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#and seeing things hanging in houses and the shadows refusing to breach the light  so the person leave their nightlight on
phantombs · 3 years
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"Scared?” He walks down the lonely road, curious, rain pittering hard and fast, and looks all a phantom in the autumntime mist. The asphalt plonks, and his voice peaks to little but a whisper. There's a rolling crash of thunder, and everything feels too... Feels too odd. Heavy,  And hadn’t the locals been yammering about this, about avoiding the night in this season with the rain? They did. Warning about ghosts and demons--wait. Is he...? "I hope you're shivering to the rain and not jumping at your own shadow. You're too old for that."
open.
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applsauss · 4 years
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Mors Ab Alto [7/8] - Terra Firma
Description: One year before the armed interventions. Union Zone, Rural Washington State.
Fandom: 
Gundam 00
Pairing: 
Tieria Erde/Reader
Word Count: 2.3k+

Warning(s): 
None
-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-
One year before the armed interventions. Union Zone, Rural Washington State.
      The sun is a violent red; It simmers in the chalky air. The grass is yellow and crisp around the uneven walkway, and in the bed of yellow flowers flanking the front door, there’s a pinwheel. It spins lazily in the breeze, unconcerned with the comings and goings of the seasons, with the smokey forest fires glaring from across the river. 
As you make your way up the front steps, the house looms, foreboding in its warmth. You’ve only returned a handful of times after selling it in the months following your mother’s passing, and your absence has made it all the more tall. 
Your apprehension is only counterweighted by the fact that, at least, you know the family you sold it to. They were neighbors from down the road and good people, hit the trails on Sundays with their two children and dog - though you don’t know how old the kids are anymore, or if there’s still a dog to hike with. 
You ring the doorbell. A voice shouts, muffled through the door, and then it swings open.
“Oh!” You’re greeted by a woman, Elizabeth. She follows her exclamation with the crisp syllables of your given name, and it makes your heart squeeze. After going so long by an alias, it feels unbearably intimate, and makes you painfully aware of Tieria, who’s standing just a few steps behind you, watching. “You cut your hair! How are you?” she tries to usher you inside, “come in, come in, we’re just about to have dinner. Who’s your friend?”
“Hi!” you bite off the rest of your greeting. “Elizabeth,” you say, stalling at the door, maybe a bit less excited than she is, “sorry, I’m in a bit of a rush. I just gotta get into the shed real fast.” Peering past her into your childhood home, you notice the paint in the hallway is smoother, and a different color. 
“Oh, no problem! We haven’t touched it,” she says, and she slaps a hand over her forehead, “Wow. It’s been years. You look so grown up - I mean, you look good.”
You huff quietly. “Thanks,” you smile, and she reminds you of Linda. “You look good, too - and the house,” you let out a puff of air, “the house looks great.” You give her a weak smile, “sorry, I’d stay to talk more but-”
“Oh, no.” She waves you off. “Go, go. Just stop by again before you leave, I’ll save you two a plate.”
The house behind her looks like a home, and she disappears back into its belly. She closes the door behind her quietly, leaving you and Tieria on the steps. You stare at the front of the house for a couple seconds, deliberately facing away from Tieria to gather your wits, and suck in a smoky breath.
“What are we doing here?” Tieria asks as soon as you exhale. There are geese flying overhead, honking, but neither of you pay them any attention.
You let out a disaffected laugh, then say, “stop asking. You’re the one who insisted on coming.” He takes a step back as you turn around, then follows as you hop down the front steps and begin picking your way across the yard to the shed.
“I didn’t agree to come here. I told you that it would be inefficient for us to split up, seeing as we’re supposed to take the same transport back to Krung Thep,” Tieria says as he follows you towards the shed.
Your response is a vague “hmm”, neither agreeing nor disagreeing with his complaint.
“Wait out here,” You say as you unlock the shed, and with some difficulty, manage to yank the door open. It drags on the gravel, then gets stuck. 
It doesn’t budge when you pull, so you huff and move to pull harder at the same time Tieria reaches to help. It unexpectedly jerks free, and you step backwards into him, shoulder colliding with his chest and the heel of your shoe coming down on his toe. “Oh, sorry,” you jump away, and when you look up at him, he’s frowning at you.
You leave him out in the dying sunlight, then flip your phone open to illuminate the dark space.
“What is this?” He asks, peering into the darkness after you. He’s still in the light, the sun playing on his hair, and his sweater is thin and open, billowing as the trees whisper. It’s all coming on too thick, too familiar.
“Again, Tieria, for someone who’s hell-bent on following protocol, you seem to be asking me an alarming amount of personal questions.”
“You’re the one who dragged me out here.”
“You’re the one who told me that either I take you or forget about it.”
There’s a car parked in the shed, an old model, though not old enough to be a classic, just run down. You tug the tarp covering the car over a wheel well where it blew away, and tuck it more securely under the tire, but otherwise walk past it, leaving it forgotten.
The shed is mostly empty, you’d gotten rid of most of your stuff, though there are a few things you couldn’t bear to part with. You’d never been materialistic, but when you said goodbye to your mom, you couldn’t bring yourself to say goodbye to the reminders of her. A dresser in the corner, covered in a picnic blanket. A few of your mother’s favourite ceramic dishes. A glass from a brewery down the road. Hiking boots, a snow bib and sleeping bag eaten through by moths.
“There you are…” you mutter under your breath as you find the crate you’re looking for. Bending at the knees, you pull up the box of records with you and drop it on top of the dresser to rifle through its contents. When you’re satisfied that you’ve got the right box, you pull a drawer open and toss a box of matches on top of the box before picking everything up and turning towards the door. 
You carry the box out into the fresh air, then join Tieria, who’s wandered off to the remains of a fire pit: Concrete bricks lining a faintly dug-out hole, still charred white and grey. 
Tieria gives you a careful look, but keeps his mouth shut, refraining from asking any questions as you drop the box on the ground heavily, kicking up some dust. You flip the lid of the box open, revealing a mess of paperwork, and he clicks his tongue in distaste.
He crosses his arms, and taps his foot when you begin lighting the papers on fire by hand, then dropping them into the pit. Soon, the fire is strong enough, and you begin just tossing paper into the pit rather than light it beforehand.
“Can you finish this box up?”
“It wouldn’t be a breach of protocol, would it?”
“I dunno, you’re the one who knows about all that.” You hold out a handful of papers for him to take, and he takes them without another comment. Sometimes, his attitude is so… aggravating, and still… You notice how his eyes change colors in the firelight, or how the fire dances across his glasses. 
He pushes the sleeves of his sweater up to his forearms, and pretends to not look at the documents he’s diligently burning. And there’s some sort of deepset elegance in his form that you can’t help but admire. You turn away quickly, something undefined swirling in your chest. Sometimes, the best way to deal with thoughts like these are to just not think them.
The sun is set when you walk back to the shed. The sky’s lost its color, just a night, the stars like freckles at the end of summer, the moon a dirty orange, reflecting the smoky wildfire you’d passed on the way up the gorge.
Honestly, this work should have been done years ago, when you first joined Celestial Being. They’d asked you to get rid of unnecessary records, minimize potential damages and information leaks, but it was all too fresh and you couldn’t come back to just destroy all of this: Medical records, bills, college transcripts, bank statements, proof you had a life, family. Your mother kept records diligently, and you tossed them all in boxes when you left.
You pull a drawer out, and begin walking back to Tieria. The lights in the house are on, and you see Elizabeth and her family moving about like shadows puppets, Two parents, two children, a boy and a girl, sitting around the dinner table. You wonder if they have as many memories of this place as you do, if their bones consider this their home also. If the kids will grow up climbing out of their bedroom windows and meeting friends in swimming holes.
You join Tieria once again at the fire pit, set the drawer down next to the original box, and he’s staring down at something. It casts a shadow over his face, and then he hands whatever he’s got to you.
It’s a photograph – the child obviously you, and the woman your mother. You’re eight, maybe nine, sitting on her lap as you beam at the camera. She’s smiling, hair tucked behind her ears, and the neckline her tank top hanging low as she bends over to hug you. Pressing the side of her face to yours.
You never knew your father. You never needed to.
She reminds you of Linda, kind eyes framed by glasses, delicate hands – she’s always got her nails painted, but the polish is always chipped – and a strength under her skin, such a shock when most of what you remember of her is a tired soldier’s smile and a body riddled with cancer – the cancer she suffered through at the hands of radiation exposure – exposure that happened while she was serving her government, exposure that the government refused to treat on the grounds that there’s no proof they’re at fault - and so they just let her slip instead, refused to pull the plug out of the drain when you both were drowning in the bathtub. 
Fuck wars, fuck The Union, fuck the people who let the world be this way. Nothing means anything anymore.
You fold the picture in half and shove it in your back pocket, afraid to meet Tieria’s gaze – and you look back to Elizabeth’s silhouette and you’re struck by the urge to keep burning everything - to finally get rid of everything you were too weak to before. It would be too easy, to just keep going. 
Your chest burns, your eyes burn, the forest burns. You want to make it all disappear, like if you can get rid of the evidence, then it never happened in the first place, then you never had a life, never had a family before Celestial Being. You could forget about all of this, just let yourself be swept up by the tide of a new era, a new world, Celestial Being is a new beginning, and they’ve given you something to believe in, given your life a direction for the last couple of years.
You’re shaking as begin ferrying boxes back and forth. You watch a teddy bear dissolve into nothing. Tieria swells with quiet contempt. 
The night isn’t nearly dark enough, the air is choked by a smokey haze, and all you can see is the fire as the wood of a jewelry box warps, then crackles. 
Your high school diploma catches wonderfully, so do the binders full of notes from university. The blankets take longer. The heat of the fire is sweltering, and it makes you sweat.
You return with a stack of photo albums. The faux-leather melts off a front. The cover photo, a family portrait, bubbles and melts into nothing. Your throat tightens, but you don’t stop.
Family recipes become lost, notes left in lunch boxes float away as ash under the stars. A picture drawn for you by your cousin, cards spelling I-heart-you, your mother’s face, your mother’s face, your mother’s face.
Finally, you go back into the shed, and find nothing left but the car and the dresser, both gutted, the drawers tossed and turned over. You return empty handed to the bonfire, staring into the flames like it holds the answer, and watch the last of the plastic toys melt, the faces of heroes shifting into nightmares to mirror the family mementos, your life, and then you remember the photo in your pocket.
You pull it out, unfold it with your thumb and stare at your mother’s face, and you find kindness there, but it makes you feel weak, and you cannot be weak, so you hold the photograph out, towards the flames, ready to let it go, let everything burn, and fade into something new when Tieria reaches out and places his hand over yours. He doesn’t pry the photo from your hands, but doesn’t let it fall.
You stare at your hands, joined - His hand is warm, soft, his nails are manicured and his grip is gentle; you could have told him to wait for you, if you really wanted. You could have thrown a bigger fit, there really isn’t a reason for him to be here, every word out of his mouth is just thinly veiled justifications, so weak you doubt he believes them himself. 
You stare at your mother’s face, and can’t help but feel like there is all the reason in the world for her to be here, standing next to you, but she’s not. It’s unfair, like most things.
You pull your hand towards you, fold the photo and tuck it in your back pocket, afraid to meet Tieria’s gaze, and regret swells as you watch everything else dissolve and leave you alone in the dust. 
-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-
A/N: Ketchum, ID, Boygenius. This is just self-indulgence. I’m not sorry.
Masterlist in desc.
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ewdenimjeans · 5 years
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It's raining so hard now
Tom used to love fall, but he was finding it much harder to like anything these days. Especially since fall had seemed to sunk it's claws in rougher than last year, like an anxious predator afraid it might miss it's chance.
The rain had been terrible all week, either filling the clouds fat and ominously until they choked out any light from the sun, or it would suddenly beat down hard enough that drums of war could be shy in comparison.
The entire bus trip had been surrounded by sheets of rain and distance booms of thunder. If the drone of storm wasn't enough, fog lingered thick as soup on the ground whenever there was a moment's pause between rain. The edge of cold was just a bit harsher than it should be, and the wind cut through Tom's coat as he walked from the bus stop.
The plastic bag in his hand knocked hard on his knee with each step, but he didn't bother to adjust it. His beaten black umbrella only defended parts of him from the water as wind blew rain sideways and pelted his jacket. The loose hems of his jeans were wet, the soles of his checkered sneakers worn. The scarf around his neck was a gray, much softer than the midnight shade of his coat and the dark of his eyes, even the shadows under his eyes, and it was thick enough to keep the chill from his neck but not big enough to protect his ears or jaw.
It was uncomfortable. It was enough.
The walk from the bus stop was dull and depressing, though the rain seemed to have sensed the mood and at least had enough sympathy to lessen the onslaught. Still that allowed fog to creep up from the sidewalk and yards like tendrils and Tom tripped from a few uneven steps he hadn't been able to see. But besides some bitten curses, Tom kept walking.
The neighborhood had changed, more than once, more than a bit. He could recognize a few houses but they were now just unused backdrops he hadn't seen in months. No one was out in this piss poor weather so that saved him the trouble of trying to recognize people too. Good thing, he wasn't really in the right state of mind for that sort of casualness. Not that Tom minded or even really thought it mattered- he wasn't there to reminisce, he was there to see something specific.
The plots of land remained beaten and unbuilt upon, a sort of scar in the middle of a once pretty standard neighborhood. Where two houses had stood, there was uneven patches of dirt and half planted bases made out of thick brick. A bulldozer sat far back among the fog along with tall pyramids of lumber, untouched. If this were anywhere else, the reconstruction would already be well underway, two houses half built up to blend with the rest of the buildings, but now the project was left unfinished, the supplies abandoned. It had been that way for almost a month now, all construction workers refusing, contractors desperate to stop the injury lawsuits, and the local community at a loss at what they could do. At least, that's what Tom had heard.
Stepping from the sidewalk and onto the debated land was almost like something out of a horror movie, Tom knew, but he also knew that nothing dangerous lurked in the halted construction and fog. Well, nothing dangerous to him. Glass crunched under his feet, a few lost nails making clinks as they were kicked by his shoes into rocks.
The plot to the right of him received only a mild glance, and he tilted back his umbrella to look towards the left. Just a square empty base on a dug up bit of dirt. Tom sighed and walked to the home's skeleton, tiredly lifting his leg over the wood outline and setting his shoe on cold dirtied ground. The scuff of his shoes and the sound of the wind was all that filled the plots, as if every other sound didn't dare breach the area. In the center of what used to be a house, Tom kicked a plank of wood a bit to the side. He sat down on the plank, knowing that this way he wouldn't have to explain any mud stains or cuts from glass or nails once he returned home later. And he waited.
With his umbrella resting on the crook of his neck, Tom pulled out a large dark colored bottle from the plastic bag still tangled at his fingers. It was even colder than the fog and trickles of rain around him, but he held to it casually and stuffed the bag into his pocket. He unscrewed the top of the bottle and took a harsh swig. The taste was awful but it was cheap and it did the trick. So it worked just fine for Tom. The plastic bag was then carelessly flattened by one of his dirty shoes.
Tom pulled his phone from his pocket, checked the time, then turned on the flashlight app. The light was good enough to shine a few feet. With a light sniff, Tom lightly tossed it screen down onto the plastic bag, making the light shine up towards the sky. Then Tom took another drink.
"Ew. Are you drunk?" The voice came from somewhere Tom couldn't find, because it was low and could easily be a whisper or a shout from very far away.
"I'm working on it," Tom replied, turning his eyes on the light shining on nothing but air just a foot or two from his face.
"Don't... do that here." Soft voice, tired, maybe a bit sad. It came from the shadows somewhere to the left, but Tom saw something move to the right of him.
Tom pointedly took a sip from his bottle, and made a face at the taste. Which would earn him a hard glare from some of his friends, and a string of insults from the others. But he didn't hear or see anything.
A gust of wind blew Tom's spikes, more waterdrops touched his knees.
"Tom, go home," a huff of a request from the tinder pile nearly behind Tom, "It's raining."
"I didn't notice." Tom lightly shrugged, making his umbrella bob above his head.
The bulldozer set near the other house lets out a distraught groan.
"Why are you here?"
Tom nods towards the spotlight in front of him. "Can't a guy just come to his burned down house to drink?"
The fog around the light swirls, guided but nothing is there.
"This is my house. Yours is over there."
"Well yeah, but there's no one to talk to over there anymore," Tom feels rainwater on his cheek and brushes it away with his shoulder.
There's a dry laugh, a very slight and small sound. It could just be a gasp or groan, but Tom is sure it's a laugh.
"You could just go talk to anyone else. Eduardo told me that you're fine when you're not being a dumbass, and he wouldn't mind hanging out with you more- don't tell him I told you that, though."
"I'd never sell you out unless Eduardo paid me."
"Comforting." The wall frame that was only two support beams creaked.
Tom paused a moment before he took a chug from his bottle. He swallowed the burn and looked down, watching suspended nearly invisible beads of rain patter down into the barren area.
"Jon," Tom sounded more tired than he had been, as if the cold and water had soaked into him and made him creaky and slow like a broken machine, "It's weirder for me to be talking to the air than you, no matter how you look now. I promise not to freak out- so could you please just show me already?"
Silence, heavy like a graveyard (Tom closed his eyes bitterly against the not so inaccurate comparison). A gust of wind knocked against Tom, making him shiver and his umbrella rattle. The light of his phone flickered a bit. And, when Tom pulled back from his flinch, opened sore eyes from water and wind, Jon was there.
Behind the small, dull spotlight of Tom's phone, Jon stood out just barely in the dark. Dressed in a button up and jeans, with his simple haircut and small dark eyes and his thin uneasy smile, Jon looked the way Tom expected. He seemed solid, at least in his face, but the further down his body Tom looked, the more faded and unstable Jon became. He seemed diluted of color, each hue of his body bleached out almost violently. Darkness stained his hands, slipped down his sleeves. There was a streak on his cheek, from which red headed down to his throat. And on Jon's chest, right where his heart had been, was a dark seeping wound- a gash through his shirt filled with vivid red and black, oozing long streaks of blood all down his chest and stomach.
If Tom hadn't seen it before, he would've be disturbed. Jon was a faded version of himself, stained in blood and burns that still bled. That was why he didn't blame Mark for freaking out like he did.
Tom wouldn't lie- it looked bad. It was bad. Absolutely awful. But Tom could handle it.
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dramatisperscnae · 6 years
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HEADCANON -- SIR THOMAS SHARPE
Edith
So much of Thomas’s life - its vast majority, in fact - was spent doing anything and everything his sister asked that the idea, let alone the possibility, of him acting on his own personal desires was almost unthinkable. Until he met Edith Cushing. Thomas had arrived in Buffalo for two reasons: to attempt to find some capital to help fund his continued work on his mining machine, and to court and ultimately marry Eunice McMichael to ensure he would eventually have said capital thanks to her dowry. Eunice fit Lucille’s specifications perfectly; a flighty, easily-charmed girl whose family would likely not think it strange when they ceased to hear from her. Edith was anything but.
Had it not been for his glimpse of her novel, it’s doubtful Thomas would have taken more notice of Edith than he did. She was lovely, to be sure, but by the time he met her he was far too deep into his sister’s machinations and only subconsciously beginning to realize it despite his best efforts to ignore it. Edith’s story, with its air of the macabre and its ghosts, fascinated him. To learn that she was the author fascinated him further. Here was a woman of wit and clear education and creativity, bold enough to sass a complete stranger - and a strange man, at that - and yet still with a certain feminine softness that was so different from the woman he knew best.
His arrival at her residence to escort her to the McMichael party was the first time Thomas had ever acted on impulse. He didn’t want Eunice - truthfully he didn’t want to continue the cycle he and Lucille had begun at all, but he saw no other way - but this woman was different in a way he couldn’t describe. That was why he’d told Lucille to go on ahead, that he had some last-minute business to attend to, and took a cab to Maston Park where he stood out of sight in the rain trying to work up the courage to approach the door. When he saw her father depart without her, that made things easier; his previous encounter with Carter Cushing had left him more than a bit intimidated, even though he’d managed to stand his ground.
Thomas knew exactly the statement his arrival to the party with Edith would make. Given that he was the guest of honor and it was already generally known he was planning on courting Eunice, his arrival with another woman - and one who had already informed the hostess she would not be attending, no less - was an incredible breach of etiquette and a slight to the young lady he was meant to be paying his attentions to. When asked to demonstrate the waltz, again he knew exactly what his actions would suggest. It was a chance for him to save face and continue with the plan as his sister wished, to make up for his earlier slight of Eunice, but he very deliberately - and very publicly - passed over Eunice in favor of asking Edith. This marked the first time he’d ever outright gone against his sister’s wishes, as it had been Lucille who suggested the waltz to begin with.
Victorian etiquette dictated that a lady could not outright refuse a gentleman’s request to dance, especially when it was given so publicly, which meant that Thomas would have to rescind the offer in order for Edith to avoid joining in the insult. He did not. Instead he insisted, even after she did refuse him and reminded him that Eunice was meant to be the object of his attention. For the first time Thomas acted on his own desires, ignoring the plan Lucille had so carefully arranged, and held steady in his course. It caused a minor scandal, of course, for Eunice to be snubbed so overtly and at her own party, but Thomas didn’t care.
In the days that followed, as he payed court to Edith Cushing, Thomas’s fascination with her grew. She truly was different, genuine in a way no one had ever really been with him before. Bright and intelligent, warm and quick-witted, and with an inventive and creative mind of her own, speaking with Edith was speaking with a kindred spirit. In truth, Thomas was so taken with her that he’d quite forgotten the fate that awaited any woman he took to wife.
Carter Cushing’s discovery of his marriage to Pamela brought it all crashing down. Thomas could not bear to have Edith learn of his history, especially not in so terrible a fashion, and especially not on the night he’d intended to propose. So he accepted Mr. Cushing’s money and would have left Buffalo entirely, had Lucille not insisted he follow through. She would depart for the port, and he would remain behind to finish the job and convince Edith to come with him. He had changed the target, after all, but the ultimate goal remained the same. It wasn’t until Ferguson brought the news and he went with Edith to see the body that Thomas realized what must have happened. He knew, or at least guessed, Carter Cushing’s true fate, though still he couldn’t bring himself to speak against his sister. Especially not now, when he would be hanged for murder just as surely as Lucille would be thrown back into a sanitarium for all they had done. He couldn’t speak. Not anymore.
The brief honeymoon he had with Edith following their hastened wedding brought some of the earlier light and life back into his relationship with her. To be with someone who saw him, and not simply a pretty, charming face, was wholly new. Edith even liked hearing about his work and his designs; as much as Lucille adored him she had never shown much interest in his work beyond idle fascination. When the inevitable poisoning began, Thomas felt himself trapped between the woman he had come to truly love and the only woman who had - as far as he believed - ever loved him.
There were several points at which he considered telling Lucille to stop, to let Edith live, but he could never bring himself to do so. If he did, then she would learn he’d broken yet another promise to her, that he’d fallen in love with his newest wife, and he couldn’t bear to confess that particular sin to her. He could barely even show the affection he wished to where Edith was concerned, though she was the only woman he’d ever desired of his own accord. The chance storm that stranded them in the village ended up being the perfect - and only - chance for Thomas to act on his feelings towards her.
It was a chance he would pay dearly for later; seeing the hurt and panicked despair in his sister’s eyes on their return had Thomas’s heart nearly breaking with guilt. His slip in wishing for Edith’s presence as his clay harvester finally came to life only made things worse, though he tried to fix them as best he could, to ease Lucille’s pain as he had always done, to assure her that nothing had changed. But it had. Something about Edith Cushing had finally drawn Thomas’s eyes out of the shadow he’d kept them in for so long and pushed him into the light.
He made his decision to get Edith out of Allerdale when he found her unconscious in the entry hall. She was dying, he knew, a slow and torturous death that he had condemned her to, and her only hope of survival was to get away from both the house and him. His plan had been to use the excuse of a ride in the fresh air to get Edith out of the house and take her to town. From there he could get her a train ticket to London, and from there she could find a steam-ship to take her back to America. The marriage he could have annulled, leaving her free without any ties to Allerdale or to him. Free to live her life.
And free to tell the world the truth she had learned about Thomas and Lucille, about the women they had killed. That dashed his plan like a storm-tossed ship against rocks. If the truth were to get out, he would be hanged - he would accept full blame, after all, regardless of the fact that women were rarely put to death - and Lucille would be left alone, likely to endure again the tortures of a sanitarium. Trapped with no escape in sight, Thomas felt truly lost, his new-found free will warring with his devotion to his sister.
The arrival of Dr. Alan McMichael would prove to be the miracle both Thomas and Edith needed. Had the man not arrived precisely when he did, it was highly likely Lucille would have finished the task the poison and shoving Edith over the railing had begun. As it was, Thomas knew from the moment McMichael entered the house that things were finally coming to an end for them, one way or another. A very large part of him was petrified, frozen in fear and still caught in his sister’s spell, but a small and slowly growing part was relieved that it would soon be over.
With McMichael being, as Thomas saw it, the key to Edith’s salvation, he had no choice but to ensure the man’s survival as best he could. That was why, though he truly had no wish to harm anyone, he took the insults from his sister and turned the knife on McMichael. Lucille would not stop, he knew, until both McMichael and Edith were dead; their only hope was now in Thomas’s hands, and his hope lay with the doctor himself to show him where to stab so as not to prove fatal.
Ultimately it worked, though Edith’s scream of anguish as McMichael fell tore through Thomas like rending claws. That was the final catalyst that drove him to action. This was the final act of their macabre tale, and Thomas was not going to see it end with Edith or McMichael’s deaths. For the first time in his life he felt fully free, as if he could stand straighter, as if there was no key in his back or strings guiding his movements. He would get them both out and then...well. And then fate would take over as it must.
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