NEON DEMON.

ɪ ᴛᴏᴏᴋ ᴀ ᴅᴇᴇᴘ ʙʀᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴀɴᴅ ʟɪꜱᴛᴇɴᴇᴅ ᴛᴏ ᴛʜᴇ ᴏʟᴅ ʙʀᴀɢ ᴏꜰ ᴍʏ ʜᴇᴀʀᴛ: ɪ ᴀᴍ, ɪ ᴀᴍ, ɪ ᴀᴍ.

[It's not enough, they know that. The sound of their voice cannot be enough, because the sound of Genie's hadn't been enough after MORTEM either. But they're faced with the consequences of traitor's actions, with Priscilla dead, so Wren doesn't offer to come over. Clutches their phone instead.]

WREN: The other day, on the subway, there was this little kid. Just sat cross-legged on two seats, pretty much, reading intensely. It was um — he was reading something by Roald Dahl, I don't remember exactly what. His mum was next to him, or well, I think it was his mum, don't want to be presumptuous — but she was just next to him, kind of watching him, so endeared.

WREN: And he was so engrossed in it! It made me so ... envious, I guess? But also so happy. I don't take the subway as much any more and it's so nice to just see people, like that.

[They're quiet for a moment.]

WREN: And there was a really cute dog, on my way back. Its owner let me pet it.

//

[ Utterly directionless, her feet paved a meaningless path, leading her somewhere, when anywhere would've felt like nowhere at all. Genie didn't know much. She only knew she couldn't stop. She couldn't stop moving, she couldn't stop, or she might never get up. It wasn't that different to how she feels about Wren's directionless words; she only knows what would help, as much as anything could, and she latches on, with all that's left of her clumsy bloody heart. ]

GENIE: I feel that... It's nice to watch normal people live their normal lives. A happy doggo can make a day worth surviving, so like... That's good. That sounds real fuckin' good, Birdie. Thanks. For– just letting me share the memory.

[ Her eyes shut, listening. Then rambling. This way, she can almost breathe. ]

Never has she liked being faced with the consequences of her actions. Which, all things considered, is pretty fucking ironic in the case of Gwen Goldsmith, who has always attracted consequences like syrup attracts flies. And yet, for all her experience, she has not gotten any better at facing these consequences. So, it’s hard to look at Genie. This destruction had been calculated: it wasn’t just clumsiness, or drunken rudeness, or the kind of bout of destruction she was prone to because of the claws of childhood still stuck inside her. And while she had not befriended Genie with ulterior motive – she hadn’t even known of Death’s existence, when they had met – she had kept it up, had omitted scathing truth, had looked her in the eye after Ricardo had been murdered. It’s unlike her, in all truth: she isn’t snake-like, isn’t made for dishonesty. 

Gwen Goldsmith is all heart, always has been, and now she stares at Genie, in her living room. At this girl that reminds her so much of herself, and she wants to look away. But like her mother holding her chin as a child, forcing her to look at the vase she broke, willing her to count the shards, she looks. And that heart, that sore fucking organ in her chest, wants to leap out and go away. Her anger is petulant, in a blame-avoiding way, in a way where she wants to look away from the results of her actions and pretend they are not there, at all.

Genie threatens the pub, then, and something grows tense in Gwen. She sinks her teeth into that. “If you want to hurt me, hurt me. Fuck. Slap me across the face, punch me in the tit, curb stomp me. But don’t lay your hands on this building. Yeah? Genie, really, I’ll fuck up your life if you fuck with my pub.” It’s not an entirely empty threat, she realises, and she does not like making it against the wiry thing across from her. But Gwen loves this pub like a mother supposedly loves a child, and she won’t let this, this fucking war, take it from her.

Her mouth opens to say something else, but she wires it shut, turns on her heel, into the kitchen, where she produces another bottle of liquor and one of many mismatched mugs. “Fuck Pestilence,” she says. “Fuck them for roping you in. I’m maybe in no place to say that, but fuck them.” Gwen shakes her head, then: “I’m no one’s fucking pawn.” She’d die before becoming that. She has joined Death by choice, offered her pub by choice, and will not see herself reduced to a puppet on Uriel’s strings.

She refocuses. “Sorry. Not the point.” Gwen pours whiskey in a mug, places the bottle on the kitchen table and tries to order her words in a way where they are convincing sentences and not just loose marbles. “Alright, no. No. Look, Genie, I didn’t know when we met. About Pestilence. About you. Death? It didn’t fucking exist yet, and if it did, I wasn’t a part of it. There was no motive in befriending you besides — besides the sincere shit of friendship that I won’t lament about now.” She takes a long sip from her mug. “But then I knew. I found out, yeah? I found out, through Death, after I joined — and maybe I should have cut you off, maybe that would have been kinder, but I couldn’t do that. Not when I care about you — look, fuck, all this sounds like bullshit, right? I know. I lied, I omitted truths, I’ve used people for intel, I can’t deny that, but with you? No.” She shakes her head. “I didn’t set out to use you. I like to think I never did, but I still roped you into the lies, still kept you in the dark. And it’s not — I want to say it’s not fucking personal, even it isn’t in a way, it’s all big picture, big future, et cetera bullshit. But that doesn’t change this.” She gestures between of them. 

It’s not making sense. Gwen takes another sip, lets it burn a way into her body. With others she’s lied to, like Marcus, it’s easier. Easier to rationalise, easier to justify: Marcus, after all, had sold her plenty of lies himself. But with Genie, it’s hard not to see a martyr, a victim of circumstance, herself. This is pain she had caused. Simple as that. “I’m sorry. I really am. I’m sorry I lied, sorry I played you. I didn’t want to, but I don’t know if that matters. But I didn’t befriend you for intel or entertainment or any of that. I didn’t approach you like that. If it makes a difference.” 

—

She may as well be a fly on the wall, watching the scene play out, for all the reality that reaches her just then. It is as though the two of them are players in a scene on-stage, monologues exchanged between them, front-and-centre, brimming with unmoored feeling, and she a mere audience to a confrontation, technically, of her own instigation. Perhaps it is protective instinct, born of repression in the face of traumatic incident as the mind’s way of shielding itself; it would certainly make for a dramatically thrilling, but still relatable, story to play out, wouldn’t it? She remembers titbits of clinical information from her momentary stint in the phenomenology of psychological processes sometimes, after all, like fragments of a life that belonged to her as much as an iconic role belonged to a singular actor within a singular adaptation, which is to say, partially and ephemerally and forever suspended in a moment of once upon a time. A protective instinct wouldn’t be unfounded, confronting betrayal, it can be reasoned. Still, the player thinks, bitterly: Too fucking little, too fucking late. Unforgiving in her hurt. Or, at the very least, indecisive in it. The audience sighs.

Detachedly witnessing the chaotic fumblings of Gwen’s own heart-wrought response, she considers how easily she could argue that, had she gone through with her destructive motivations, there would no Gwen to retaliate. There would only have been ashes and what if’s and blood on her hands. She considers rebuking viciously, how wounding Gwen sounded like a fantastic idea, with the same vehemence she considers crying about how she doesn’t want it, she doesn’t want to hurt Gwen, she only wants for Gwen not to have hurt her. But none of it matters. The audience is uninterested in the fire or its ashes, of literal or metaphorical infliction. What is the point? If anyone knew, it had been Gwen, how little a life Genie sometimes felt she even had to be fucked. There is no one she protects, no one who needs it from her or depends on it, not from the gangly-limbed, knobby-kneed ghost of a girl slipping through the cracks in a crowd. There is nothing she has, tangible and solid and belonging to her, that can be taken from her. She doesn’t know if this is a gift or a curse.

What she knows is Player Genie, as much as Audience Genie, can use a fucking drink. With Gwen already venturing into the kitchen for her own, there is something to use as an alternative explanation than her own feeble will. She could cite relenting in the face of proof she wouldn’t have to share with the woman. That worked, didn’t it? Enough for her to unscrew the bottle’s cap and tip glass to her lips, gulping down straight vodka like it could cure this maddening grief. 

She swipes an aggrieved back of a hand across her wet mouth when it does no such thing.

It burns enough, at least, for her erratically heaved exhale to huff from the chest, her ruddy nostrils flaring around the subsequent sniffle. She can’t even remember the first time they met. Can’t pinpoint the second, or third, or sixth. She has been so gone for so long, swallowing waves and waves and waves, that have left behind the flotsam of her mind and chronological-recollections muddled and tangled and mucky, until she can no longer discern timelines to call Gwen out about. All she can do is pour another wave down the hatch, and try not to hate herself for it. She has so much to hate herself about. It is better to hate Gwen, instead.

It is better to let it coat her words when she counters, “What the fuck kind of dear friendship let’s you show up ‘n point guns with your fellow-thugs at peoples’ heads? At– At my head. Like, ‘kay, you couldn’t tell me ‘bout Death just ‘cause? Sometimes you gotta omit the truth ‘cause it just ain’t important? Got it in one, pal. But when you were gonna show up at the club? When you knew—” Mindlessly, her head shakes; unsure precisely to what she objects, but sure that it is absolutely fucking everything Gwen has to say. “You’re not a pawn, so no one tells you who you can tell what, right? Or if you’re such a phenomenal fuckin’ liar, you could’ve lied to them ‘n told ‘em I was some recruit ‘n talked to me in some sorta code. You could’ve gone ‘bout it a million other fucking ways but you chose– You chose to be a liar instead of real and true and everything I ever fucking admired you for being. Maybe you’re one more cunt in this whole entire world of them, I don’t know. That’s what’s wrong, right? With all of you? All of you... You think there’ll be a future so it’s fine to pull shit for power, ‘s all fucking justified.”

It’s a bottle of champagne she couldn’t afford if she sold her kidney on the black market that they pass between themselves that night. When she giggles, bubbles fizz inside her nose, and Genie thinks it might be closer to happiness than she’s been in awhile, smoothing bills in an accumulating stacks between her hands. If she doesn’t catch the sight of herself in any reflective surfaces, she can pretend, so easily, that it is still a year. On a night like this, the hair she’d sheared off herself — a little too drunk too early at night, hunched over one of the nightclub’s bathrooms’ sinks, in the middle of a shift — was the only giveaway, if she didn’t look too close. Mitzi is still falling hard for Fletcher, even though all three of them know she’s a little too good for him. And Genie still has a best friend to go home to, and another’s hands to warm under if she doesn’t want the night to end just yet. Priscilla is still alive, raising a toast to her in passing when she watches her make another sale, pills exchanged from the same palm that comes away with a handful of cash. 

She lets herself hold fast to the fantasy, imprinting its impression into porcelain flesh until it vows to leave its mark on her – until it gives her something she can keep. She lets herself mean it when she beams, throwing money she’s just arranged into the air like confetti, suggesting, “We could just take it ‘n run away, you know...” 

WREN: Shit. Fuck, that's so fucked up.

WREN: We don't have to talk about it, if you don't want to. Whenever you're ready.

[It's fucked up, really, the fact that there's a part of them that can relate. Here they are, two Angels who have witnessed their respective mentors murdered. Wren wishes he could touch Genie. Hold her.]

WREN: I'm here. Do you want to tell you a story? Something boring, or nonsensical, or very mundane?

[They move to their bed, sit down, cross-legged.]

WREN: I'm here, Genie.

//

[ All she wants to do is ask them if she can come over, as innocently as kids in the playground after school. But their lives would never be so pure. Genie's never had been in the first place. All she can do is sniffle stickily, swiping the back of a hand beneath ruddy nostrils, smearing moisture more than accomplishing anything else. ]

GENIE: Please, yeah.

The world always moves a little too fast. Or perhaps it is her who moves too slow — which is not a thought that has not come unbidden enough times, already, to have made a home of her bones, regardless. Genie doesn’t know. If there is anything she knows anymore, it is that she does not know much at all about anything, and where ignorance had been bliss once upon a time, it is a bliss that has decayed to rotten softness that comes apart in meaty handfuls squelching sickeningly within fists that never seem to unclench lately. Everything she does not know, or have, or can be: they are weapons. Yet another thing she does not know: who will use them against her next? 

There is no shortage of notions and happenstance that infuriate her, but she thinks it just might take the cake these days. Maybe it’s easier to be angry, though. It is the most solid thing she has now, so she clings to it. It feeds her swipes at the bar-top with a drab cloth she really ought to replace now, her shoulders ridged with it. It absolutely coats her grin when it bares her teeth at her new boss, the same rosy-cheeked stunner of a woman who Genie’s been pouring drinks for for years, who Genie had looked after whenever she’d had too much to drink, who Genie had liked before she’d ever known her last name... and who’d just replaced Priscilla like she’d earned it, like Priscilla had never mattered at all. Maybe she doesn’t, she forces herself to know. Maybe none of us do. But Genie doesn’t want to be an us. Genie isn’t sure she wants to be anything these days.