Written for apl0tdevice at the May challenge at gyaku-flash over on LJ. I've never done tiny Pearl before, nor anything quite so ambitious dramatically, so I hope this turned out IC and creepy!
Maya didn't even know if Pearl's father was even dead, but this couldn't be all that hard if he was. She knew how Pearly felt about "special someones", and since she didn't remember her mother's, it would at least be nice to try. Uncle hadn't seemed particularly "special" to Aunt Morgan, but he'd probably want to see Pearl again. The worst that could happen was he'd be alive, and at least she'd have given it a shot!
So while Aunt Morgan was off dealing with a customer (a weekly appointment with some lady who liked to talk to her son: she was always busy for at least an hour with her and kind of grumpy afterwards), she got herself and her five-year-old cousin ready. Finding the keys to the chests for their channelling gear wasn't that hard, and she'd watched her aunt and Mia get ready enough times to do that much herself without supervision. She even remembered the club to give Pearl for the Spirit Severing Technique. Just in case something went wrong. It wouldn't, but just in case. It'd make Pearly feel better, in any case.
They couldn't use the Channelling Chamber, of course, with Aunt Morgan being so busy, but Maya knew that you could channel people anywhere really. And she was good enough now to do it by herself: she'd done it a few times with dead relatives for practice, and it hadn't been that much trouble once she got the hang of it. She even remembered this uncle, even if he'd only been around for a couple of sour years before he and Aunt Morgan had fought and he'd gone off quietly. So she was now settling on Pearly's little purple futon, spreading out the few photos she'd been able to dig out from around the house.
Pearl was sitting on the floor a few feet away, knobbly little knees lined up against a crack in the floor panels. She gave Maya a nervous look, trying to keep herself together. "D-do you think you're going to be all right, Mystic Maya? You've never done this by yourself before."
Maya pushed the beads in her hair back and grinned, sitting up to kneel in the proper position. "No need to be so nervous, Pearly! Didn't I do just fine last time? And I didn't even know any of those elders! This should go great if he's there! And if it doesn't, you know what to do."
Pearl nodded and gripped her club harder. "I hit you over the head with the Spirit Severing Stick and he'll go away and you'll come back." She bit her lip, but smiled bravely at the older girl.
"That's right!" She picked up the most recent picture - her uncle and two-year-old Pearl at the gate to Fey Manor, from the bottom of a drawer filled with scraps in the storage room - and stared at it, concentrating as hard as she could.
She called up every memory of that very slight, quiet man who had so suddenly come into their life from nowhere. Jokes she wasn't sure if they were jokes or not, dog-eyed glares at her aunt, insincere smiles for her and awkward hugs for Pearl: and then, two years later, suddenly nothing one morning, not even a hole where he had used to be in her life after school. And then, she began the Invocation. Once it started, there was no telling how long it would take for her to-
-o-o-
Pearl was more than a little nervous about Mystic Maya doing this by herself for the first time, and listening to her cousin recite the Invocation and feeling the weight of energy coming into the air (that wasn't Mystic Maya anymore, was it?), she started to grow cold. But she kept her eyes on the channeller and clung hard to the Spirit Severing Stick Mystic Maya had given her to comfort her.
She really hoped she could hit her hard enough if she needed to.
But the figure in front of her had gone silent all of a sudden and was starting to morph and change and get bigger and its shoulders were stretching and it was getting taller and hair had started to grow on Mystic Maya's hands and on her face but that wasn't really her anymore and...
A man - not a very big man, but kind of scary-looking, almost wild like something really bad had just happened - was looking out of Maya's body, eyes darting about tense and alert. "What the hell have you done to me?" he growled. Pearl stared back at it - him, she guessed? This was Daddy, right? He didn't seem so happy. She knew that spirits got restless sometimes and they might be angry if you didn't make them happy really quickly.
"D-Daddy?" Her feet shuffled nervously on the floor as she came over to hug him, dragging her club behind her. She could feel the rage prickling off of him as she got closer, but maybe if she just...
The spirit jerked himself up and twisted about, his neck - ugh, no, that couldn't be Mystic Maya - straining to always keep an eye behind him. "Morgan?! I thought you'd leave me alone when I was dead, you bitch," he snarled, shaking the air with his words. "And then you try to distract me with your brat! I always knew that she'd be nothing more to you than the rest of them."
Pearl backed away, starting to shake a little. This was Mother's special someone and he was talking about her like this? She wanted to burst out of the room right then and go and drag Mother back up to deal with him, but she knew that she would be almost as scary as this spirit was now when she'd gotten rid of it, and she'd have gotten Mystic Maya in so much trouble... "W-what's wrong, Daddy? Mother's busy right now but-"
"You taught her to call me that, woman, and you were always reminding me she was never mine?" The spirit growled, eyes wider and almost exploding out of its head. "Where are you? You've got to be around somewhere, enjoying this." Pearl felt its eyes burning into her suddenly. "Where's your mother, girl?"
"Sh-she's busy, Daddy! I can't." This was really, really getting bad. She needed to take care of it somehow - not the stick, maybe she could do this...
"GO!"
She wasn't going to cry, she was going to try and take care of this like Mystic Maya would have if she'd been the one channelling... Pearl smiled up at the spirit, trying to brave that stare. It almost hurt to look back at it. "What's wrong? Why are you restless? Mother hasn't taught me much yet, but I can try and help you, Daddy." She couldn't quite tug his sleeve to get him to sit down, but she held onto his hand, thin and almost gnarled but with a girl's chipped purple nail polish on it.
"Get me your mother, Pearl. We have a lot of things to take care of." He smiled down at her, but only with his teeth, not with anything inside him. "She never told you she killed me, did she, girl?"
The Spirit Severing Stick thudded to the floor.
This was scary, this was getting worse than she'd ever thought. Pearl's hand went to her mouth as she gasped. "N-no! Mother wouldn't ever do that to you! You were her special-"
"That filthy tricksy lying whore told you that. She probably did that the next morning after she stuffed a pillow over my face. She didn't know I was awake for the last minute of it, but I couldn't even move and..." It looked down, suddenly, and scrutinized itself. Its eyes narrowed down and almost glowed at her. "I think I see," it purred. Its smile grew wider, and that was the worst part of the creature to Pearl, like a wolf was staring her down inside Mystic Maya's body. This was too awful. It was time she did something.
The spirit was snarling again as Pearl looked around to see where her one tool had gone. "You always were so stupid behind those plots, Morgan. Channelling me? When I figured it out, what did you think I'd do? I can kill you now and no one ever has to know. They're not going to listen to your brat and her made-up stories. All I have to do is find a way."
She had to do this fast or Mystic Maya was going to die and it would be all her fault. Pearl stood in front of it now, shakily brandishing her club and hoping she could reach its head. The spirit was grinning at her hungrily as it registered what she was holding. "So you'd like to help Daddy rest, Pearl? Come on. I'll get down for you to reach." It knelt back down on Pearl's futon in the pose Maya had sat in.
Why was it being so nice all of a sudden? She couldn't think about that, she had to just do it. She walked behind it, reciting the chant Mother had taught her for exorcising before severing a spirit, and made sure she could do it. She stretched as far back as she could to swing (and she could do it pretty far, Mystic Maya'd always said she was strong), and struck harder than she ever had.
There was a sickening crack as the body fell forward and started twisting back into its own shape again. It wasn't as bad this time. It was going back to normal. She only hoped Mystic Maya was all right in there.
-o-o-
Oh. Oh. Her head.
"M-Mystic Maya? Mystic Maya!" Pearl was shaking her, trying to pull her shoulders up from her face-down pose in the futon. Maya shook her head, getting a musty whiff from the folds, and picked her face up to look at Pearl. The younger girl's eyes had gone even wider than usual, and she was so white and trembling... what had happened? "Are you all right, Mystic Maya?"
She lay there, trying to get herself back together: even if she didn't feel all that great, she needed to make sure poor Pearly was fine first. "Yeah, I'll be fine in a minute," she said cheerfully. Her foot hit the Spirit Severing Stick behind her as she stretched out. That's what had got Pearly so worked up. Maybe he'd tried to get up and leave to say hi to Aunt Morgan or something. "You got to talk to Uncle?"
"Y-yes," Pearl said nervously. She seemed a little sick to Maya, and for the first time the older girl wondered if this had been such a good idea. She couldn't be okay like that, she must miss him even more that she'd gotten to see this. "But," and the rest of it poured out of her as she tripped over even more words than normal, "he said Mother was a bad woman and he wasn't really her special someone and... and..." The sobs choked out anything she was trying to say.
Maya was just as lost, but pasted on a smile and shoved herself up from the floor. She scooped Pearl up and squeezed her tightly. "Well, you handled that really well, Pearly!", she said, hoping to put her in a better mood. "I don't know what went wrong" - she wiped Pearl's nose on her sleeve, forgetting she was in channelling gear - "but I'm sorry about that. Maybe when you're a little older you can try asking Aunt Morgan so we can straighten things out and..."
Pearl's eyes were a frightened rabbit's, and Maya realized that that hadn't been the best promise. "No, Mystic Maya. I really don't think that's a good idea."