4.7 Malebolge
1st of April, 2011
"Is this your idea of a joke?" is literally the first thing that I blurt out loud when an oddly subdued Louise informs us first things first in the morning of what happened yesterday evening while waiting for school to begin.
She blinks back at me a little owlishly and I can almost see in real time when she connects the dots, the whole sequence culminating in her making a little cute snort.
"Afraid I'm not," she answers, back to being serious, "It's everywhere on PHO this morning. Something went down between the Nazis and the ABB and now they're beating each other in the streets."
Caroline and Adelaide shuffle anxiously at the confirmation that, no, this is truly not our friend's idea of an April's fool, and I feel myself frowning as I catch Missy's grim look in the corner of my eyes, since this is pretty much all the confirmation I needed.
She probably received a text in the morning asking her to get ready for deployment in case things degenerate even further, what with the local PRT Director being oddly utilitarian like that when shit goes down.
And I can't help but ask myself how exactly the local morons managed to somehow throw themselves into a gang war right after I took out the one guy who would have benefited from it and gladly fanned the flames in the background while nobody was looking!
I swear, I'm going to start blaming Simmy for this latest bout of idiocy, I privately grumble, because there's no way things went sideways that fast without any reason.
"Alright, so the rest of the Bay is currently caught in a brewing war between two supremacist gangs," I sum up, one of my hand coming to rub at my temple in a bid to stave off both the headache I can feel creeping in and the full-body tingle of the Witchfire Condenser being hard at work, "How does it impact us exactly?"
My query earns me four puzzled looks, which prompts me to throw my hands heavenward in barely hidden avoidance.
"We're twelve years old still going to Middle School! It's not like we can do anything about it, right?" I explain further, before gesturing at Louise, "But that's the very first thing you spoke about right after we finished saying hello's, so I'm wondering what's your angle here."
My friend does another cute little snort, before smiling crookedly my way as she rubs the back of her head a little sheepishly.
"Ah, well," she starts, halting herself to worry at her lower lip for a beat, before sighing with emphasis, "With the Hitler fanboys out and about, my folks are getting worried, and it's possible I'll be staying at home until things calm down if tonight gets worse. So I wanted to give you all a heads up in advance?"
I let her words sink in, before slowly nodding as the rest of our little group chimes in their support and understanding.
"Makes sense, I suppose," I end up saying after giving it a moment's thought, before smiling her way, "Then I hope this latest stupidity doesn't exceed its welcome, otherwise things will get a lot more boring at school."
Louise's awkward little smile turns into a beaming one, and the conversation turns toward less heavy topics until the bell heralds the beginning of our classes.
My body tingling all over and getting increasingly closer to the ultimate state of boredom, I eventually grew complacent over the course of the morning, which meant that I completely fell for Louise's prank when it was time to eat and she told me that she'll bring me back something to my taste and to go sit at our usual table.
I nearly brained her with the thesaurus she served me on a platter in outrage on a background of giggles for my other – but just as traitorous! – friends and Louise's cackle.
***
Highschool had lost a lot of its luster since Emma's one true friend had been carted off to bumfuck nowhere over a little prank that everyone kept blowing out of proportion and especially her psychiatrist and her mother.
Oh, she was still Winslow's sophomore's queen bee, no doubts about it, but she also had to mind herself a little more to avoid pissing off the people a little too 'connected'. Which in this sorry excuse of a school mostly meant wannabee gangers, since nobody with relatively well-off parents and good graces ever ended up here.
She hadn't cared much when Sophia was here, but now she was regretting just a bit having missed her shot at going to Arcadia, especially since she now had to bear with the swagger of both Empire and ABB posers and couldn't vent her annoyance on that worm Hebert as often as she used to.
More often than not, Winslow was a very good microcosm of the Bay's overall situation. Sophia told her that one day, and she couldn't help but notice it in how both sides kept throwing mean looks at each other in the hallways.
A gang war was picking up for sure, and the hero the Bay truly needed wasn't here to make a difference, since the PRT discarded her like a dirty towel!
Still, appearances are everything, which is why Emma keeps on smiling even as what's left of her posse – which actually hasn't slimmed down that much, thank you – keeps making mouth-noises about the previous night's events around their cafeteria table.
"–hear about the latest cape goss'?" Mallory – a brunette with an unfortunately high-pitched voice – asks out the blue in a faux-conspiratorial tone, wrenching Emma out of her quiet fuming.
"No?" Julia asks, her head tilted interrogatively, "I mean, I don't think I did?"
"There's a new vigilante in town," the brunette grins while waving her fork around, "It's not top topic on PHO, but it keeps popping back up on the local board. It's one of those monster capes, the fifty-three something."
"Case 53," someone – a temporary add-on Emma doesn't care to remember the name of – quietly corrects.
"Right, like Ghislaine said, a Case 53," Mallory keeps talking, steadily worsening Emma's brewing headache, "Cameras don't work on her apparently, but plenty of folks caught her standing eerily still in the most random places, looking at things like she was seeing them for the first time, which is hella weird."
"It is not," Emma primly corrects while giving her lackey a pointed look, "Case 53s more often than not suffer from amnesia when they're discovered for the first time. It's probably the case for this one too."
Which she knew about because Sophia and her talked about the monster capes a long time ago, mostly about how they'd like to look if it ever happened to them. Her hero would have of course liked to be a kickass anthropomorphic black panther woman, no questions asked, though Emma herself never really managed to come to an answer that truly spoke to her on a deeper level.
Although if she had to revisit the topic these days, she'd say lioness mostly to match with Sophia.
"Anyway, she's this tall, blue skinned woman, with pointed ears–" Emma's mind comes to a screeching, total halt as she registers Mallory's words, though she does her hardest to downplay her own reaction, "–and eyes with black– what's around the iris again?"
"The sclera," Ghislaine politely chimes in.
"Right, that," the brunette snaps her fingers in the other's direction in thanks, "Eyes with black sclera around yellow irises. Looks like a half-woman, half-puppet, with her neck all stitched up, but like Bonesaw did it, yes?"
Cue a collective shiver spreading all over the table, although Emma is certain her own doesn't come from the same place as the others.
No, because her shiver is due to the excitement she feels!
This is it, she inwardly grins, this is what I needed to finally bust the parasite and–
"And get this: she kills rapists," Mallory's grin turns wide enough to cut across her face as Emma's own thoughts yet again come to a grinding halt.
"What?!" she hears herself blurt out amid a chorus of theatrical gasps and awed noises.
"So, most of the time? She just stands here, taking in the sight while carrying around the creepy doll she always has in her arms," the brunette elaborates after locking eyes with her, though the entire table is drinking her words by now, "But sometimes she disappears. And sometimes, when she reappears, it's near someone who's having some shit happening to them. A girl getting assaulted. A woman getting the shit kicked out by their husband. A child getting more than the belt from their father, if you catch my drift.
"One moment, they're at their lowest, and the very next, there's this woman with a look straight out of a horror flick right next to them who's staring down their aggressor, before killing them most of the time," Mallory gushes, with bonafide stars in their eyes, "The Blue Devil thread has been steadily growing with testimonies, and the only assholes calling for her arrest probably deserve it if she happened to them, because I sure as fuck would like to have a guardian devil watching over my shoulder if this kind of crap happened to me."
The cafeteria quickly devolves into a debate – mostly on the so-called Blue Devil's side of the fence, to absolutely no-one's surprise – but Emma barely pays attention to it as her thoughts churn.
"We could send this bitch out of town," one of the guys said, "Stick her in one of the farms and hold her for a while. She's got tits, could auction her off."
And churn.
"Don't be a moron. White girl goes missing, they look," one of the others berates the first one, a disapproving scowl on his face.
And churn.
"Not- not the face, please. I'll do anything you want, just… not the face," Emma begs, tears streaming down her eyes like a waterfall.
She abruptly stands up, her field of view narrowed like a pinprick, barely acknowledging the question sent her way as she takes hold of her platter.
Appearences. Are. Everything.
"I'm sorry," she smiles, "I'm not hungry anymore. Julia, I need to go to the bathroom, do you mind…"
The blonde scampers out of her seat with an 'of course' on her lips.
But Emma barely waits for her as she's already walking away from the table, her mind abuzz with dark and somber thoughts.
***
When Emma comes back home, the house is empty.
It takes her all of five seconds to ditch both her shoes and backpack before powerwalking upstairs to throw the parasite's door open.
She pauses at the threshold, her eyes looking and finding the creepy portrait.
She feels herself swallowing in apprehension, before taking a step inside, then another, her fists balled at her side.
Five steps inside Anne's old bedroom, and her brows are all furrowed. Each time she tried to suss something about the parasite's villainous ways, there always was this sickly, heavy feeling in the room, more often than not by the portrait jumpscaring her trying to frighten her off.
Here though? Nothing of the sort.
Emma closes the distance between the portrait and her–
"This isn't it," she mumbles under her breath.
–and quickly comes to the conclusion that this isn't the genuine article. The other always gave her the heebie-jeebies a bad feeling the closer she got to it, no matter if it moved or not.
Which begs the question–
"Where did the parasite stash the original?"
***
The answer had been obvious in hindsight, only the attic never saw much use in the Barnes' household.
Any leftover doubts about the parasite being a cape fled from Emma's mind the very moment she opened the door and found herself face-to-face with the alarmingly empty and seemingly levitating original portrait.
Penultimate proof, the heebie-jeebies her bad feeling? Back at it again, although dialed to eleven.
By this point, Emma should've left the very moment she found the proof she's been looking for since the parasite arrived to ruin her life.
Yet–
"Then it's the face after all. Hold her," the man shrugs, before leaning forward with a gleeful look.
–she finds herself stepping into the attic after slowly closing the door at her back.
She takes a couple of steps deeper in, feeling transfixed by the empty frame slowly bobbing up and down under currents unseen, until–
–a feeling of utter dread washes over her–
–Emma quashes her immediate urge to whimper, her back going ramrod straight–
–right as a too-hard hand gently comes to rest on her right shoulder.
She gulps, before slowly, very slowly, looking over her shoulder–
–and locking eyes with a pair of baleful yellow ones, swallowed amid two pits of black as pitch sclera.
For a beat, neither Emma nor the Blue Devil speaks, the former being bug-eyed while the latter frowns down at her, her mouth set in a thin line.
But then the fiendish woman breaks the spell.
~~If you speak to anyone about this,~~ she tells her conversationally, in a voice that speaks of the comfort of the grave and the revenge of restless spirits, ~~No-one will ever find your body, this I swear.~~
The devil leans closer.
~~Do you understand, little kit?~~ she asks, her tone deadly serious, but also just deadly at the same time, and with her grip tightening a notch around Emma's shoulder.
Wide-eyed and scared shitless, Emma can only silently and repeatedly nod in assent.
The parasite's projection – because by this point, she's sure that her cousin is behind all of this – keeps staring her down for a while before ultimately straightening away, squeezing her shoulder one last time before taking a couple of steps toward its portrait.
The wise thing would probably to keep her mouth shut by now, and yet–
"Eyes. Nose. Mouth," the man lists as he pokes and probes at her with his knife.
"Will you keep doing it?!" she ends up blurting out, her fists all balled up at her side and with her eyes drilling a hole in the dusty floor of the attics.
The slow 'click click' of the projection's steps come to a halt.
~~Doing what, little kit?~~ it asks.
"Killing them," Emma whispers.
A pause.
~~Only those who deserve it,~~ it answers.
Slowly, Emma raises her head, just in time to watch the projection vanishing back into its portrait, the glassy orb of its doll rolling in its orbit to better lock eyes with her.
She remains standing in front of the portrait for a while longer, her thoughts still churning.
Until she finally comes to a decision she can live with.
***
"How was your day, Jacky?" Emma asks out of the blue during dinner, and I almost do a double-take when I realize that a) she's talking to me of her own volition; and b) she actually used my preferred form of address instead of bullheadingly trying to taunt me with my birth name.
I carefully look at her through the corner of my eyes, and only get more confused when I can't find any trace of deception in it.
Which doesn't mean there isn't any, mind, although I seriously doubt that she somehow managed to step up her game that hard since this morning out of the blue.
But I also don't have the spare time to worry overly much about what goes in her head, so I just end up shrugging and rolling with it, a non-negligible part of me being aware that two pairs of eyes are currently watching over our interaction with rapt attention.
"It was fine," I answer a little non-commitally, before frowning, "Though people at school kept speaking about the gang war, and it did a number on the mood."
"Don't worry," the curvy redhead hums a little distractedly while readying a bite of spaghetti for herself, "I'm sure someone is going to solve the problem soon enough."
I'm almost tempted to throw her a weirded out look, only stopping myself when I remember that I'm not alone with her in the room and how quietly relieved my aunt and uncle seem to feel at seeing the both of us not being at each other's throats for once.
"Someone probably will," I end up answering after a beat, right as another siren gets heard in the far-off distance.
I ended up 'going to bed' feeling incredibly confused by the evening's events, having zero idea what I did for my usually bitchy cousin to suddenly be nicer to me.
Then I remembered that this is still the 1st of April, and that this was probably her idea of a joke.
I only got more confused the next morning when Emma's newfound tolerance in my regard kept going strong, somehow.
But, well, not my Catachian Deathworm, not my battle.
[AN: I've been quietly laughing to myself about your various comments regarding Emma's reaction since the very beginning of this arc, mostly because all of ya forgot one key detail about her.
If she latched so hard on Sophia, it's because Stalker was the bigger monster who beat her own monsters away. And Dark-chan's modus operandi is pretty much a twisted take – both kinder and meaner at the same time – on her best friend's own brand of vigilantism.
So, when caught between 'outing the parasite' and 'letting her deal with the Bay's scum like a true hero should', well, Emma's torn.
Really, really torn.
Incidentally, this chapter heralds the end of the Jacky/Emma conflict – at least until new and unforeseen developments arise. Doylistly speaking, it's mostly because I nearly milked it for all it's worth and beating a dead cow never achieved anything of value, and because I find it funny that a misunderstanding somehow managed to resolve the situation.
Hope you enjoy, xoxo!]