A Dream of Summer Rain: Step One (Chapter 43)

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Track List: "In My Mind" by Amanda Palmer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9WZtxRWieM

***

Lacy’s eyes shot open to the sight of the red sigil bearing down at her. She was back in Michigan, back in her cell in the attic. Yes! It worked! Isabella had been right! Lacy had to get her home- but first she needed to get out of this cell. She put her hand to the glass- it was five inches thick. Even if she could break it, her hands would tear to shreds in the process. How-

The door to the room opened, and Danny entered. His beard was four inches of grease, his hair a disheveled mess, the bags under his eyes eating the rest of his face. He’d somehow lost even more weight. And he had a knife, and a tranquilizer dart gun.

“Um, what are you doing?” Merab said, standing up from her chair and putting down her bowl of human-chowder.

Danny shot her with a dart, and she collapsed unconscious immediately.

“Drew said you’d be awake,” Danny said to Lacy. “Good.”

Lacy said, “Technically he’s not Drew, he’s a cosmic entity channeling his appearance and memories into order to make talking to him easier on us-”

“Don’t care.”

“Well I’m glad you’re here because I really need to talk to you.”

“Well that’s a shame, because I’m done talking,” Danny said. He walked over, put a hand on the glass. With a small red flash, a door formed and opened. Danny ran through it, brandishing his knife and charging at Lacy.

Lacy dodged, kept dodging as Danny kept stabbing. She blocked one of his strikes and kicked him in the stomach, then pried the blade from his fingers and jammed it into the mattress on the cot. He swept-kicked her and brought her to the ground, then began striking her in the face and stomach. He was cold, precise, desperate. This completely went against all his family’s plans- if they’d decided she needed to die, Alistair would have eaten her already- they’d probably thought she’d have a change of heart when she woke up. Not untrue, just not in the way they might have expected.

Still, Danny’s pulse was audible. So what was going on? What is he doing this for?!

Lacy delivered a blow to Danny’s gut, then rolled away from him. He got back up, and the two resumed their close-quarters brawl beneath the Entropy sigil. Lacy blocked two, three punches; a kick to the ribs; an elbow to the face. She fought back, trying to avoid Danny’s throat or eyes, and pinned him down.

He coughed up blood, his face swollen and red. “Do you think your parents fought back?” he sneered. “Because I don’t think they did. I don’t think they were strong enough. Just like you’re not.”

The lid on her anger snapped like kindling, and she barreled her fists into his face and chest. It took her a minute to realize she was on the cusp of backsliding already. It took her a minute to realize he wasn’t putting up any kind of fight anymore. It took her another minute to realize he wore a contented, almost peaceful smile.

This day had happened once before; it was a reflection of their shared history, the image reversed inside the glass.

She backed off of him until she reached the wall. She pulled the knife, an old but sharp dagger with a shining steel blade and a black handle, from the bed and held it close.

Danny laid there, flat on his back, bleeding and looking up at the sigil. The red light was so bright it made his crimson blood look black. “Why’d you stop?”

“Because,” Lacy said, her breathing slow and heavy, “This was a suicide attempt, you coming in here and picking a fight. You want me to kill you.”

“...”
“You gonna try to deny it?” Lacy asked. “Fact- most people’s heart rates shoot up when they’re lying. But you already know that. It was why, for all those years, you avoided saying any lies directly. You omitted plenty, but you always avoided saying what was overtly untrue. You gonna do that now?”

Danny cringed. “... No.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“... Was I that obvious?”

“Yes. Guess we can call it even, then.”

“What?”

“You saved me from killing myself. Now I’m doing that for you,” Lacy said, running a hand through her shoulder-length hair, shoving her bangs out of her eyes.

Danny pinched the bridge of his nose. “... What?”

She shuffled over to him and sat down next to where he laid on his back. “I’m not killing you. And I’m definitely not letting you die here.”

“I killed your parents!” he said incredulously. “You should want me dead! I lied to you, manipulated you, and betrayed you! I kept lethal information from you for years!”

“I’ve been trying to kill you, humiliate you, and otherwise hurt you for the past few weeks,” Lacy reminded him. “I’ve killed dozens of ghouls, even after finding out they’re intelligent, that most of them were born this way, and some more of them were raised and indoctrinated to follow your dad into hell. I lied to you for years, about my being trans, about my magic, about my Destiny. About how Drew died. And I killed your sister. I killed Elaine.”

“Not directly!”

“Indirect murder is what you did to my parents too,” Lacy said. “But none of that matters. Because if either of us want forgiveness for our mistakes, it’s gotta start here. You and I can’t judge each other for what we’ve done because of our families- we’d both be hypocrites. We can only forgive each other, and forgive ourselves, and try to move forward.”

Danny sat frozen solid for what felt like hours. Finally, he moved. He curled into a fetal position, and he wept. “You really mean all that?”

“I do. It’s gotta start somewhere, man.”

He gulped, pulled his hands from his face. “I hate you.”

“No you don’t. You hate yourself.”

He narrowed his eyes. “It can be both.”

“You’re projecting. Trust me, I would know.”

“... Fucking hell, Lacy,” Danny said, rolling his eyes and groaning. “Why do you always have to be smarter than me?”

Lacy chuckled. “What are you talking about- you always got better grades than I did.”

“Drew thought you were smarter,” Danny said. “In class with him, it was the one place you talked, and you always came up with something. I floundered, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do with any of it.”

“Like I said,” Lacy said, standing up. “We can’t judge each other here. And I think the last thing Drew would want is for us to fight like this. He would want us to stand up in the face of evil and tell it ‘you go no further.’ And he’d want us to be true to ourselves, our real selves, not who anyone else wants us to be.”

Slowly, Danny gathered himself and sat up straight. “Okay. Maybe you’re right. Maybe this was a way for me to die. ‘Cause of what I’ve done to you, and to Gwen. Maybe this was a way for me not to have to face what’s coming.”

Lacy offered him a hand up. “We face what’s coming together. We fight it together.”

“You really trust me enough to fight alongside you after all this?”

“We’re family, Danny,” Lacy said. “Real family, not the bullshit version our parents want us to uphold. I’m with you till the end of the world. I can’t force you to do anything, but I can ask you to please stand with me until that day comes.”

“... Okay.” His eyes slowly but surely de-fogged. “Maybe I'll try it your way instead. Maybe tomorrow… We set off those fireworks again?”

“Sounds good to me,” she smiled.

He took her hand and rose to his feet. “What are our odds of living through this?”

“We stay here? Jack shit. We gotta move, right now.”

They made their way out of the attic, down the stairs to the first floor of the house, hauling themselves as quickly as they could with their injuries. Lacy’s body was a mass of bruises and aches and pains. On top of that, Danny had explained she’d been under for the past two days, and was low on food and water as a result. Danny was still in the throes of withdrawal, plus the beating he’d just taken, so the descent was a step at a time.

Still, it was something. Forward, always forward. No going back. Not ever again.

The mudroom, and then the front door, came into view. Lacy breathed a relieved sigh. She began to choke on it as the door swung open and revealed Alistair, fully restored, standing in the archway smiling. “Hello, my children. Good to see you up and about! I’ve just finished clearing this dreadful town of the last of its food stores, but I think I can spare a few scraps for you if you’d like!”