[story] girl in the war
Sep. 28th, 2008 03:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ib_archiveauthor: skadi (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
xskadi)
email: satri.jo [at] gmail.com
artist: llyse (llyse)
email: xanedrian [at] gmail.com
"Excuse me," Jane said, tapping the girl's shoulder. It was the homeroom on her first day at her new school. "What’s with the gun?"
"Oh, this?" the girl said, and touched it.
"Yeah."
"You can see it?"
"Well, if I’m asking you about it--"
"Of course, of course," she interrupted, and stood up. "Um." She grabbed Jane’s arm. The girl was too delicate-looking for it to hurt that much. "I’m so sorry, you’ll have to come with me." The girl glanced around and dragged Jane out of the room. " I hope I won’t have to kill you. Don’t worry about missing class, Peter is making an illusion; oh, I hate it when I have to kill your kind."
"Kill me?"
The girl stopped in the middle of the hallway. "Well, that's one plan."
"What are the other ones?"
"That's not for me to say." And she started walking again. So much for not causing trouble. "We have to see our leader; I don’t have the authority to do anything about you. Don’t worry-- I'm sure we won’t have to kill you."
That wasn't reassuring. The girl peeked into the classroom and made a gesture at someone Jane couldn’t see, and then started walking again. "Where are we going?" Jane asked.
"The Conveniently Empty Classroom. It’s always empty."
"Hence the name?" If she wasn’t potentially leading her to her death, she would like her. However, her gun was a little too big for Jane to be comfortable.
"Peter thinks that it’s magic left over from when the school was created. Once you’re in there, no one else can come in unless you want them to."
She led Jane upstairs, and they went in the first door to the left. "See? Empty."
There was a faded area rug with a distinct scorch mark just left of center, and stacks of long-forgotten desks and chairs all shoved to one side with small colonies of dust bunnies breeding underneath. On the wall, there was a blackboard with broken stubs of chalk on the tray and a detailed map of the school drawn on it. The map had five floors, as opposed to the four she knew of. What she really noticed, however, was that outside the windows, it was night.
No, Jane realized. It wasn't night. The world outside the window was grainy, the washed-out white and black of an old photograph.
The girl pulled two chairs out of a stack. "Don't worry about what's outside. Our leader will be here in a minute." She sat down on the rug and crossed her legs. "It takes her a little longer to cast illusions. She has a higher level restriction on her magic than Peter."
"Magic." Half of her wanted to say, No, that's impossible, you're crazy, let me out of here. The other, more sensible half, had been presented with incontrovertible evidence (there was, in fact, a bird frozen in midair outside the room) and was therefore going to sit down and wait for some answers. "And what's your name?"
"I’m not sure if I can--"
"Her name is Gabrielle," said someone behind her. "I'm Ana."
"Are you going to kill me?" Jane asked.
"Why would we do that?"
Jane turned around to look and saw that Ana was short and Hispanic and very pretty. "Is that a sword?"
Ana smiled. "You see Gabrielle's gun, too?"
"But why are you carrying weapons in a high school?"
She smiled wider. "I asked you first." She didn't draw the sword, which was probably a good sign. "You can see Gabrielle's gun, too?"
"I can," Jane said, and though Ana drew on can, Jane’s voice didn't quaver. A nodachi, she thought, Japanese. She had probably read about it somewhere. The sheath, however, was far too short to accommodate it.
"Does the name Scarbo mean anything to you?" asked Gabrielle.
"Um, my mom's a piano teacher and she plays it in her spare time. It's by Ravel from his 'Gaspard de la Nuit.' Her favourite recording is the Vladimir Ashkenazy one; it's on, like, three staves because it'’s so hard"-- don’t kill me-- "I like the Martha Argerich one better because it's so fast, even though I’m not so nuts about Ravel himself." Don’t kill me--"It's based on the image of a fairy dancing through a graveyard, or something?"
"A ghoul, pirouetting. The graveyard demon," said Ana, and sheathed her sword. "The monster that eats the souls of the dead still trapped in their bodies. Among other things."
"Why are you telling me this?" Jane asked.
"Because you can see our weapons, and that means that you're going to start seeing other things. The school does that to people."
As if on cue, a translucent figure appeared in the middle of the room. "Don't close your eyes," Ana said. The figure looked at Jane and shrieked. She felt it in her bones and her teeth. She stuffed her fingers in her ears and wiggled them around and hummed, but it was no good.
The two of them looked unaffected by the sound. "Permission to fire?" Gabrielle asked. At first Jane thought she had been asking Ana, but she wasn't. She waited a split second, nodded, and shot the figure between the eyes. It disappeared, and she holstered her gun. "Thank you, Peter."
Jane pulled her fingers out of her ears. The thing was gone, but the noise was still bouncing around her brain.
"Let's get back to class," said Ana. "I can’t keep up my illusion much longer."
Gabrielle took Jane's hand and led her out of the Classroom. Her grip was far gentler this time around.
"And just so you know, it's not about you," Peter concluded, pushing dark blond hair behind his ear. "You're not special, or anything."
"Thank you." Jane took a bite of her sandwich.
"The ability could leave you at any time."
She took another bite. Peter was Gabrielle’s twin. He had cornered her at lunch, and while she wasn't happy to see him, he had given her more answers in thirty minutes than Ana and Gabrielle had given her in three days. What Ana had said to her in the Conveniently Empty Classroom was, according to Peter, the most she’d ever said at one time.
"So," Peter said, quite out of nowhere (she wouldn’t have been surprised if he had teleported to her lunch table), "We're sitting on a magical hub. Everything comes to hang out. Some idiot built a school on top of it, and since it takes several gods to move anything built on top of a hub, someone’s got to protect the people here. It's like a wireless hot spot-- some people come to work on research papers, some people come to look at porn. We get rid of the perverts."
Jane opened her milk and took a sip, only to discover that it had gotten warm. Peter touched it, and it was cool again. "I'm not restricted, not like Ana is."
A ghost walked through the middle of the cafeteria, and she flinched. "How about explaining them?"
He looked over his shoulder. "It just happens-- which is good for us, because none of us can see them."
"How do you fight them?"
"We’ve had others." Peter looked uncomfortable for a moment, and then reached into Jane’s lunch bag and pulled out her grapes. "May I?" She shrugged. "Anyway, Ana’s given you this much time to think about what you saw in the Classroom. The deal we usually give people is, either you work with us, or we kill you."
"And the deal you're giving me?"
"Either you work with us, or we kill you." He smiled like Ana, with that same touch of cruelty, and then with the tiniest adjustment, it turned friendly. "Gabrielle can make it hurt." The ghost moved on. As far as she could tell, there were two kinds: the ones that screamed, and the ones that didn’t.
"I get it, I get it," Jane said.
Peter had glossed over the precise details of his magic and his sister and Ana’s form-shifting weaponry-- and her sudden knowledge of all the weapons that the two girls were using was almost more disturbing than her sudden ability to see spirits. Gabrielle requested permission to get out her gun again and pulled out was a submachine gun, an FN P90, which was far too big to have come out of her holster. "It’s around here," Gabrielle said. "Where is it?"
We can't see it unless you look at it, Peter had said. We're borrowing your eyes. Don't think too hard about it.
Jane looked around. The offender was nowhere to be seen. Unless-- "Do you have a mirror?" she asked.
Gabrielle took one out and handed it to her. It was bright pink and had hearts on the back. (Her gun, when she wasn’t paying attention, had become a SIG P228. She would wonder about it later.) Jane studied her face in the mirror for a moment, and then tilted it up to look at the ceiling.
Above us, Jane mouthed.
Gabrielle frowned and took a deep breath, and the world reversed itself so that they were standing on the ceiling. Jane fell to her knees. "Stay down," Gabrielle said. "And don't close your eyes."
It was a white-faced ghost, dressed in black, with long arms and limp wrists, attacked Gabrielle. She was holding it off as she spoke without any apparent effort. The thing split itself in two and went for Jane, but Gabrielle shot both pieces, and they disappeared.
"Want to go bowling with me and Peter after school?" Gabrielle asked.
"No, thank you."
Gabrielle shrugged and holstered her gun just as the bell rang. Peter came out of the classroom, followed by his two illusions, and they disappeared when he reached them. "Good job," he said. "Walk with me, Janie."
They left Gabrielle behind. Jane remembered that it was lunchtime. "That was a yuurei."
"A Japanese ghost?" That had slipped out: Jane knew nothing about foreign ghosts. She tamped down the sick feeling in her stomach that always accompanied her knowledge and took a sip of water.
"Yes." He looked impressed. "They're not usually any more than creepy, but there’s something about this place that makes them--"
Ana sat down, and Jane jumped about a mile. "Did you tell her about Scarbo yet?"
"Scarbo? Isn't that a piece of music?"
The other girl gave her a dirty look. At least Gabrielle still liked her.
It had been three months, and it was January. There was no snow.
Jane watched the creature-- a raven mocker-- pick up the boy she was walking with and drain him, before coming for her. She watched, because she had to. Because Peter quarantined the area and shouted his authorization for Gabrielle to put some rounds in that thing and after that Ana drew her sword and carved it into mincemeat and she could not close her eyes.
She didn't cry when Peter destroyed the bodies of the victims, which he and Ana had laid out side by side in the Classroom. She and Gabrielle stood side by side against the wall. She reached for Gabrielle's hand, but Gabrielle brushed it away and went to stand by her brother.
Ana was the one who walked her out of the Classroom.
"Two raven mockers in a month," she said.
Jane shrugged. "We're unlucky."
"All the records say that they only show up in a hub once a year, and only when something bad is going to happen."
They kept walking to Ana’s locker, number 217. The other girl opened it up (Jane watched the combination: 2-29-40) and pulled out a red scarf and knotted it around her neck, very slowly, as if performing a striptease in reverse.
"It’s also an omen of a graveyard demon's arrival," Ana said. She had no coat, though it was freezing out.
"You mean--that Scarbo thing?" Peter and Ana had never gotten around to telling her about it, and Jane had forgotten about it until now.
Ana nodded, and pulled her backback off of a hook and started putting some notebooks into it. "Scarbo is most famous one. It revealed the secret to splitting the atom to a scientist in a dream so it could watch humanity destroy itself. And it killed Peter and Gabrielle's parents."
"Why?"
"Why not?"
"Two raven mockers," said Peter cheerfully at lunch. "I'll get my revenge. Ana told you, didn't she?" He took a bite of her apple, which she had already started eating. She should have been annoyed.
"By the way," Peter added, "I forgot to tell you that when you die in the line of duty, which you will, we're going to rip out your eyes and send them back to the organization for study. Sorry."
There was something wrong about Gabrielle, as if she only existed as an extension of her brother, like an extra limb. She sat at their table: she had been silent since the burning of the bodies. She didn't talk as she pulled out a sandwich. She took a half-hearted bite before setting it down.
Another day, another hunt. It was only her and Ana. Ana was wielding her impossible nodachi again, but minutes before, it had been a broadsword, and before that, a cutlass.
Now was as good a time as any to ask about it. "How does it work?" Jane whispered, gesturing to the sword.
"I'm contracted to a demon. In a fight, it takes over. It’s an extension of the demon. And ghosts don't have ears, so you don't have to talk like that."
Jane caught sight of the ghost lurking in her peripheral vision, and she turned quickly and saw that it wasn't just a ghost: it was an ambush. Jane saw the panic in Ana’s eyes when she realized that she was outnumbered.
"Run," Ana said, and grabbed Jane’s hand, dragging her along. Jane was not very fast. The ghouls were gaining on them, and when they reached the stairs, Ana stopped and turned around. "A stand," she said, squeezed Jane’s hand, and raised her sword in what may have been a defensive stance. Jane realized, This is it. We’re going to die here.
No, something inside of her said, and when she saw Ana brace herself, Jane found herself stepping forward. She raised a hand. "Stop."
The ghouls stopped.
"What," said Ana, once she finished them off. It wasn't a question.
"I don't know," Jane replied, rubbing her hand . "I just--"
"Scarbo," she said, frowning.
"Scarbo's a piece of music--my mother’s a piano teacher, she plays it all the time. It's from Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit. I like the Martha Argerich recording because it's so fast, but Mom likes the Vladimir Ashkenazy recording. I think it’s based on the image of a fairy dancing in a graveyard."
"Scarbo," Ana said, again.
"Um, Scarbo? All I know is that it's a piece of music. My mom plays it all the time, she’s a piano teacher--" Jane stopped. "Why do I keep repeating that?"
"What's your mother’s name?"
Jane thought about it for a long minute. "I don't-- I don't know." But it was her mother, of course she knew her mother’s name.
Ana frowned. "I don’t think you are what you think you are."
"What I think I am? I know what I am; I'm an eleventh grader who just transferred into this school and started seeing ghosts and monsters. You people are using my eyes and you're going to rip them out once I get killed and send them back to your organization so they can attempt to synthesize the ability to see ghosts and--" Peter hadn't told her that.
"What's your last name?"
Jane crossed her arms over her chest. "I know what I am."
Ana stood up and, toyed with the tassel on the hilt of her sword. "We don’t know it, either. The teachers never call it, and it's not in any of their books. You talk to people, but they don't use it. I'm willing to bet that you can't exist outside the school. Which can only mean one thing."
"And that is?" She felt something inside of her chest growing, reacting to Ana’s words. She could kill her, if she wanted, just by reaching out with it and severing her connection to her sword-- a web of lines from Ana’s sword to her hands and arms.
She didn't want to kill Ana.
"Nothing. You could have killed me just then, couldn't you?" Ana sheathed her sword.
"I’ll kill you and your magician and your gunman whenever I feel like it," Jane heard herself say.
"I don’t doubt you will."
She left the room, but Jane stayed and it hit her: every person she'd killed, her plan to infiltrate the newest group the organization sent, all the fun experiments she was going to conduct once she used the power she'd get from cutting the bond between Peter and Gabrielle to get control once and for all. Now, if only Ana hadn’t figured it out-- oh, well, it didn’t matter. She could kill her later.
Peter and Gabrielle are my friends.
Peter and Gabrielle were the means to an end.
Jane saw herself standing in front of her, and instinctively knew that she’d shifted into her own pocket dimension. The other Jane grinned and Jane saw that the eyes were white and blind. "Hello," she said, hesitant.
"Hi, there," said Scarbo-Jane, and its voice was ten thousand spiders running up and down her spine.
Jane extracted herself from the pocket dimension and ran out of the Classroom to Ana. She saw a flicker of fear in the other girl's eyes when she grabbed her shoulder. I don’t want to see that look on her face, Jane thought. She could feel power welling up in her to make Ana her slave. She forced it down.
"I can be killed in this body," Jane said. She took a deep shuddering breath in. "If I do anything to put you, Peter, or Gabrielle in danger, I want you to cut me down." She didn’t want to die, but she was more afraid of what the thing inside of her could do than she was of death.
Ana touched the hilt of her sword. "All right." And that was that.
Jane dreamed.
The fun she would have! She started wars-- Napoleon was one of her greater accomplishments (Hitler, however, was someone else’s fuck-up). She starved whole cities just to see what would happen, destroyed continents to watch entire races drown.
It wasn't enough. There were plenty of spiritual hubs, but the one under the school was the worst-defended of them all. It was just a bunch of high school kids each generation. The organization that protected the hubs was spread thin.
It was simple to ensure that a pair of psychically-bonded twins would get assigned to the school. They kept twins like Peter and Gabrielle in labs for research precisely because their power could unleash what was in hubs. Peter’s abilities and drive for revenge had ensured that he couldn’t be locked up.
Alone in her pocket dimension, watching the human she had made interact with the two of them, she shivered to think of all the wars she would start when she killed them.
Jane woke up. She was in front of her locker. I’m willing to bet that you can't even exist outside this school. She turned around and crossed the hall to the window, and opened it. A stiff wind blew in, but she didn't feel the cold.
She tried to put her hand outside the window, but there was something viscous and invisible stopping her, and when she pushed through it, there was no hand. She pushed farther. Her forearm disappeared, and, in her horror, she stumbled backwards. Her hand and arm came back.
Someone yelled, "Shut the window!"
She went to class, and to lunch. Peter acted as if there was nothing wrong. Ana hadn’t told him, for whatever reason. Jane didn’t question it.
Something had gotten into the Classroom, moving too fast for Jane to see. Usually, nothing but banshees could get in, but this wasn’t a banshee.
The four of them were in the center of the room, back to back, waiting for Jane to get it in her sights, but Jane was finding it increasingly difficult to focus-- the others didn’t notice, but whatever was in the room came near her every few seconds to give her tiny, shallow cuts. Jane kept her mouth shut and focused on the power inside of her.
She found it, and stopped the right in front of her. It looked more like a porcupine than anything, but with metal blades instead of quills. Jane could feel it struggling to break free, but it was a thousand years too young.
"Permission to fire?" Gabrielle said. It was the first time Jane had heard her talk in days.
"Permission granted," said Peter. Ana looked furious, even as Gabrielle shot it between what may have been its eyes.
Peter and Gabrielle left the Classroom. When the door closed, Ana grabbed Jane's arms and shoved her up against the wall. "Don't do that again," she said.
"I'm sorry," Jane said. "I know the more power I use, the more likely it is that I'll become me again, but I couldn't let you--"
"Don’t." Ana looked her straight in the eye, and Jane saw that she was frowning but didn't look angry--she looked sad. "I'm pretty sure," she started, and faltered. "I'm pretty sure this is the part where I kiss you and tell you that I don't want you to go back to what you are and stay with us forever. Even with a level-three restriction I can feel your real soul laughing. And I don't ever want to hear that again," Ana said. She looked faintly dazed at the effort it took to talk so much. Jane leaned down and kissed her.
(On the seventeenth of February, a half a month later, Jane couldn't hold Scarbo back any longer. Ana made sure she didn't feel the sword when it cut her.)
Jane kissed her, and felt them shift into Scarbo’s pocket dimension. She saw the demon sitting in an armchair that hadn't been there before, watching the two of them with its white eyes.
"This is interesting," said Scarbo-Jane. For one heart-stopping moment, Jane thought that Ana heard, because the other girl pulled away and searched her face, but then she very nearly attacked Jane’s mouth.
Scarbo-Jane stood up and started pacing when the two of them managed to figure out to do with their noses. "You're keeping me suppressed," it said. "The artificial construct. Fascinating."
Jane flinched when Ana started unbuttoning her shirt, and Ana smiled-- the same cruel smile she'd had the first day they met.
"I could try to break out, of course," Scarbo continued. "But you're drawing on my reserves to maintain the seal that I used. I don't think you know how you’re doing it."
Jane wanted to scream, but that would have clued Ana in to the fact that they were not alone, and she liked what Ana was doing with her tongue far too much to want to do that so she dug her fingers into her palms and shut her eyes. They ended up on the rug at Scarbo-Jane's feet, despite Jane's efforts to keep them near the wall. Scarbo-Jane leaned forward in the chair to watch the two of them, resting its elbows on its knees, and smiled.
"How long can you hold me back?" it asked and they were back in the real world.
Ana began buttoning Jane's shirt. "I'll be going now."
Jane caught her wrist when she got to the third button, and Ana tried to yank it away with the most vulnerable face Jane had ever seen her make. Still, she held on.
Again: the desire to make Ana her slave. Sure, the demon attached to her would have to be dealt with, but it was hardly graveyard-class and would take only a fraction of her power to subdue.
She let Ana's wrist go.
the end
xskadi)email: satri.jo [at] gmail.com
artist: llyse (
llyse)email: xanedrian [at] gmail.com
"Excuse me," Jane said, tapping the girl's shoulder. It was the homeroom on her first day at her new school. "What’s with the gun?"
"Oh, this?" the girl said, and touched it.
"Yeah."
"You can see it?"
"Well, if I’m asking you about it--"
"Of course, of course," she interrupted, and stood up. "Um." She grabbed Jane’s arm. The girl was too delicate-looking for it to hurt that much. "I’m so sorry, you’ll have to come with me." The girl glanced around and dragged Jane out of the room. " I hope I won’t have to kill you. Don’t worry about missing class, Peter is making an illusion; oh, I hate it when I have to kill your kind."
"Kill me?"
The girl stopped in the middle of the hallway. "Well, that's one plan."
"What are the other ones?"
"That's not for me to say." And she started walking again. So much for not causing trouble. "We have to see our leader; I don’t have the authority to do anything about you. Don’t worry-- I'm sure we won’t have to kill you."
That wasn't reassuring. The girl peeked into the classroom and made a gesture at someone Jane couldn’t see, and then started walking again. "Where are we going?" Jane asked.
"The Conveniently Empty Classroom. It’s always empty."
"Hence the name?" If she wasn’t potentially leading her to her death, she would like her. However, her gun was a little too big for Jane to be comfortable.
"Peter thinks that it’s magic left over from when the school was created. Once you’re in there, no one else can come in unless you want them to."
She led Jane upstairs, and they went in the first door to the left. "See? Empty."
There was a faded area rug with a distinct scorch mark just left of center, and stacks of long-forgotten desks and chairs all shoved to one side with small colonies of dust bunnies breeding underneath. On the wall, there was a blackboard with broken stubs of chalk on the tray and a detailed map of the school drawn on it. The map had five floors, as opposed to the four she knew of. What she really noticed, however, was that outside the windows, it was night.
No, Jane realized. It wasn't night. The world outside the window was grainy, the washed-out white and black of an old photograph.
The girl pulled two chairs out of a stack. "Don't worry about what's outside. Our leader will be here in a minute." She sat down on the rug and crossed her legs. "It takes her a little longer to cast illusions. She has a higher level restriction on her magic than Peter."
"Magic." Half of her wanted to say, No, that's impossible, you're crazy, let me out of here. The other, more sensible half, had been presented with incontrovertible evidence (there was, in fact, a bird frozen in midair outside the room) and was therefore going to sit down and wait for some answers. "And what's your name?"
"I’m not sure if I can--"
"Her name is Gabrielle," said someone behind her. "I'm Ana."
"Are you going to kill me?" Jane asked.
"Why would we do that?"
Jane turned around to look and saw that Ana was short and Hispanic and very pretty. "Is that a sword?"
Ana smiled. "You see Gabrielle's gun, too?"
"But why are you carrying weapons in a high school?"
She smiled wider. "I asked you first." She didn't draw the sword, which was probably a good sign. "You can see Gabrielle's gun, too?"
"I can," Jane said, and though Ana drew on can, Jane’s voice didn't quaver. A nodachi, she thought, Japanese. She had probably read about it somewhere. The sheath, however, was far too short to accommodate it.
"Does the name Scarbo mean anything to you?" asked Gabrielle.
"Um, my mom's a piano teacher and she plays it in her spare time. It's by Ravel from his 'Gaspard de la Nuit.' Her favourite recording is the Vladimir Ashkenazy one; it's on, like, three staves because it'’s so hard"-- don’t kill me-- "I like the Martha Argerich one better because it's so fast, even though I’m not so nuts about Ravel himself." Don’t kill me--"It's based on the image of a fairy dancing through a graveyard, or something?"
"A ghoul, pirouetting. The graveyard demon," said Ana, and sheathed her sword. "The monster that eats the souls of the dead still trapped in their bodies. Among other things."
"Why are you telling me this?" Jane asked.
"Because you can see our weapons, and that means that you're going to start seeing other things. The school does that to people."
As if on cue, a translucent figure appeared in the middle of the room. "Don't close your eyes," Ana said. The figure looked at Jane and shrieked. She felt it in her bones and her teeth. She stuffed her fingers in her ears and wiggled them around and hummed, but it was no good.
The two of them looked unaffected by the sound. "Permission to fire?" Gabrielle asked. At first Jane thought she had been asking Ana, but she wasn't. She waited a split second, nodded, and shot the figure between the eyes. It disappeared, and she holstered her gun. "Thank you, Peter."
Jane pulled her fingers out of her ears. The thing was gone, but the noise was still bouncing around her brain.
"Let's get back to class," said Ana. "I can’t keep up my illusion much longer."
Gabrielle took Jane's hand and led her out of the Classroom. Her grip was far gentler this time around.
"And just so you know, it's not about you," Peter concluded, pushing dark blond hair behind his ear. "You're not special, or anything."
"Thank you." Jane took a bite of her sandwich.
"The ability could leave you at any time."
She took another bite. Peter was Gabrielle’s twin. He had cornered her at lunch, and while she wasn't happy to see him, he had given her more answers in thirty minutes than Ana and Gabrielle had given her in three days. What Ana had said to her in the Conveniently Empty Classroom was, according to Peter, the most she’d ever said at one time.
"So," Peter said, quite out of nowhere (she wouldn’t have been surprised if he had teleported to her lunch table), "We're sitting on a magical hub. Everything comes to hang out. Some idiot built a school on top of it, and since it takes several gods to move anything built on top of a hub, someone’s got to protect the people here. It's like a wireless hot spot-- some people come to work on research papers, some people come to look at porn. We get rid of the perverts."
Jane opened her milk and took a sip, only to discover that it had gotten warm. Peter touched it, and it was cool again. "I'm not restricted, not like Ana is."
A ghost walked through the middle of the cafeteria, and she flinched. "How about explaining them?"
He looked over his shoulder. "It just happens-- which is good for us, because none of us can see them."
"How do you fight them?"
"We’ve had others." Peter looked uncomfortable for a moment, and then reached into Jane’s lunch bag and pulled out her grapes. "May I?" She shrugged. "Anyway, Ana’s given you this much time to think about what you saw in the Classroom. The deal we usually give people is, either you work with us, or we kill you."
"And the deal you're giving me?"
"Either you work with us, or we kill you." He smiled like Ana, with that same touch of cruelty, and then with the tiniest adjustment, it turned friendly. "Gabrielle can make it hurt." The ghost moved on. As far as she could tell, there were two kinds: the ones that screamed, and the ones that didn’t.
"I get it, I get it," Jane said.
Peter had glossed over the precise details of his magic and his sister and Ana’s form-shifting weaponry-- and her sudden knowledge of all the weapons that the two girls were using was almost more disturbing than her sudden ability to see spirits. Gabrielle requested permission to get out her gun again and pulled out was a submachine gun, an FN P90, which was far too big to have come out of her holster. "It’s around here," Gabrielle said. "Where is it?"
We can't see it unless you look at it, Peter had said. We're borrowing your eyes. Don't think too hard about it.
Jane looked around. The offender was nowhere to be seen. Unless-- "Do you have a mirror?" she asked.
Gabrielle took one out and handed it to her. It was bright pink and had hearts on the back. (Her gun, when she wasn’t paying attention, had become a SIG P228. She would wonder about it later.) Jane studied her face in the mirror for a moment, and then tilted it up to look at the ceiling.
Above us, Jane mouthed.
Gabrielle frowned and took a deep breath, and the world reversed itself so that they were standing on the ceiling. Jane fell to her knees. "Stay down," Gabrielle said. "And don't close your eyes."
It was a white-faced ghost, dressed in black, with long arms and limp wrists, attacked Gabrielle. She was holding it off as she spoke without any apparent effort. The thing split itself in two and went for Jane, but Gabrielle shot both pieces, and they disappeared.
"Want to go bowling with me and Peter after school?" Gabrielle asked.
"No, thank you."
Gabrielle shrugged and holstered her gun just as the bell rang. Peter came out of the classroom, followed by his two illusions, and they disappeared when he reached them. "Good job," he said. "Walk with me, Janie."
They left Gabrielle behind. Jane remembered that it was lunchtime. "That was a yuurei."
"A Japanese ghost?" That had slipped out: Jane knew nothing about foreign ghosts. She tamped down the sick feeling in her stomach that always accompanied her knowledge and took a sip of water.
"Yes." He looked impressed. "They're not usually any more than creepy, but there’s something about this place that makes them--"
Ana sat down, and Jane jumped about a mile. "Did you tell her about Scarbo yet?"
"Scarbo? Isn't that a piece of music?"
The other girl gave her a dirty look. At least Gabrielle still liked her.
It had been three months, and it was January. There was no snow.
Jane watched the creature-- a raven mocker-- pick up the boy she was walking with and drain him, before coming for her. She watched, because she had to. Because Peter quarantined the area and shouted his authorization for Gabrielle to put some rounds in that thing and after that Ana drew her sword and carved it into mincemeat and she could not close her eyes.
She didn't cry when Peter destroyed the bodies of the victims, which he and Ana had laid out side by side in the Classroom. She and Gabrielle stood side by side against the wall. She reached for Gabrielle's hand, but Gabrielle brushed it away and went to stand by her brother.
Ana was the one who walked her out of the Classroom.
"Two raven mockers in a month," she said.
Jane shrugged. "We're unlucky."
"All the records say that they only show up in a hub once a year, and only when something bad is going to happen."
They kept walking to Ana’s locker, number 217. The other girl opened it up (Jane watched the combination: 2-29-40) and pulled out a red scarf and knotted it around her neck, very slowly, as if performing a striptease in reverse.
"It’s also an omen of a graveyard demon's arrival," Ana said. She had no coat, though it was freezing out.
"You mean--that Scarbo thing?" Peter and Ana had never gotten around to telling her about it, and Jane had forgotten about it until now.
Ana nodded, and pulled her backback off of a hook and started putting some notebooks into it. "Scarbo is most famous one. It revealed the secret to splitting the atom to a scientist in a dream so it could watch humanity destroy itself. And it killed Peter and Gabrielle's parents."
"Why?"
"Why not?"
"Two raven mockers," said Peter cheerfully at lunch. "I'll get my revenge. Ana told you, didn't she?" He took a bite of her apple, which she had already started eating. She should have been annoyed.
"By the way," Peter added, "I forgot to tell you that when you die in the line of duty, which you will, we're going to rip out your eyes and send them back to the organization for study. Sorry."
There was something wrong about Gabrielle, as if she only existed as an extension of her brother, like an extra limb. She sat at their table: she had been silent since the burning of the bodies. She didn't talk as she pulled out a sandwich. She took a half-hearted bite before setting it down.
Another day, another hunt. It was only her and Ana. Ana was wielding her impossible nodachi again, but minutes before, it had been a broadsword, and before that, a cutlass.
Now was as good a time as any to ask about it. "How does it work?" Jane whispered, gesturing to the sword.
"I'm contracted to a demon. In a fight, it takes over. It’s an extension of the demon. And ghosts don't have ears, so you don't have to talk like that."
Jane caught sight of the ghost lurking in her peripheral vision, and she turned quickly and saw that it wasn't just a ghost: it was an ambush. Jane saw the panic in Ana’s eyes when she realized that she was outnumbered.
"Run," Ana said, and grabbed Jane’s hand, dragging her along. Jane was not very fast. The ghouls were gaining on them, and when they reached the stairs, Ana stopped and turned around. "A stand," she said, squeezed Jane’s hand, and raised her sword in what may have been a defensive stance. Jane realized, This is it. We’re going to die here.
No, something inside of her said, and when she saw Ana brace herself, Jane found herself stepping forward. She raised a hand. "Stop."
The ghouls stopped.
"What," said Ana, once she finished them off. It wasn't a question.
"I don't know," Jane replied, rubbing her hand . "I just--"
"Scarbo," she said, frowning.
"Scarbo's a piece of music--my mother’s a piano teacher, she plays it all the time. It's from Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit. I like the Martha Argerich recording because it's so fast, but Mom likes the Vladimir Ashkenazy recording. I think it’s based on the image of a fairy dancing in a graveyard."
"Scarbo," Ana said, again.
"Um, Scarbo? All I know is that it's a piece of music. My mom plays it all the time, she’s a piano teacher--" Jane stopped. "Why do I keep repeating that?"
"What's your mother’s name?"
Jane thought about it for a long minute. "I don't-- I don't know." But it was her mother, of course she knew her mother’s name.
Ana frowned. "I don’t think you are what you think you are."
"What I think I am? I know what I am; I'm an eleventh grader who just transferred into this school and started seeing ghosts and monsters. You people are using my eyes and you're going to rip them out once I get killed and send them back to your organization so they can attempt to synthesize the ability to see ghosts and--" Peter hadn't told her that.
"What's your last name?"
Jane crossed her arms over her chest. "I know what I am."
Ana stood up and, toyed with the tassel on the hilt of her sword. "We don’t know it, either. The teachers never call it, and it's not in any of their books. You talk to people, but they don't use it. I'm willing to bet that you can't exist outside the school. Which can only mean one thing."
"And that is?" She felt something inside of her chest growing, reacting to Ana’s words. She could kill her, if she wanted, just by reaching out with it and severing her connection to her sword-- a web of lines from Ana’s sword to her hands and arms.
She didn't want to kill Ana.
"Nothing. You could have killed me just then, couldn't you?" Ana sheathed her sword.
"I’ll kill you and your magician and your gunman whenever I feel like it," Jane heard herself say.
"I don’t doubt you will."
She left the room, but Jane stayed and it hit her: every person she'd killed, her plan to infiltrate the newest group the organization sent, all the fun experiments she was going to conduct once she used the power she'd get from cutting the bond between Peter and Gabrielle to get control once and for all. Now, if only Ana hadn’t figured it out-- oh, well, it didn’t matter. She could kill her later.
Peter and Gabrielle are my friends.
Peter and Gabrielle were the means to an end.
Jane saw herself standing in front of her, and instinctively knew that she’d shifted into her own pocket dimension. The other Jane grinned and Jane saw that the eyes were white and blind. "Hello," she said, hesitant.
"Hi, there," said Scarbo-Jane, and its voice was ten thousand spiders running up and down her spine.
Jane extracted herself from the pocket dimension and ran out of the Classroom to Ana. She saw a flicker of fear in the other girl's eyes when she grabbed her shoulder. I don’t want to see that look on her face, Jane thought. She could feel power welling up in her to make Ana her slave. She forced it down.
"I can be killed in this body," Jane said. She took a deep shuddering breath in. "If I do anything to put you, Peter, or Gabrielle in danger, I want you to cut me down." She didn’t want to die, but she was more afraid of what the thing inside of her could do than she was of death.
Ana touched the hilt of her sword. "All right." And that was that.
Jane dreamed.
The fun she would have! She started wars-- Napoleon was one of her greater accomplishments (Hitler, however, was someone else’s fuck-up). She starved whole cities just to see what would happen, destroyed continents to watch entire races drown.
It wasn't enough. There were plenty of spiritual hubs, but the one under the school was the worst-defended of them all. It was just a bunch of high school kids each generation. The organization that protected the hubs was spread thin.
It was simple to ensure that a pair of psychically-bonded twins would get assigned to the school. They kept twins like Peter and Gabrielle in labs for research precisely because their power could unleash what was in hubs. Peter’s abilities and drive for revenge had ensured that he couldn’t be locked up.
Alone in her pocket dimension, watching the human she had made interact with the two of them, she shivered to think of all the wars she would start when she killed them.
Jane woke up. She was in front of her locker. I’m willing to bet that you can't even exist outside this school. She turned around and crossed the hall to the window, and opened it. A stiff wind blew in, but she didn't feel the cold.
She tried to put her hand outside the window, but there was something viscous and invisible stopping her, and when she pushed through it, there was no hand. She pushed farther. Her forearm disappeared, and, in her horror, she stumbled backwards. Her hand and arm came back.
Someone yelled, "Shut the window!"
She went to class, and to lunch. Peter acted as if there was nothing wrong. Ana hadn’t told him, for whatever reason. Jane didn’t question it.
Something had gotten into the Classroom, moving too fast for Jane to see. Usually, nothing but banshees could get in, but this wasn’t a banshee.
The four of them were in the center of the room, back to back, waiting for Jane to get it in her sights, but Jane was finding it increasingly difficult to focus-- the others didn’t notice, but whatever was in the room came near her every few seconds to give her tiny, shallow cuts. Jane kept her mouth shut and focused on the power inside of her.
She found it, and stopped the right in front of her. It looked more like a porcupine than anything, but with metal blades instead of quills. Jane could feel it struggling to break free, but it was a thousand years too young.
"Permission to fire?" Gabrielle said. It was the first time Jane had heard her talk in days.
"Permission granted," said Peter. Ana looked furious, even as Gabrielle shot it between what may have been its eyes.
Peter and Gabrielle left the Classroom. When the door closed, Ana grabbed Jane's arms and shoved her up against the wall. "Don't do that again," she said.
"I'm sorry," Jane said. "I know the more power I use, the more likely it is that I'll become me again, but I couldn't let you--"
"Don’t." Ana looked her straight in the eye, and Jane saw that she was frowning but didn't look angry--she looked sad. "I'm pretty sure," she started, and faltered. "I'm pretty sure this is the part where I kiss you and tell you that I don't want you to go back to what you are and stay with us forever. Even with a level-three restriction I can feel your real soul laughing. And I don't ever want to hear that again," Ana said. She looked faintly dazed at the effort it took to talk so much. Jane leaned down and kissed her.
(On the seventeenth of February, a half a month later, Jane couldn't hold Scarbo back any longer. Ana made sure she didn't feel the sword when it cut her.)
Jane kissed her, and felt them shift into Scarbo’s pocket dimension. She saw the demon sitting in an armchair that hadn't been there before, watching the two of them with its white eyes.
"This is interesting," said Scarbo-Jane. For one heart-stopping moment, Jane thought that Ana heard, because the other girl pulled away and searched her face, but then she very nearly attacked Jane’s mouth.
Scarbo-Jane stood up and started pacing when the two of them managed to figure out to do with their noses. "You're keeping me suppressed," it said. "The artificial construct. Fascinating."
Jane flinched when Ana started unbuttoning her shirt, and Ana smiled-- the same cruel smile she'd had the first day they met.
"I could try to break out, of course," Scarbo continued. "But you're drawing on my reserves to maintain the seal that I used. I don't think you know how you’re doing it."
Jane wanted to scream, but that would have clued Ana in to the fact that they were not alone, and she liked what Ana was doing with her tongue far too much to want to do that so she dug her fingers into her palms and shut her eyes. They ended up on the rug at Scarbo-Jane's feet, despite Jane's efforts to keep them near the wall. Scarbo-Jane leaned forward in the chair to watch the two of them, resting its elbows on its knees, and smiled.
"How long can you hold me back?" it asked and they were back in the real world.
Ana began buttoning Jane's shirt. "I'll be going now."
Jane caught her wrist when she got to the third button, and Ana tried to yank it away with the most vulnerable face Jane had ever seen her make. Still, she held on.
Again: the desire to make Ana her slave. Sure, the demon attached to her would have to be dealt with, but it was hardly graveyard-class and would take only a fraction of her power to subdue.
She let Ana's wrist go.
the end
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2008-09-28 08:06 pm (UTC)Also, the art is gorgeous.
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Date: 2008-09-28 09:20 pm (UTC)When
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Date: 2008-09-28 09:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-12 07:04 pm (UTC)Thank you!
Also seconding on the "MOAR STORY" bit.
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Date: 2008-09-29 12:24 am (UTC)(On the seventeenth of February, a half a month later, Jane couldn't hold Scarbo back any longer. Ana made sure she didn't feel the sword when it cut her.)
^-- Broke my heart! ):
The illustration is quite beautiful! *___* Thank you for writing such a beautiful story.
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Date: 2008-09-29 09:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-12 07:06 pm (UTC)Thank you!
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Date: 2008-09-29 12:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-29 10:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-29 01:53 pm (UTC)I can totally tell you had a lot of fun.no subject
Date: 2008-09-29 02:05 pm (UTC)EVERY WORD THAT I FORCED FROM MY FINGERTIPS WAS EXISTENTIAL SHOUNEN TORTURE. Haha.no subject
Date: 2008-10-01 11:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-01 10:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-24 07:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-24 07:54 pm (UTC)