Chapter Text
After
To make the shitty Sunday a truly shitty Sunday, the knife in the radiator had finally fallen out and let the engine overheat. The brakes shrieked as they pulled into an empty lot a half a mile from when the hood started spewing smoke out of its holes. The engine and remaining headlight shut off out of sync, leaving the hood to bubble angrily as the front spit coolant all over the ground. The door opened and out came Zoey shouting profanities in every language she knew. This incuded English, an odd thing to find in the Korean country side, Korean, Spanish and bits of Japanese from the shows she watched.
Mira followed after her, leaning an icepack against her bruised jaw.
“What is it this time”? She demanded and leered at the crooked nose of the vehicle. Her nose curled at the sight of the hole, a gaping twisted slit. Like a smiling maw, it cackled as bubbles spit from its lips, green liquid dripping from its twisted teeth. She glared at it as if it was intentionally mocking her.
“Hey Zoey, how long will this take to fix”, Mira drug her attention to the flailing thing in a green hoodie. A company logo stared back until Zoey turned around, harassed and exhausted. A scratch ran across her nose, dry and cracking, but untouched since she had received it. Beyond it her eyes were wide in a crazed expression, her teeth bared like a tiger in hunt.
“I don’t know Mira. I haven’t even seen what’s wrong yet”, she squealed through her teeth as if they were the cage for the true fury within.
Mira slid out of the way and pointed. Zoey’s eye twitched with her chagrin. Yet she composed herself and marched up to the rusty front of the RV.
Her mood improved.
“I mean, if it's just the radiator. Yeah that’s something I can totally fix. No biggie”.
“Have you ever fixed one”? Mira asked.
“Noooooo, but the radiator is right at the front, so I can take the front off. As long as I don’t have to remove anything from the engine bay, I can do it”, Zoey answered.
Mira blinked slowly, subtle disbelieving in her face. Then her shoulder rose into a shrug and she decided to survey the area. With Mira's lack of disapproval, Zoey darted into the RV for her phone. Mira took her own out of her pocket and made a call.
“Hey Bobby”.
“Oh hey Mira, what is it this time? Did this one break down again”?
“Um… yeah”, Mira drawled, “Zoey thinks it's an easy fix though”.
“Well this is why we plan our shows so far out. Although, now that the group is making decent money, we can buy you guys something new instead of all these lemons that keep breaking down on you”.
Zoey popped out, rattling on about the RV, what year and what brand behind Mira and her conversation.
“Uuuuuummmmmm”, Mira tucked her lips in and turned back to survey the RV behind her.
It was unassuming and ratty. The paint would have been blue if the sun hadn’t been so harsh to its paint. The plastic sealing the windows was cracking and falling apart. Its window had a massive crack in it. It was rusty, dusty and old, yet for them it was brand new. Better than the last RV. Slash marks scoured the sides of the body. Dents from sharp objects hitting the metal peppered up its sides and onto the hood where holes exposed the untouched engine below. By all means, this RV was totalled, a shame, but if it was a flashy brand new RV with all the amenities, it would have been a tradgedy.
“Maybe some other time, Bobby. We will be able to fix this one and be on our way. We should save that money for snacks. Will be there soon, bye”.
“Bye Mira, be safe”, Bobby cried back.
Mira sighed and looked out into the trees.
The air was filled with bird noises and bugs singing, chirping and screaming over the budding spring flowers. Mira glared through the trees at the surrounds, searching for glowing purple. For the flash of teeth or the gleam of claws.
She found what she was looking for, but it was behind her.
Out of the van stepped the last member of the group. Purple braids swung behind the heels of her back boots which were muddy and worn. Shimmering stripes ran all the way up her legs, glistening in the sunlight until it hit a set of short shorts, resumed up her abdomen and vanished into her shirt. Her hands were tipped with blackening claws that gleamed in the sun, sharp and dangerous. Her elongated canine teeth gleamed sarp as her yawn snapped close. Her eyes open, one a silky brown and the other gold and glowing, the pupil sharpened into a pike.
“Hey Rumi, how’s your shoulder”? Mira asked.
“Getting there”, Rumi answered and flung it around to losen the muscles. Mira stopped her mid swing.
“Don’t do that”, she said and glared at the massive gaping hole in her flesh.
“But its so sore”, she whined.
“Its not sore, you are missing a chunk of your body. Just let it heal, the last thing we need it to do is scar”, Mira scolded.
“uhuhuhuhuhuhuh”, Zoey rattled in the background to the little phone.
“Stay still”, Mira commanded and opened the demon hunting medical kit. First was the cleaner which she poured on Rumi’s injury. The blood ran down into her shirt which was already trashed from her getting gored. Next was stitching the injury into not being open. Everything in the kit could be bought from any store in the world, except for one thing.
“Take this”, Mira instructed and uncorked the small glowing bottle. Inside was what looked like glowing blue spagetti, but to the ordinary eye, it would be a normal, unremarkable bottle.
Rumi emptied the contents into her mouth and felt a slight tingle as they spread through her body, dulling her pain receptors and pulling her skin tighter. It also gave another sensation, a burning one in her throat and lungs. It wasn’t too bad, like she had eaten some extra spicy ramen, but it wasn’t pleasant.
“Do you need some Zoey”, Mira asked.
“yeah, yeah, uhuh, ok. That’s doable. I’ll call them, thanks, Mom”, she hung up, “What was that Mira”?
“Do you need the Hamoon healing stuff”? She scoffed.
“Nope, I’m good. This scratch will be gone before the next show”, she announced.
“Cool”, Mira shrugged and got back to carefully sewing her friend back together.
“Also good news, radiators aren’t that expensive and in this model they are pretty common. I can get this fixed up in no time”.
“Is there a place nearby”? Mira asked.
“No”, Zoey answered nervously.
“Can we use the air conditioning”? Mira asked.
“Ummmm”, Zoey cowered, “No”.
The look Mira and Rumi gave would have split ice.
“I’m going to kill those demon hunters”, Mira snarled, clenching her fist covered in Rumi’s blood.
Before
If she strained against the chains she was able to reach it. It was a crack in the corner of the wall. Standing on the surface she slept on, she could just about reach it, claw at it, tear it apart.
Her cell was solid concrete on all sides. There was no color in it or outside of it. Most of the time there wasn’t even any light. The only source was the little window in the iron door which only came to life when the other one stepped in.
In her world, there were only seven things. The cell, the door, the chains, food, the songs from her chest, the woman and herself.
Herself was long and clumsy, with lots of extended parts that changed, failed, and obeyed. She was similar to the woman in a lot of ways, except for one. The woman didn’t have patterns. They glowed and spread when she attempted to attack the woman, they cooled and stayed on her skin when she was by herself. She liked their light, it was familiar and comforting.
The woman on the other hand was not comforting. First she would coo at her, lean down, pretend to be soft and nice. Then in the next second it would be loud scary sounds and sometimes hurting. She had never understood it. It made her confused and scared as when she was small, now she knew better than to let the woman get near. The only good option to seeing the light from the door was to be louder and scarier than the woman.
To help with that, her strength grew, her patterns grew, her claws and teeth grew. However in addition to those, the chains had appeared. They kept her from getting too close to the woman whenever she visited. They kept her claws and fangs from piercing the woman, they kept her from touching the door, they kept her from sleeping comfortably at night, they kept half of her cell from her and she had a memory of being able to move faster and moving more.
And the eighth thing that came into existence was the crack. She had not seen it appear, it just was. Darker than the concrete it was darkness upon darkness, but it was also something else. Sometimes there was something blue in it. It was smaller than a speck of dust and brighter than the light the woman brought.
Though she should have been afraid, she was curious. She wondered questions about it. What that light was? What color was blue? Why water came through? Originally she had thought that water was a "the woman" only thing, but the crack had produced some. The crack was fasinating.
With her claws, she dug around the crack. Her chains kept her one arm hostage, joined in one solid chain link stuck in the ground, the other was a little more free. With her attention, she scraped and clawed at the crack, picking away grain by grain. She sang, it was usually all she could do, but now she had two things to do. Singing and digging.
The crack grew wider and wider. The blue didn’t, not for a long time. That is until she accidentally broke off the cunk of concrete.
It had crushed her hands. She had yelped in pain when it came down. She wasn’t expecting them to come down. Only the chains come down, not walls. The concrete had slipped when she had yanked her hands out from beneath it and it had fallen and hit her in the toe. She yelped again and toppled back off the sleeping ledge and hit the ground, chains and all.
For a moment she existed in shock and pain, letting the chains stab her in the back. When her breath returned she was finally able to look at the thing that had hurt her.
It was blue. So much blue. It filled the room with itself and turned the walls a different color. It had chased the darkness into corners, lit the lines of her chains in black, changed the way the world fit around her.
It freaked her out so she scrambled across the suddenly streaked floor and hid. She hid in the spot where the light didn’t touch, behind her sleeping ledge. She closed her eyes and waited for the darkness to return, for the familiarity to fall over her head and comfort her.
But it never did, instead a sound met her ears. It sounded like her own voice, but different there was more of them. They were also singing.
She was the only thing in her 8 pieces of life who could sing. Yet there, the blue sang. It sang more than she did, richer than she did. The revelation that this blue could also sing, brought her back into the new world.
The chains below her snaked and clattered as usual, but they inherited the blue’s brightness and spread it all over themselves. Some objects like the walls absorbed the light and it made them brighter, but the chains just let it match its surface and slide off. In between the links were all of the hair they had ripped out of her head, shimmering a lighter purple than her patterns. When she thought of herself, she remembered her patterns as crisp and glowing unfettered, but on inspection, they were marred and interrupted by streaks of grime and dust, it was hard to see them at all.
Still using the sweeping motion with her knuckles she used to feel around, she moved to the platform and found the chunk of her wall. She startled from it, thinking it might come for her fingers again.
It didn’t, even when she offered up her finger to it, it refused to come for her again. She felt embarrassment for thinking a wall piece could attack her and promptly shook off her fear in leu of a blanket of boldness. No wall chunk would get the best of her.
She rose to her toes, strained against the chains around her neck and one of her wrists. If she stood on her toes she could just see beyond the chunk of wall.
It was half of something she had never seen before, a flaky version of the rock with a strange, sweet smell. On it was more color, this time hairs in a shade of green shooting out of the ground, the blue was behind it. It was still too bright. She had to wait for the horrible pain in her eyes to die down before the world beyond filled out.
Colors, more colors than she had ever seen in her entire life. It was all so shocking. There was barely a hint of darkness to the world outside. She couldn’t entirely comprehend or imagine what she was looking at. But there was one thing that was somewhat familiar.
“Alright, can we try again from the top”? A voice sweeter then the buds of softness on her food plate said.
In the same way she could tell the woman was getting closer, she could tell this voice was far away. Not only that, but it was different. Different than the woman’s different than her own.
She narrowed her eyes until it hit a gangly tall creature bouncing around in the blue.
“How do you keep messing this up, its basic choreo”, another voice said. This one was deeper, like echoes bouncing off the iron door.
“I know, but I am memorizing so many dance moves, I just get mixed up sometimes”, the first voice defends herself.
“You’ll get there, I messed up that slide”, added a new one like chains clinking on stone.
“Hey don’t blame me if you are all untalented”.
Their little shapes bounced into an organized line. One of them, the one with bright hair bent down and pressed something on a small brick. Then it began to sing, yet way better than she could ever. It played sounds she had never heard before, thumped in sharp bangs that her hands or chains could never make. Sharp hums like claws scraping over stone. It layered and folded the sounds into a cohesion which brought a chill down her spine.
Then the others started to sing.
Their voices were new, shimmering, brightening, full of color and layers and distance and crispness. Them together, singing with the complex sounds was the epitome of what the blue was. It was the center, the sweetness among the plates of sourness. She was glued to it, shivering with each shift and wave of sweet noise. She found a rhythm, she didn’t find understanding in the words, but she began humming to the tune. Sometimes there would be a change in the new notes and she had trouble keeping up, but it was wonderful. Singing with them made her feel included, like the chains were off, she was out in the blue with them, she was listening to their joyous voices.
“Girls”, a new voice called. One that was like a drop in her stomach, a burning in her throat, like fury and iron and pain. So much pain.
The woman walked into view, putting that expression on her face that meant danger, that meant she would lie before she would change.
“Oh hello, Celine”, The sweet one answered.
“Oh hey, Celine”, the deep one followed.
“Hi mom”, the high one said.
“Are you girls ready for lunch”?
She thought the woman was only to be heralded by the horrid light that hummed and gurgled. She was only supposed to appear from the door. She wasn’t supposed to be in the blue. Yet herself didn’t bark or snarl, or attack the blue. Based on the way the woman’s mask stayed on her face, she had not noticed her. If she did, and herself was not supposed to see the blue, she might put her in tighter, heavier and worse chains.
She grabbed the chunk from the wall and put it back, hiding the blue and bringing back her familiar darkness. She made sure it would say in its place. She promised to never look out there, never ever again.