#sensitive materials

"There won't be a third time," his brother warned him. Hermes, still brokenly trying to claw his way into a bomber jacket three times his size, didn't answer. But he clocked what Apollo meant, through the heroin had and incense clogging the room. The first time Hermes surrendered his immortality, it was for a slave boy in Syracuse who found his face on a temple wall and kissed it, begging for freedom. A war criminal, allegedly, hadn't a hope of release in any form. He would work until he was dead, and that was the mortal world. Hermes retrieved him from darkness without his caduceus and raised him to walk on green fields to envy Elysium. His repayment was a destruction of his temples, and a laying to waste of his offerings by a man who boasted of fooling the gods. Hermes had wandered, a broken amnesiac who was nothing without his worship. Afraid and reduced to a shell of his former self, Apollo found his brother crouched in a cavern in Crete, screaming hoarsely in their ancient tongue of love lost and betrayal's sting. Until Apollo, all Hermes could remember were the eyes of his betrayer, and the scars he left oh his skin with mockeries of burnt offerings and thrown stones from demolished places of worship. Of love. Apollo filled him once more with the flaming power of the gods, and the younger, more naive God became just a bit bitterer. It didn't stop the second time from happening, though. He locked eyes with his brother in the crooked mirror. It was 1984, a decade after the second disaster and two or so before he'd meet Rowan of Only One Name. In the tense electricity of the room, Apollo silently judged him, a figure of black, white, copper, and gold - surveying one of tin, rust, neon, and garbage. The myriad of colors smeared across Hermes' form suggested joy but inferred worse. Nagasaki had been unkind. Most cities were, especially in this particular decade. It had taken Apollo almost four years to find him again. "If you came to berate me-" Hermes was cut off as Apollo raised a hand, the gesture eerily similar to the one he used to conduct his power. Dark fingers curled and the sun god sighed, clove smoke blowing into tepid air. "I came to remind you. To warn you. To not love again." His voice hardened with warning on the final words. Hermes scoffed, then coughed, rummaging around in the costume trunks nearby - the old stage was his hiding place, his life a comedy of errors. It seemed only fitting. Dionysus would've been proud. Or laughed. More likely the latter. 

“Who the fuck are you to tell me about love? Your idea of love is to chase girls till they turn into monsters and to love men until they burn or bleed out.” The words were venomous, but spoken lowly. Apollo cocked his head with a vague hint of warning, and Hermes instead focused on finding something in the backstage drawers once more.

The thought drifted into her head as Jami walked barefoot through the scrub pines. Her fingers lifted to trace chandeliers of bluish-green, the deciduous decadence lush and teeming with life in the high hills. Her eyes drifted from shadow to shadow--each outline more detailed to her than they might be to others. In the trees, Jami could read every movement--see each depth and pocket of darkness as something with layers and heartbeats and hesitance.

Her head tilted as she craned her neck to view the moon rising overhead.

Through the thickets came a gentle hum of something more. Wings of insects, the frantic, near-soundless flutter of avian life shifting from elm to spruce and back again. Her fingers caught the bark of a particularly old tree and the vampiress all but melted into it--her back pressed flat against scratchy, gnarled wood flaking in the midsummer heat.

Someone was looking for her.

But she was looking for something.

Her long legs shifted her like an elegant heron--spiking her through the underbrush with careless and effortless grace. Blackberry bushes pushed aside clung to her in reverence, tugging at the would-be dress that was more a gossamer sigh; a suggestion of steam, than an actual garment. Her pace quickened with the echo of a heart that did not beat. In her eyes was a fierce and immeasurable light; a liveliness that ignited each iris with purpose and turned the pupils to pinpricks; punctuation that steadied her cause.

When she leapt over a fallen log, it was with the rise and fall of fog in the early morning light. 

When she fell, it was upon the neck of a rabbit, her hands twisted up in its soft and downy fur. 

As she was a part of the forest, so she hunted, so she fed, freer and more content than she ever thought possible.

Proteus was near, shouting a hoarse “marco?” into the trees, hoping for a “polo!” that would not come--

               Norman stood adjacent to the big windows, watching the world below. Angela and her team were out patrolling the Bay, looking for some trivial old god no doubt wallowing in the mud by the tepid water. Better for him, all things considered. His own team could effectively torture the small sect of undead below while he dealt with matters marginally more humane above.

               His dark eyes circled the floor, following the thin scuff marks where shoes were dragged across tile, trails of lackadaisical blood danced in tandem with ash, and the occasional scratch in marble caught the sun, winking jovially. Norman took a long and considerable drag from his cigarette before grinding it out against the ashtray on the desk nearby, his fingers steady and his face unchanging.

               The figure on the chair said and did nothing, as he—it—was in fact, unconscious.

               “You know,” said Norman idly, to no one in particular—not the guards who flanked the two doors in and out and a third patrolled the elevators, nor to the frigid secretary standing attentively nearby, “I rather thought we’d lost you for a moment there. Which is what, I expect, Ms. Dourly wanted more than anything else. To keep you safe.” His steps crossed, one in front of the other, unhurried and patient. Slender fingers circled the air, extinguishing smoke with languid flicks of either wrist. “Which puzzles me—because she can’t have cared that much for you. She opposes almost everything you stand for, and yet…”

               Norman’s eyes shifted across the prone figure’s face as he crouched before him.

               Roy Talbot had never looked worse, but that may’ve been because the glamour was failing.

               “Spells weren’t meant to hold up quite this long,” said Norman idly, selecting a pen from his suit breast pocket and lifting the other man’s hand with the end of it, examining the nails. The edges were warped; the weakening enchantment flickering across skin that fluctuated in base hue, threatening something tawnier than the ashen outer layer that looked less like flesh and more like a husk with each passing second. The Station’s disenchantment abilities were nothing short of extraordinary; stripping magic down little by little over time as the technological and counter-magical methods broke everything apart, analyzed it, and began disengaging energy from its source.

               To put it in layman’s terms, the perimeter fed off magical outputs and leeched away at them until said perimeter “bled” folks dry.

               Norman’s mouth hardened into a lean line of disagreement as he studied the disintegrating marionette strapped to the plain black chair. It’d all gone awry so abruptly, so horribly, that he couldn’t quite understand how it’d happened. Or why. Whether someone had tipped Roy off or sent him on his way; they’d tampered with the initial spells placed upon the figurehead, and as a result, everything was sloughing away—molasses-slow, but inevitable.

               Might as well get it over with, then. Rip that bandaid clean off.

               “I had been hoping this would be a relatively easy fix. A successful experiment. But no, I had to leave Brussels in the Springtime for your sake. Just because there’d been rumors of your return from the New York offices, and yet…” His tongue clicked; the safety released from a gun, against the back of his teeth. “You’ve nothing to show for it but convenient amnesia and a directionless purpose, and I must say, that does us all here a great disservice.” Norman propped a hand under his chin, staring at Roy.

               “So what are we to do with you?”

               There was a presto to his gesture, the flourish of removing a tablecloth without upsetting a single piece of silverware. One fell motion, accompanied by a disenchantment, sheared the spell from Roy’s skin. He was unmade; the vision of a white American male replaced by something else. An “other”, more battered and bewildered than even its scattered predecessor. In the wrenching of the glamor, Norman also yanked the restful repose from the captive on the chair somehow as well--he started so suddenly he nearly went nose over tail, chair and all.

        "Where--am I." The room came into swirling, delirious view, cascading and clashing images kaleidoscoping in and out of focus. Two Normans slid seamlessly into one, the severe figure standing with his hands behind back, the ruined glamour rippling and disintegrating into cinders followed by nothing behind him. Every part of him hurt; felt raw, like his skin had been shed. He shook; a junkie’s shake, limbs refusing to collaborate with the steadiness he longed for. Everything felt too cold, too sudden, and the smell… the stagnant air was rich with chemicals. Roy swiveled as much as his banded arms allowed, glancing around the familiar-yet-not room with bleary eyes, trying desperately to force it all into focus. Trying to make it all make sense.  

        But like a word on the tip of one's tongue, the harder he tried to concentrate, the more it all continued slipping away from him.

        "Welcome home, Mr. Talbot." Norman's smile was particularly cruel, edged inward by creases of laughter that refused to fully wrinkle his eyes with anything remotely warm. "It's been quite some time since last we spoke." Norman leaned into frame a little better; half-bending to come closer to Roy, who instinctively shifted back in his seat, tensing in his bonds. Norman's smile brightened, ever so slightly, dark eyes darting across Roy's face--his real face. A face that hadn't been seen in approximately...three and a half years.

           "You were our most successful running experiment to date," said Norman idly, still crouched before Roy on the chair. The captive glanced sharply between Roy and the armed guards in the room, stomach plummeting. "And you gave us quite the fright when you up and vanished like that. You recalibrated yourself, no less, in the process...! Blew your own bloody brains out, more or less, trying to escape that troublesome puppy and his meddling kids. Tapping into forbidden powers, oh..." The "tsk" Norman emitted seemed to reverberate throughout the room.

                    "You know better, don't you?" Roy felt chilly sweat dot his neck, and squirmed a little where he sat. Norman blinked; reptilian slow, and nodded to himself almost imperceptibly, straightening up and adjusting the front of his suit. “Or you used to. You knew exactly what we wanted you to know, which is what I knew.” Norman tapped the side of his nose and strolled away a few steps, ambling amidst his preamble. Roy wet his lips and tasted copper, closing his eyes briefly to catch what little bearings he had.

               Memories tried to come back to him from time to time. The past two years had been—difficult to piece together. Like most things before. And…sadly, after. His shattered jigsaw of a circumstance was ill-fitting—the pieces seemed all wrong, almost as if two different puzzles were mixed in with one another. He could remember—a pale woman; a Bridgette, with an icy blue stare and talons of bronze…Angela; vaguely—some soft, dark woman with soft, dark eyes and hands like two iron maces always commanding. Always ready for the next fight.

               Another song from Big Data’s breakout hits filtered, muffled, up from below. Roy tensed as the sound interrupted his unsteady strain of thought, head cocked to one side. The room reeled, ugly and vacant, and he shut his eyes again, shivering.

               “Where’s—wh…” Roy’s voice cracked. Hoarse and foreign. He was—remembering something else. Something less…pleasant, somehow, than the cold woman with the wrathful stare and the warm woman with the weapons for hands.

               He was remembering…himself.

               Except he was not himself. He was—commanding, totalitarian. He was—there were Cages, Cages full of people—tags, not people, tags don’t matter, people barely do, either—staring hungrily out at him. Zombies with their gray faces mashed against pristine steel bars, drooling filth onto themselves and to the floor. Vampires crawling out of the darkness on hands and knees; bleached of all color save their red, red mouths and their red, red eyes, shrieking and whimpering from starvation. Desperation. Witches hung from Celtic Knots blessed for the Trinity, their heads bowed forward under the backwash of holy water and oil meant to trap their magic under their skin and keep it dormant. Beaten into submission by all things holy, he was—

               “Who are you?” Roy and Norman asked one another simultaneously. Norman smiled a little. He tapped a finger to the side of his nose. Roy, eyes fluttering and exhausted, tried in vain to make him stay in sharper detail. He wanted to—no. He had to remember this. This was important. He’d—

               He’d done terrible things. And then—and then there’d been an…explosion, of some kind, he could still feel the ferocity of the fire beating heat into the sides of his face and ripping its flaming claws into his back. The fire had felt alive—it’d all felt so alive, so real.

               He dreamed of it often. In fact, he realized [the longer he looked around, and around, and in the circles his vision and head swam in and out of] he dreamt of this office, too—his office. Or—

               It was all for show, wasn’t it.

               Suddenly everything came to a grinding halt.

               And Roy looked into Norman’s eyes, and, deep in their darkness, he saw a man; a face, who was not himself.

                And without warning, he started to scream. On the inside mostly, as it came to the surface in sharp, hurried breaths, each more desperate and blazing than the last. 

              “No--no...no, no, no no, no, no...”

               “Oh, he gets it,” said Norman softly, crouching in front of the chair. “He gets it now, doesn’t he? The window dressing. The parlor trick. The grand finale. This was your debut, and you fucked it up royally, didn’t you, Roy? You may’ve been a great attempt at reformation, but you were a mediocre mirror of me and nothing of yourself; you see…” Norman rolled back on his heels, then onto the balls of his feet, oscillating absently as he watched Roy’s true face melt into an expression of abject horror. “I filled your head up with all the ideas they deemed appropriate for presentation. The adequate Handler; the sufficient and sophisticated leader. I made you who you are, after I directed our psychics department to scoop everything else. I’m the candle in your Jack-O-Lantern; Mr. Talbot. I chose everything in your life from your suits to your sentiments to your name.” Roy jerked in his bonds, suddenly much more awake than before.

               “No--”

               “All this time, you thought you were a real boy.” Norman’s smile creased anew, folding disbelief in with amusement neatly.

               “No--!”

“Just because you couldn’t see the strings.” Roy’s heart jumped in his throat. He couldn’t think. What was his favorite color? He didn’t know. Who was the president? He didn’t know. Where was he—who, what was he?—this couldn’t be real. This was a dream. He was back in the New York recovery wards of—that hospital. Wasn’t he? This was a nightmare; a dream—something everyone told themselves when presented with the terrors of possibilities otherwise. His breath caught, sweat breaking out in a new wave across his brow and down his back. It was not unlike witnessing the incoming beeline of a meteor and being helpless to its collision course. He was beyond a deer in the headlights now; he was an elk in the line of fire. Fire.

               Fire.

               Everything burned. His eyes, his hands, his throat. Norman watched him squirm from his position not even three feet away, features slipping gradually into boredom, then pensive focus.

               “Tell me what’s going on,” Roy was ranting, his voice slurred and frantic all at the same time. “Tell me everything, I just—I want to know. I want to know, who am I, who—are you? Why’ve you done this, where is—” Norman snapped his fingers.

               And Roy focused.

               “Follow my hands,” said Norman calmly. Two fingers rose together, one on each hand. They lifted, and they fell. Roy squinted, disoriented, but having something to pin his thoughts on. The fingers rose. And then they fell. They rose. And they fell. They rose. They fell. They…

               “He has not even seen you,” Norman was reciting in a calm, clear metronome to the rhythm of his movements, “he who gave you your mortality; and you, so small, how can you guess…”

“…hhhhis courage or his loveliness?” Roy’s mouth moved almost of its own accord. His initial panic had faded, slipping back under something a bit like a glamour and more like a blanket. This…this was familiar. Familiar was good. Roy needed something familiar that wasn’t a nightmare of…faces were fading, too, now. They were being washed away by the slow, hypnotic pull of words he’d heard before more times than he truly knew. A lullaby in the form of a war-time poem, dragging him down into the darkness.

“Yet in my quiet mind I pray,” Norman murmured; watchful—

“He passed you on the darkling way,” mumbled Roy, inflection and fear evaporating. “His death, your birth, so much the same--”

               “And holding you, breathed once your name.” Roy finished, emotions completely wiped from his voice. Norman relaxed marginally, dropping his hands.

               The figure in the chair—late twenties; Asian-American, wan and arguably malnourished –had gone slack in his bonds, save for the mechanical tilt of his head, and his glossy stare pinned to the nearby white wall. The music below had droned off into some kind of electro-funk whine, more machinery than music, now. It would’ve been too on the nose for Norman’s preferences normally, but this was a special occasion.

               “Don’t glamourize him again until Angela’s seen him,” said Norman calmly, motioning to the guard by the elevators to come forward and collect their now-placid charge. “We’ll discuss the next steps when she gets back from the field.” His jaw set as he watched them unbuckle and carry the puppet out, all limp-limbed and dangling from his lack of orders.

               It’d been fun while it’d lasted, he supposed. They could always make another if need be. It was easy enough when you had the model down.

               For what position of power in a company such as theirs did not designate a face like the one he’d chosen for Roy-Who-Wasn’t?

               Wiping the vague taint of magic from his hands, Norman folded his digits behind his back and slowly turned to look out the office window at the world below.

              The shotgun shell exploded three centimeters from his left temple; blowing a chunk of pine to smithereens. Trevor froze; the ringing in his ears accompanied by the loosening of his terrified fingers, the specimens he’d been gathering for examination tumbling to the forest floor, each dirty truffle a silent bomb as it hit the ground and was lost to the debris of leaves.

              Frankie, shotgun at eye level, stood opposed the Welshman, his finger steady on the trigger, empty casing following the mushrooms to the ground. His face was pale under splashes of mud and grime, and there was a wildness to his eyes that hadn’t been there prior. He was back in the trenches; on the front lines. He was somewhere other than here, but completely present, Trevor not five yards in front of him, beginning to shiver.

              “If you had just—fuckin’—been enough,” Frankie ground out, the smoke of his gun curling laurels around his ears, “I wouldn’t have to do this. I wouldn’t—I’d be fine. You’d be fine, you fuckin’…”

              Pale hands trembling; raising, Trevor started to turn. The threatening hiss of breath and clicking of mechanisms of death told him to stay put. Eyes fixated on the sleeping forest before him, the young vampire trembled, his new existence as fragile as his old one. Maybe he’d come back from this; if shot, but maybe not. He didn’t know. The uncertainty his life was constantly cast into was too shady for his eyes to decipher. He was blind to the reality of immortality and all that came with it, just as he had been with mortality.

              “Jack,” Trevor whispered. His own little prayer, perhaps, or a reminder that he was not alone. “Dane. N-Nero. Mariela…Mossy…” Red eyes blinked rapidly; the thin film of scarlet fear rising in the form of bloody tears. Frankie set his jaw and kept the gun aimed at Trevor’s back, tattered brown scarf shifting with the movement—the ugly flash of a tattoo somehow still as raw and fresh as when he’d first been branded catching the dying light of day.

              “What d-do you mean, I—what did I ever do to you?” Trevor, finding his footing, finally glanced back at Frankie—and went still anew. The hunter was oh, so familiar to him—he’d remember that piggish face and predatory stance anywhere. Right down to the bloodstains on his camo pants; and the mats of his dark hair. He was filthy; disheveled, disoriented, yes, but still every inch the angry little man who’d given Trevor up as a sacrifice without so much as batting an eye. The lanky scientist swallowed what felt like glass shards of regret and stared Frankie Jackson down, turning a little more in place.

              “Stay where you are,” Frankie snapped, gun lifting a little more readily than before, if possible. Trevor remained motionless other than the swivel he made to look Frankie in the eye, his hands still upraised.

              “…Th…” His voice broke with sickened, hysterical laughter. “This is insane. Y-y-you already…made me this way.” Trevor motioned to himself shakily, and Frankie narrowed his eyes. “You…” Trevor sucked in a miserable breath that tasted, distantly, like bile and blood. “You—got me killed; y-you—you just…gave me to them, you…do you know what they d-did?” His tone shifted; angered. “Do you know what they fucking did to me, before it was done?” Frankie jerked slightly at the increase in volume, eyes momentarily shifting to follow a line of birds that left the trees with a whirl of brightly-colored wings.

              When he looked back around, not half a second later, Trevor was there, one hand curled around the cold barrel of the gun, his eyes steady, and the open mouth of the shotgun’s snout buried against his chest. Frankie jolted again, but Trevor’s grip was firm, the vampire stoic; defeated—even tired.

              “I’m dead,” Trevor said flatly, gaze steady. “I’m already dead. And maybe you think by finishing the job, you’re doing the world a favor. But before this, I was just…me.” His hollow stare softened to its ordinary chestnut brown, damp with tears and bloodshot with exhaustion. The shadows under his eyes lengthened like night was closing in, shaggy hair swept back with a free hand, fingers knitting against his skull. The other fingers still gripped the gun, pulling it close to his chest like a lover. The shotgun shone in the sunset, a line of steel and promise.

              “Can you really live with that?” Trevor asked dryly. Frankie stood still; watchful and ready. “What you did to me; what you’ve done to—however many others, you…just gave me up.” His laugh was short, this time, short and pained. “You didn’t even know me, maybe that’s why it was so easy, but—you used me as leverage. That’s what they told me. That’s all I know. I don’t know why. I was just—I wasn’t…” He shook his head, inhaled again, and stepped forward. Frankie stepped back, hands tightening on the gun Trevor kept against his heart.

              “I don’t care what happens to me now,” Trevor admitted, features sallow and dulled. “I really don’t. I was just…starting to feel alright again. I was starting to get used to it all, and then…you did this to me.” His eyes flickered; a fireplace’s red sparks kindling fire back to life. “So before you go pointing guns and fingers, mate…” Trevor jerked the gun upward. It was easy. It was so bloody easy. The cold kiss of the end grazed his chin, and the vampire flashed Frankie a ragged, angry little smile.

              “Take a good hard look in the mirror, because I can’t anymore.”

              Frankie opened his mouth—he wasn’t sure why. There was nothing he could say. They were a tableau of dramatic posturing in the woods, playing chicken with a shotgun and supernatural powers. He could’ve pulled the trigger; and he almost did—but a searing pain on the side of his neck reminded him that he had other places to be. Other people to see.

              “I didn’t say you could do that.”

              And sure enough, Sig slipped out of the shadows like chainmail made from smoke; an armored, evil-eyed reminder of the price Frankie paid for his stupidity. The fey’s grin was ghoulish as it was faint on his scruffy face, the Huntsman’s swagger a slow and leisurely lope through dead leaves dyed red by the setting of the sun. Trevor and Frankie both looked up at the sound of the voice, but when Frankie looked back to find the vampire, he was gone. Mist himself; blown on the wind between the trees.

              All at once, Frankie was very much aware of his second round of foolishness. He knew who was actually to blame for this. He always had. He knew, and he knew the cost that came with knowing. Someone had to pay.

          Sig smiled a beatific, bloodstained smile down at him, clapped a hand on his shoulder, and shoved him back toward the deeper woods with a booming laugh that was half thunder, half hoofbeats.

              “Come on—I’ve better game for you to hunt, Mini-Me.”