimes it's dark and you only get some of the head.
“No,” Gracie breathes out, shaking her head with a serious expression. “Even if I wind up having nightmares about this, that was better than every revenge fantasy I ever cooked up with that guy as the subject. He was the bane of my existence every night he was at port for months.” She pulls on a faded red flannel, fumbling with the buttons due to the chill in her fingers. “Don’t be sorry.” When she fails for the third time to push button through hole due to her shaking hands, she lets out a curse that’s louder and more emphatic than it needs to be. “Fuck! I hated that guy.” It at least served dual purpose.
She utters a soft apology and shakes her hands out at her sides before starting again. “I’m… stupid lucky you guys clocked him as sus.” Gracie sniffles once. “Really, really.”
“Don't mention it,” Elliot says, back turned. The effort really wasn't any bother, and he never did get to murder Wright’s father so it kind of filled a void.
“Sus?” Wright asks as she finishes hopping into a tight pair of jeans and zipping them up. She doesn't get around to buttoning them, noting Gracie's shaking hands. Instead, she walks up behind Elliot and reaches around both sides of him to fish his flask out of his jacket. It seems a very comfortable and intimate gesture, though not quite a hug. He leans his head back into hers for a moment but doesn't turn around without an all clear.
“Suspect?” he suggests for a full word. “I'd say it tracks; people back east…not using entire words, but…” Wright turns away and offers the flask to the only partially clothed Gracie.
“The things you've said so far suggest you came here with that convoy,” he finishes. The approaching question is palpable. Gracie knows that the man who murdered Wright's father met with this Elliot.
“Fuck,” Gracie whispers this time, blushing faintly from embarrassment born both of her lack of dexterity and being attracted to Wright. With more intent to be heard, she says, “Thanks,” and takes the flask, then a sip from it. She has to clear her throat after, but doesn’t look put off in the least.
“Yeah, suspicious. Suspect. Whatever.” She chuckles nervously, head tilting to one side as she admits, “Got it in one. I came in from th—” She catches herself, remembers Wright’s aversion to nicknames. “What’s left of New York City.”
Passing the flask back, Gracie buttons her shirt high enough to say it’s done up and refrains from making a joke about getting into Wright’s pants. If this is the part where she gets killed for knowing too much, well… Well, she doesn’t think it is. Otherwise they probably would have just let her die in the alley, or the back of Keith’s truck or whatever, and certainly wouldn’t let her put on Wright’s clothes.
“Do we need to talk about that, local boy?”
“Depends,” Elliot says as Wright takes a drink from the flask as well, “are you wearing pants? This feels like a face to face kind of conversation.” Wright finally gets around to buttoning hers. She gives Gracie some space, casting a wondering look toward her partner without asking for clarification.
“Under extreme protest,” Gracie assures as she shoves her legs into a pair of carpenter pants. Her teenage self is dying from the agony of this affront to her fashion sensibilities. After she’s done up the zipper and button, she casts a glance to Wright, holding her hand out in front of her to pantomime wiggling that flask back and forth, brows lifted in question. Another, may I?
Wright leans back against the desk and happily tosses the flask back to Gracie. Elliot turns around slowly, as though he isn't positive everybody's actually decent. He locks eyes with Wright and signs, Not joking.
“Are you from the alternate timeline?” he asks Gracie.
“What… the fuck?” Wright adds, a laugh conflicting with her trust that Elliot wouldn't joke immediately after signing that he wasn't.
“Yeah,” Gracie answers easily, catching and uncapping the flask. What’s the fucking point anymore? “But not the one the other guy’s from.” She cants her head, slanting a look to Wright. “It’s weird,” she mutters around the mouth of the flask as she takes a drink. “Sorry.”
“There's,” Elliot asks, surprised, “more than one?”
“There's more than zero?” Wright interjects, aghast. Her mouth is open wide enough to catch flies, and she isn't sure if she's confused, incredulous, or angry to only be finding out right now. “You have to be fucking with me,” she insists.
Not joking, Elliot signs again, chagrined. “Was waiting for an opportune time to mention it,” he says quietly. “Gracie here provided that opportunity. I met another version of me.” He was different weird. Gracie knows that the man who she watched murder Wright's father doesn't consider himself to actually be another version of Elliot.
“A fucking inter-dimensional convoy?” Wright asks, deciding she's leaning toward anger. “You met yourself from another timeline who came here—from one of multiple alternate goddamn timelines—on some kind of magic fucking schoolbus?”
“We did name it Frizzle,” Gracie reveals about the convoy’s school bus with a shrug. “Look, forgive me for being blasé, but I have been through a lot recently, and I’ve been on this interdimensional fuck-you-go-round for four months short of a decade now.” She moves to lean against the file cabinet, arms crossed under her chest.
“For me, it started out with someone from his timeline,” she means the other Wright, who she isn’t going to refer to by name, thank you, “trying to punch a hole through time to send some airmail to the past. Instead, he suckerpunched reality and dragged me and a couple of friends from our timeline into theirs. Which sounds like a set-up for some wacky and colorful after school cartoon, but it was more like if John Carpenter, Stephen King, and what’s-his-fuck Cronenberg got together and decided to write a script that would completely ruin our lives with fucked up science and body horror and people wanting you dead at every single fucking turn.”
Gracie sighs heavily and rakes a hand through her wet hair. “I got subjected to experimentation, given an ability, and when my body started to reject it, I got strung along with intermittent treatments to keep the whole cells melting to death thing at bay. Then I decided, fuck it, guess I’ll die, and got found by the cultists of a being I can only equate to an ancient fucking god in eurotrash clothing, who fixed me up, gave me new powers, and then chucked me through a disco ball made of voidstuff and the next thing I know I’m in bombed out bumfuck Idaho with instructions to hoof it on foot to New York so I can meet up with the other one of you,” she gestures vaguely, again meaning Wright but letting it be inferred that she means Elliot, “from the second reality I was stolen from, and keep tabs.”
The flask is brought to her lips for a drink. It makes her take a brief break from her manic babble. “Fuck if I know how the fuck it works, though. Sorry. I’m a communications major, a budget slasher, not a quantum fucking physicist.” Gracie glances at Elliot. “It’d be quantum physics, right? It’s always quantum physics in the comic books.” He seems like the right flavor of nerd to have an answer to that.
The amount of information pouring out of Gracie is clearly unexpected, eyes boggling in greater increments as she continues. “Well,” Wright finally responds. “There is so much to unpack there.”
“I was hoping it,” Elliot laments, “would turn out to be a Subtle Knife. Have a soft spot for that for obvious reasons. Unfortunately, in my experience, quantum mechanics doesn't allow me to make non-immediately-adjacent wormhole portals. Otherwise I would not fucking be here right now. Not-the-Elliot's doomed timeline still has a lot of modern amenities I'm sorely missing.”
“Doomed?” Wright asks, hopelessly lost. “Also, how did he even get here if his wormholes can't bridge timelines? Can his? Is he cooler than you?”
“He can't make wormholes,” Elliot says simply. “At all. He has the ability to make a telepathic network between himself and his world's version of you.”
“What the fuuuuuck?” Wright asks, beginning with a statement but settling on a question.
Gracie shrugs at Wright. “Look, I did the word vomit version because it’s so fucking stupid outlandish that you know it couldn’t be off the cuff.” She shifts her attention to Elliot. “I don’t know what a Subtle Knife means. I mean, I know it’s His Dark Materials, but I never got around to reading that one.” She admits that with another shrug and some measure of chagrin. She’d actually meant to.
“God,” she spits out. “He actually told you about what’s coming? Jesus Christ, dude.” Gracie scrubs a hand over her face and tips her head back to groan. “And no, can confirm he doesn’t make wormholes.” She’s spent a long time with Elliot-Wright, squinting and trying to discern the proper nature of his ability with no desire to try it for herself and get the definitive answer. Even before he told her it’d kill everyone.
Dipping her head back to center, she squints at the local Elliot now. “Anyway, tell me about how it works in Subtle Knife. Is it the whole severing of souls and gathering Dust thing? Because that shit’s fucked and I’m pretty sure that’s not what got me here.”
Elliot shrugs in turn. “May have inferred it from,” he explains, “the fact that whatever they're looking for was so important that they traveled into a parallel timeline on a one-way suicide mission.”
“Also the dust and child sacrifice,” he explains further, “is from the second book. The Subtle Knife is literally just a knife that's sharp enough to cut doorways between realities. I haven't read Golden Compass in a while, I only have the first one.” He produces a small, carved wooden horse and begins to fidget with it, making it seem to disappear from one hand to reappear in the other.
Wright, continuing to look boggled, merely turns her attention back and forth between the two for a while. “Jesus Horsefucking Christ,” she finally manages, turning to Gracie. “Is that why you didn't leave with the convoy? Because there's no way home either way? What's so important that they'd come here for it if they can't even bring it back home? Did they also ride the disco ball to Idaho? Why can't they just ride it back?”
“Only I rode the disco express train to bumfuck nowhere,” Gracie elucidates with a shrug. “They jumped through some other kind of unstable portal and landed at the Pelago, I guess. I was there to meet them, but I didn’t see it happen or anything. I just… laid in wait until I had the opportunity to cross paths.”
She buries her face in one hand and laughs helplessly. “This whole fucking thing is fucked the fuck up.” To put it so very mildly. Gracie lifts her head again and peers through the crack between her first and second fingers. “Thing is… I think they can get home again. R— Elliot seems to think so, too.”
“When I talked,” Elliot says before a long pause that ends with a clearing of his throat. He scratches at his eyebrow in irritation, and opens his mouth again. “Met him and a couple others at Tom's. A pirate, the safe kid, Chess, and Richard. They seemed a lot less than confident that they were getting home.”
“You met a Richard at Tom's?” Wright interjects. “I met a Richard at Tom's. Though, he was apparently fucking hoofing it to Alaska and not going with that convoy, so probably not the same guy. Wore sunglasses inside. Richard Blues Brother. Except if he was the same Richard, that's pretty anti-Blues Brother behavior, doing the opposite of getting the band back together. Richard Estranged Blues Brother.”
A breath of sardonic laughter passes from Gracie’s lips. “That’s the guy,” she confirms of him being the same Richard. “I think he’s kind of hoping that if he separates from the group, everyone will have their best chance.” There’s a weariness to her as she shrugs her shoulders. “I hope he’s right. If there’s anyone crazy enough to make that work, it’s Richard fucking Cardinal.”
Another moment of reflection on the absurdity of the whole situation comes over her again, slouching forward while her shoulders quake with broken laughter. One thing Gracie knows for sure is that if both Elliots — regardless of whatever one of them has become — played their cards any closer to the vest, they'd need to be surgically extracted from their torsos.
“I was really hoping you were going to say something like, 'I can make wormholes,'” Elliot laments. “That would have been really helpful to us.”
Clearly both have trust issues. But the one who trusted her told her that, if there's any hope the Travelers will ever make it home, they need the ability that this one kept from him.
“We don't have a way back,” Elliot says from the bathroom. “But if you help me, and we find a way, I'll do what I can to get the inter-dimensional cannon pointed toward home for you too.”
That bedraggled ginger head lifts in tandem with a heavy sigh that heralds an end to the laughter. A sly little smirk remains in its place and she lets her gaze fall squarely on Elliot.
“Show me how your ability works. I have an idea.”
November 8th, 2006
Eddie only falls from the roof once, but he keeps not getting back up off of the pavement forever. He only feels cold around the back of his head, not feeling anything anywhere else. The sounds of little breaths he isn't controlling are interrupted by the clatter of brick fragments all around him.
The part of the building that's missing fell when he did. Now it's just the loose bits around the edges of a hole through the wall and roof raining around him, stinging his face like grains of sand. He can't see what fell around him, just up and to the side where his face is pointed at the moon. Did he do this? He always wanted real power. He wonders what he'll be able to do with it once he feels better. He remembers how it refracted the light of the moon into rainbows. How he saw the wrong here and the wrong there.
A face looks down over the lip of the top floor, not the roof. Elliot must have fallen down a story instead of the entire way with him. How? Elliot was the one dangling over the edge, not Eddie. He looks terrified, which Eddie likes, because he's going to kill that fucking mute idiot for this. Not for destroying part of this shit hole they've lived in all these years, Eddie did that. Didn't he? Elliot is going to die for resisting. For screaming in his face impotently before Eddie got the power of a god.
The face is gone for a while, the littlest kids are mewling. Lights are coming on, Mrs. Lewis looks down at him and makes a pained noise he doesn't like. It's animal, primal. She never cared about him, she sure as shit shouldn't pretend to care now. She'll get hers when he feels better too.
Elliot eclipses his vision, wearing his winter coat and holding a book that Eddie likes to tear pages off of. He's white in the moonlight, the kind of white he turns when he's cornered. Unable to do anything but look closely, Eddie isn't sure if Elliot is scared anymore. He looks sad and cruel and furious and ecstatic.
“I'm so,” Elliot says, “sorry. I di-didn't know I could do that. I hope… you die, though. You deserve to.” The other boy leaves him on the pavement that he's continuing to not get up off of.
“It was me,” Eddie doesn't say out loud. “I did it.” The light of the moon entering his one good eye dims, gets, smaller, goes ou