(A/N: Oof. Let me tell you something. This was a doozy to write. I started this story about the time that Deep End aired and only just finished. Silly me, thinking I could finish it during the break between season one and season two! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Anyway, this is an homage to all the times that the Pines family could have kicked the can during season one and to Depravity Falls. Thank you Depravity Falls for existing to satisfy my craving for violent stories. No I will not be doing this for season two, the poetic narration-driven style I chose for this piece is too much to handle (although it was fun to develop) and present tense is hard to keep straight sometimes, especially when you're used to writing past tense. Overall I'm pretty pleased with this story in general and I hope you like it too! Thank you for your time.)
Sometimes
AU, Depravity Falls, Horror, Suspense, Tragedy
Rating: M for blood, gore, rape, language, and character death
Pairing: none
Final Word Count: 8,590 words
A man sits down, drink in hand, and focuses on the screen before him. Static flares, white noise spilling into the otherwise silent room, and settles into blobs. Blobs become shapes; shapes become more defined, until he is watching a pair of chocolate-haired children flee.
Behind them is a large monster composed of little forest men. The gno-man roars and rips a tree from the ground and throws it at the golf-cart and—subsequently—the children, narrowly missing them. Instead, it causes them to swerve and eventually tip over from imbalance. The kids are thrown from the vehicle, pitched forward, and sent flying into a bush.
Getting up, they dust themselves off and face the approaching gnome-monster, a grim scowl set on their faces—fully ready to handle anything this thing could dish out to them (only not really).
The girl pleads with the head gnome, words empty and meaningless, as she plots for a way to defeat them. Her mind brings to light the presence of a leaf-blower in the shrubbery behind her—a leaf-blower who's nozzle is gnome-sized.
She pleads with the head gnome again, her nervous smile flashing silver in the air, and he almost accepts her proposition and falls into her trap. However, her brother chooses at that moment to hurl a baseball bat, acquired through a seemingly non-sequitur encounter with their heavyset friend, at the monster's head.
It takes only mere seconds for the life to seep from his body, pouring out of the wound in his broken neck in accompaniment with his blood. She screams and the head gnome apologises profusely; if she had just accepted their offer, he reprimands, this wouldn't have happened.
It's all my fault, she thinks in despair as a wail rips from her throat. Her other half is gone now, leaving a gaping hole where he should be, an emptiness that cannot be sated. She is hollow now.
She doesn't react when the gno-man grabs her and drags her off to the forest to wed all hundred creatures. She does not cry out as they take her innocence to create more of their dying race. She does not say a word as she watches her children take the world by storm.
All she does is silently beg for a death that will never come.
Somewhere, a record scratches; sometimes, a CD skips; somehow, static skitters across a glass screen causing frustration for the observer.
The man gets up and pounds the set, adjusting the bunny-ears accordingly; curses grace the tip of his tongue, and yet, do not spill over. His internal swearing quells as the snow rearranges itself into another picture, clear as day.
A pudgy, young child in a baby-blue suit clutches a cyan gem set in a bolo tie. Madness is present in his eyes, wild and angry, as he hoists the damned interloper in the air with his 'skill'. "I'll make sure," he sneers as he pulls a pair of sheep-shears from a 'Lil' Gideon' branded box, "you'll never lie again."
The cyan glow of his 'skill' is the only light in the warehouse on the edge of a cliff, bathing the choking victim with its eerie illumination. The same energy surrounds the shears as they ever-so-slowly approach the brunette's mouth, poised for cutting out his lying tongue.
If the brunette boy could manage to choke out anything, he would cry out that the blond could not have his sister, ever. But he cannot even take a breath.
There is a muffled sputter as silver blades sever the muscle at the base, blood spurting out and covering the 'psychic' in crimson ichor. The energy around his victim dissipates and he is dropped unceremoniously on the ground, a waterfall of blood pouring from between his teeth. The blond cackles and gloats; see, he asks haughtily, what happens to those who cross me?! They're punished! She's mine now; you can't get in our way anymore!
Suddenly the warehouse door flies open and the brunette's sister walks in, grim frown set on her face. She stomps up to the blond, calling his name.
He chuckles nervously, hoping—wishing—that she doesn't notice her brother bleeding out on the concrete floor.
She points at him, "I have something to tell you!" The high-tension spirit in the room breaks for a moment, filling the space with silence and the soft sound of the boy gagging on his bleeding wound. "Look," she admits, "I like you, I really do! But...just not that way." The 'psychic' stammers out an apology but she interrupts, "we can still be makeup-buddies though, right?"
He agrees wholeheartedly and reaches for her to give him a hug. Suddenly, however, her eyes harden and she snatches the tie from his neck and screeches, an enraged Siren who's song has been interrupted in order for her to finally feast upon the flesh of the sailor she's lured in.
The blond shrieks in protest as she screams insults at him, pointing out that he cut out her brother's tongue, all-the-while walking towards the cliff-side window to throw the accursed pendant away. With a howl, the blond throws himself into her, tossing the two of them into a spiraling descent towards the Earth's crust, gravity working in tandem with their velocity.
The girl's brother cannot cry out, he cannot make a single sound in grief as his sister hits the trees beneath her with a sickening crunch. Pine needles entwine in her hair and sap mixes with her crimson blood as it cascades down the rugged bark of the evergreen that broke her fall. Blood and tears mix as he mourns her; blood and tears mix as he moves forward towards the broken window; blood and tears mix as he silently promises her that he'll never leave her alone.
He can't live without her.
He dies for her.
Somewhere, a record skips, and a punchline is missed; sometimes, an actress trips, stuttering over her soliloquy; somehow, a man with an eye in his forehead screams at the programme he's watching as it dissolves into nothing once again.
His fist hits the top again and again as he curses the existence of quantum-dimensional viewing signals. Damn the company that decided to make meta-dial-up, because someone in this general space-time position is using their phone. Without warning the picture resolves, and the man sits down once again, ready for another story to unfold.
The machines around them spark to life, whirling and twirling in a mad dance. The ghosts' peals of laughter echo in the store as one-by-one the teenagers disappear.
The first victim of the ghosts' mad revenge is the technologically-obsessed young woman. Fingers flying over the keys of her phone, she is sucked into a monitor. Within the glass walls of her new prison, she can only watch time pass on and on, for the rest of an eternity. A fitting end for someone who never payed attention to the world at all.
The second one to be punished is the portly pushover, refusing to leave his game to run. Inside the machine he so adamantly refused to part ways with, falling arrows pierce him over and over again until he lays on the bottom of the screen, bleeding out. Pity, he was just losing some weight.
The third to go is one of the tall males, his parting comment rather pathetic. "Yeah, I'm sure the ghosts just want to talk about their feelings, or something." Someone must have pissed in his Cheerios this morning because you are what you eat. So maybe that giant toucan is now a teenage boy, stabbed to death with a spoon.
The fourth teen is pushed back by one of the remaining teenagers, trying to keep him from doing something stupid. Too late; he's angrily shouting at the ghosts and they take offence. "I don't like your tone of voice," the ghosts rebuke in unison—as they had been doing all this time. With a flash, the disrespectful boy becomes a hot dog, rolling on the heated bars of a hot dog warmer. Trying not to be a weenie, he became a weenie.
The fifth teen and the boy hide, hearts pounding in terror. What do we do, what do we do?! They worry aloud from within their hiding place, trying not to scream in terror.
Putting aside his fear, the boy steps out onto the ceiling, face-to-face with his possessed sister. "I need to tell you something," he cries. The torturous whirling and twirling of the store around him stops abruptly and the thing—not his sister, that can't be his sister—turns to face him in midair. "I am not a teenager!"
There is silence as the ghosts contemplate this new information. For a moment, just a fleeting moment, he thinks they believe him. Then they utter one syllable, damning them all.
"Liar."
His sister's neck snaps at a right angle and she vomits blood. The ghosts drop her and reach for him, fingers of bone and ectoplasm cold as they tear him from his place on the floor/ceiling. They tear him apart.
"Liar."
His tongue and his jaw hit the floor with a sickening thud.
"You are a liar."
His hair is ripped from his head, scalp attached still, and flung across the store to stick to the window.
"You are a teen."
Eyeballs fall into olive jars, teeth drop into a popcorn bag, fingers slip gently into hot-dog buns—ketchup no extra charge!—and toes into a baby carrot container. All of him, being sliced and diced into little bits and baubles, packing away neatly.
"Teenagers deserve to die."
The fifth teen breaks for the door, screams tearing from her mouth. Don't kill me! Please don't let me die! They grab ahold of her and hoist her by her hair.
"You don't want to die," they hiss at her, "then prove it."
"H-how?!" She squeaks as she dangles like a piñata.
"Grow up. Grow up or get out."
"Yesss," the ghosts sigh, "get out of town. If you stay here, we will find you and make you pay."
"You would make a lovely business woman."
"Or a corpse."
Her form melts between their ghostly fingers, dribbling to the floor in a reddish ooze. Groans, moans, and screams bubble from her dripping mouth. She cannot hold on any longer. She lets go and dribbles into the grate below, seeping into the sewer drain.
"Good bye!"
The mists swirl around the ceiling/floor and the store rights itself. A lone figure steps from the reconfigured store and looks around. "Oh God. Oh God. They're gone."
"They're dead!"
"I'm gonna go home and rethink everything."
Somewhere, a key breaks and a man is stuck outside his home in the rain; sometimes, a comedian gets the last laugh as he dangles from a ceiling fan; somehow, a man howls in frustration and slams his head against the television set before him making the eye in his forehead water in pain.
He twiddles with the knob, trying to fine-tune the static away to no avail. His palm slaps the glass screen and—through pain-tears—he sees the picture reform.
They are falling, the four of them. Falling and falling with no end in sight. The elder groans, angrily damning the wind that pushed them into this predicament.
The overweight man giggles as they take turns telling stories to pass the time. He's having way too much fun with this, the elder determines, the big baby.
The male twin is slowly running out of stories to tell, cynically eyeing his great-uncle with distaste. This is all his fault, he tells himself, us being here in this hole. We're never gonna get out of here and it's all his fault!
The female twin continues to knit tales, both fantastical and factual, as they fall forever. Why bother getting mad? There's so much fun to be had! Telling stories, spinning, 'Eye-Spy', the possibilities are limitless!
Time means nothing in the void they are in. Story after story passes from their lips as they resort to remembering life before the incident that led them here. They learn more about each other than they ever thought they would. Yet as time passes—all in their mind of course—so does their sanity. The four of them descend into gibbering madness.
The man-child regresses to a time of simpler joys and simple thoughts. He babbles like a baby as he falls eternally in the nothingness. The elder slips into a feral line of thought and snaps at anyone who gets near him. The man-child lost a hand to him, but the bleeding stemmed after a little while and all was well, as it would be.
The twins turn to silence and evolving their awareness into something more. As eternities pass they realise that their existence as singulars is pointless and decide to become a collective. They abandon any form of verbal communication and resort to telepathy. They revel in their aloof nature and refuse to acknowledge any of the others for they are lesser lifeforms.
The four of them, eternal, youthful, impossible, become mad. Then again, who wouldn't when trapped in Limbo?
Somehow, a record scratches, losing the best part of the verse in the club; sometimes, a football player who forgot to wear his mouth guard bites his tongue off; somewhere, a man with an eye in his forehead beats the ever-loving shit out of an old TV, swears ever-present in his tirade.
"Damn this machine, damn this machine, damn this godforsaken machine all the way to the farthest reaches of Hell! Your mother is a toaster and your father is a microwave! I hope you rot!"
The picture resolves again, albeit a bit begrudgingly, and shows the twins once more.
They're in a boat and behind them is a large monster of Lovecraftian lore, hell-bent on destroying their vessel and gobbling them up. The portly man at the wheel shrieked and steered the boat this way and that, attempting to shake their pursuer to no avail. The boat cornered like a semi compared to the monster's dime-sharp-turns.
The boy points to a waterfall, screaming that there might be a cave behind the curtain of water. 'Might be' scares his sister and their friend, but 'might be' is better than 'isn't', so they face the prow towards the falls and pray for luck.
Their death is swift, the boy's neck breaking upon impact, the man's chest is pierced with a shattered piece of the ship, and the girl's brains splattered across the rock wall that was actually behind the waterfall.
The monster slinks away, gears turning angrily as it was denied one more chance to fulfill its destiny. The elder within its carapace growls angrily, robbed of another corpse for the pile.
"Donkey-spittle"
Somewhere, a baseball player's face is smashed in by a stray fly-ball; somehow, a football player snaps his leg at an unnatural angle; sometimes, a television set swirls into snow, trying to piss off the man watching.
He's not going to take any of that shit any more, he decides. He is going to lay down the law, he affirms. He is just going to sit there and scream at the TV, and he does as the snow resolves into another picture.
A pixillated man chases him, running them into the park, screaming in his off-kilter voice. The teen in front is swearing loudly, and the boy behind the man is panting. Why? Why did this always happen to him?!
Luckily for the boy, his older friend and co-worker pulled up in his truck and offered a ride, which was eagerly accepted—understanding the proviso that the gaming cabinet around him was not to be mentioned. When they catch up, the teen is heavily bruised and bleeding, as well as halfway up a water-tower. The man had pummeled him with sharp edges and pixels, swearing that the boy's dead father would be avenged (which makes no sense to the teen).
The man shakes the tower again and again, jostling not only the teenage boy who spray-painted the explosion (muffin) on the tower, but the girl and her Grunkle as well. The three scream, swaying back and forth with the tower, and the elderly man nearly falls off the edge, supported only by the weak wooden railing on the edge. They creak and moan as his great-niece screams his name and reaches for his hand to pull him back up. It's far too late as he pitches over the edge and she almost follows, only caught by the neck of her 'Double-cross' sweater. It cuts off her breathing, her face contorts from asphyxiation, and she thrashes in vain.
Below her, the boy cries out to get the character's attention. He stops attacking the water-tower long enough to throw a fireball at the boy.
The smell of burnt flesh fills the air and its all the teenager can do to not vomit. The scent is noxious and heavy, settling in his nose like a reminder that he won—but he is going to die. A Pyrrhic victory as he drops from the tower when it falls, crushing him underneath a metric ton of water, wood, and metal piping.
GAME OVER, YOU WIN! The mysterious announcer praises the game character, feeding his oversized ego more. That is, until he, too, starts to disappear; his image degenerating into square pixels. He screams loudly, lamenting his—however brief—existence in the third dimension. All that remains of his legacy are the charred remains of a boy, a man laying impaled upon a tree, the purple-faced corpse of a young girl, and the rubble of a water-tower, beneath which rests the body of an unfortunately jerky teenager.
Somewhere, a figure skater falls on his rear in the middle of his routine; sometimes, a mother breaks a plate on the floor, swearing angrily at her stupidity; somehow, the television set in front of a man blurs for only a minute before it decides to behave again.
The wax figure lowers the blade before him, severing the boy's head from his neck. Blood spurts everywhere, coating the normally-inanimate figure in the crimson fluid. He smiles wickedly and heads back to his companions, head in hand.
They greet him with glee, the melted face of one of them twisting in a snarl as he turns the spit over the fire. The boy's sister is burning there, brown hair long gone and skin flaking away. It's a righteous revenge for the malformed mannequin, to burn those that burned him, and he enjoys it. An eye for an eye.
Somewhere, the hand of a statue snaps off; sometimes, a bird hits the windshield of a car, splattering across the glass; somehow, the meta-dial-up signal settles long enough to show the next horrific scene.
A merman smiles sweetly at the girl, all Spanish charm and rouge looks, and grins. She agrees to help him, to get him out of the pool and back to his family and that pleases him; no one has ever offered to help him before!
Her brother suspiciously patrols the pool outcropping later that night, waiting and watching for someone to put a toe out of line. He confronts his Grunkle as he attempts to—and succeeds in—sneaking in to reserve 'his' seat at the pool. As he is dealing with the unruly elder, his sister backs the Mystery Cart in and retrieves the merman.
Alas, she is noticed and, as she flees from her obsessively strict twin, is part of a high-speed (for recreational vehicles) chase.
She swerves as she reaches the lake, pitching over and flying to the ground. Her head and hands scrape the dirt and rocks beneath her, tearing off a layer of the epidermis. She crawls towards the lake, dragging the cooler behind her. Inside, the merman sloshes around and gasps as his water-supply slowly diminishes. She continues pushing it towards the water's edge despite the pain in her hands and knees. Tears spring to her eyes but she manages to heave the merman out of the cooler and into the water with a strained grunt. Her brother gapes, flabbergasted at the fact that she was harbouring a merman of all things. He apologises softly, gathers his stuff, and leaves as she weeps over her lost love.
The merman calls from the water, charming grin set on full lips. He beckons her and she moves toward him as if she were in a dream. His siren's song lulls her and she walks into the water, deeper and deeper in until her feet can no longer touch and she is bobbing gently in the waves. She sighs as he wraps his arms around her waist and plants a deep kiss on her lips. Then, with a sadistic chuckle, he drags her underneath the water.
She struggles as best she can, thrashing against her captor's deceptively strong arms to no avail. He whispers in her ear that everything will be alright. She will join him in the cycle of life, he says. It is in the nature of humans to fall prey to greater predators; the mer-people are one of those predators. As he tells her of what her death will bring him, the life leaves her body with the last of her air. His grin becomes feral and his jaw unhinges as he bites into the flesh of the girl who risked everything to save him. Within five minutes, there is nothing left of the brown-haired girl save for a bloodstained hairband and some bathing-suit scraps. Her brother does not find out until the police come to his door asking questions about her. He weeps and screams at his loss.
Somewhere, a woman kisses her lover's dead lips; sometimes the last words of a villain can be humorous; somehow, the man gets a phone call in the middle of the transition to the next clip and all he sees is a triangle wearing a top hat before the picture dissolves into snow.
He answers the call—a lowly Realtor selling Gated community property—and politely tells him to fuck off. Politely.
When he returns to the de-fuzzed television set, the picture no longer features the pyramid-man, but the twins and the blond-haired boy again.
The blond towers over the brunettes with manic glee evident in his baby-blue eyes. A pudgy hand scoops them from the ground they rest upon and deposits them in a jar. As he takes the bus home, he contemplates what all he is going to do with the twins now that he has them in his grasp. The boy? He is worthless. Painfully torturing him and killing him in the end seems like it would be a good use of his power. As for the girl...his precious marshmella' would be a queen—provided she does as he says.
When he finally reaches home—a gaudy place with his daddy's used-car dealership in front—he storms past his neurotic mother and into his room on the second floor. He upends the jar and leers down at the miniature twins. "You'll do as I say or you'll pay...," he threatens.
The male refuses but that's okay 'cause his death was imminent anyway. The blond grabs him up in a meaty fist and squeezes, ever so slowly increasing the pressure, until the boy screams and blood spurts from every orifice. With his life spent, the boy slumps over in the blond's hand as his blood drip-drip-drips on to the girl below.
She screams, calling the blond all sorts of names and slurs until her throat is raw and she cannot cry any more. When he attempts to pick her up, she bites the blond and claws up his hand.
"It's understandable," he reasons, "what happened to your brother. He disobeyed me, so he had to die. You, on the other hand," he purrs as he tries to stroke her hair (she bites him again), "you'll listen to me, won'tcha?"
"Never," she rebukes. "I will never do anything you tell me to! You're sick! That was my brother and you killed him!"
"Now, now," he tries to placate her, "no need to be rash." But she is unstoppable in her fury. She calls him every name she can think of—and some she made up—and rebukes him at every turn. When he tries to reason with her she lashes out with tenfold fury and so on and so forth until he cannot take it any more. Tears streak down his face, angry tears that leave red welt-like lines on his cheeks as he screams at her with all his might.
"Fine," he yells, "if I can't have you, no one can!" And his pudgy fist comes down like a gavel upon her tiny head. There is little resistance given as her bones snap like toothpicks and she splatters across his desk like a bug. Clad in fury he wipes her remains from the front of his perfect suit and sighs. Well, he consoles himself through the ever-present cloud of red rage, soon that damned man will wonder where they went and then...well, the police will have no evidence. They'll think he did it! And then I'll get the Shack by default! I still win!
A bittersweet victory to say the least, but one the blond can live with.
Somewhere, a chip in the cornerstone of a building turns into the crack that fells the whole place; sometimes, the fire station burns down; somehow, the man gets distracted by the doorbell.
As he leaves to answer it, a series of images flicker across the television screen like an EVP. The brunet boy with a hole in his chest bleeding to death; the brunette girl, grotesquely deformed, sliced in half by a brilliant scarlet laser; the pudgy man being gored by a British dog-man; the pyramid man laughing manically; the blond boy laughing at the flattened corpse of his enemy; the blond's eyes glowing a bright cyan as an eye opens in the middle of his forehead; a shooting star; a pine tree; a question mark; a pair of thick-framed glasses; a six-fingered hand. When the man returns from his fools errand—a Jehovah's Witness (ironic considering his current state of non-living)—the screen is back to showing another scene.
It is the boy, without his sister for a change, surrounded by a hoard of manotaurs. They roar at him, demanding to know why he returned without the head of their multi-headed foe. "You are not a man," they scream at the near-naked boy, "you are not one of us!"
He tries to explain to them why he didn't complete his given task but his excuses fall on deaf ears. The manotaurs' leader pins the boy down with an enormous hand. He lets out a frightened squeak as the leader bends close to his ear and whispers, if you are not a man then there is only one thing you are good for.
"Procreate! Procreate! Procreate!" The chant is taken up by the manotaur mob as their leader none-too-delicately rips the loincloth off the boy and positions him for his punishment.
It is rough as the manotaur leader shoves in without warning. The boy cries out as he is violated by the large monster. When the leader is done, each individual manotaur has his way with the boy, raping him until he is bleeding profusely from the abuse. As the last manotaur finishes, the chant of procreate dies down as well. Hiccoughing loudly, the boy heaves himself upright and staggers off towards the woods—not home he can never go home now—manotaur spawn already developing in his engorged stomach. The manotaurs lose interest in their conquered foe and go back to doing manly things.
A week later the search for the missing boy ends when they find his body swinging from a tree, his lower half torn apart as if an animal forced its way out of his anus. His sister cuts her hair and wears his hat in mourning. Through her hysterical sobs she says, "see? No one can tell the difference! Me. You. Who knows? It's a mystery!"
Somewhere, a woman gives birth to the end of the world; sometimes, the hunter becomes the prey; somehow, the television set fuzzes up again, this time on command.
As the man's finger lifts from the pause button he sighs heavily and stands up once more. He heads into his kitchen and opens a bag of golden tortilla chips and a can of chunky salsa, then sits back down in the living room with his snack in hand. He un-pauses the television, watching the scene unfold before him.
The boy and girl are freaking out. They are no longer themselves because they have switched bodies due to the magical—or perhaps scientific—properties of a carpet they found in an abandoned room in the Shack. The female now is dealing with a part she didn't have before and the male is dealing with the sudden lack of that part. In their hysteria she empties her guts and he rocks back and forth in a corner all the while praying that their sudden change is only a fevered dream.
When their mania subsides, they come up with the reasonable plan to pretend to be each other—for the time being. They go about their day as normally as possible as the body-swapped twins imitate each other to a caricatured tee in attempts to earn the new room for themselves—or rather their original bodies—by sabotaging their—each other's—chances to win. Alas, they do not account for the unforeseen circumstances that hinder their goal of switching back.
The girl-now-boy can only scream in horror as she finds out that her great uncle threw the carpet away. They are stuck. What is she to tell her brother?
Her brother-now-sister is equally horrified. How are they to keep up their façade? He will never get to be himself again! And to top it off, he'a pretty sure the girl he likes is into guys instead of other girls. He laments the loudest.
The girl-boy takes it hard as well. She already had her mental chastity taken from her by her well-meaning Grunkle, but now her body was out of her reach. The blade is her only companion as she sits in a tub of warm water. Her brother-sister finds her dead and breaks into little pieces.
They say it'll be all right to him. They say that 'her' 'brother' is in a better place now. They are liars.
Weeks pass and his parents, for they will no longer allow him to visit the 'neglectful man that allowed the death of our precious boy', notice something strange in his behaviour. Sometimes he is himself, cynical, obsessive, and geeky. Other times he is her, bubbly, optimistic, and artistic. The shifts are sudden and do not follow a pattern. He wears his hat and her sweaters. He makes more and more of those precious tops until his fingers bleed and he gets no sleep because of it. His parents worry for their 'daughter'.
"Grief," they say as they look at the boy-now-girl's body swinging from a rope of bloodstained yarn, "took this child. No one should live without their other half."
The parents just weep.
Somewhere, a person's heartbeat ceases and their soulmate can feel it deep within them; sometimes, the Fates cry as they weave the Fabric of Space-Time; somehow, the picture blurs again. Tears stream down the man's face as he laments the children's existences. Why, oh why couldn't they live better lives?! Why is there not one happy ending in the entire batch? Are all these Cycles for naught?!
He smears the saline fluid away with a hiccough and continues to watch the set before him, carefully nurturing the small seed of Hope within himself.
The twins are cornered by the police in a dank room full of national secrets. Behind them is a man, so mad he was brilliant, encased in a large block of peanut-brittle.
The sheriff warns them not to take a step out of line. They are to come quietly and not resist. They are going to live the rest of their lives in seclusion under government surveillance due to the dangerous information they stumbled upon.
The boy cringes as his sister shouts out in anger. "How dare you infringe upon our most basic human rights?! You can't just take our freedom away! Besides," she takes a step forward and there is a sharp crack and the smell of gunpowder. She never finishes her sentence.
Blood trickles steadily from the bullet wound in her abdomen. The sheriff's gun is raised and still smoking from the shot he had fired into the girl's chest. The boy screams.
He leaps forward, wrestles the gun from the stunned sheriff's grip, and points it at the fat man's forehead. "You killed her," he shrieks. "She's dead and it's all your fault!"
The sheriff tries to reason with the boy, stammering through an apology as his deputy clumsily fumbles with his own handgun. "I'm truly sorry," he insists. "I didn't mean to shoot your sister!"
"Lies!" The boy retaliates from the other end of the gun, "you told us not to move! You had the gun! Your finger was on the trigger! You meant to shoot her!"
"Sometimes," the sheriff says, advancing towards the boy ever-so-slowly, "people make mistakes."
"Then," the boy sobs, "I'm sorry." He squeezes the trigger and the sheriff cries out.
The deputy keels over, a lucky—or perhaps unlucky—shot in his temple weeping his life away. The sheriff rushes over to him and cradles the thin man in his arms. "Don't...please don't go..."
Too late though, the deputy has already been brought to the afterlife in the hands of intense brain trauma.. The sheriff grabs his subordinate—and possible lover's—weapon and lets out a torrential scream. Once, twice, thrice, he fires. In his rage he is no better a marksman than the untrained child; only one of his shots hits its mark.
The boy falls, his world moving in slow-motion as his entire body recoils from the force of the bullet lodged deep within his right arm. (The arm that last held his sister's hand while she still lived.) He is not dead for the wound is not mortal, but he is injured, and never before has he felt physical pain of this magnitude.
He drops the gun. Another shot sounds. He goes limp.
Tears fall from the boy's eyes as he drops like a sack of wet concrete. Down, down, down. His fall isn't graceful nor is it tragic. It's merely a fact of life. He is shot; he is falling; he cannot control his legs; he cannot support himself; he is dying; it is all that man's fault.
That man, the Sheriff, cries as well, hands holding the gun that shot the boy. He shoots again and again and again until his clip is empty and the striker clicks against the bullet chamber with each desperate pull of the trigger. Soon he is the only living man in the room and he cannot contain his grief at this fact. He collapses. He weeps.
Somewhere, another bullet ends another life before its prime; sometimes, a woman screams in fury as her mistress is taken away; somehow, the picture dissolves into streams of white and black snow. The man, wiping tears away from his reddened cheeks, realises he is sitting on the remote, and stands up to rectify that issue.
As he shoves his hands deep into the cushions and fishes through the sea of crumbs and lint for the elusive remote, he mutters to himself. Is that all there is for them, he wonders, this pain and suffering? Why can't they be happy? What would it take?
When he finds the remote and adjusts the channel back to what it needs to be, he settles back on his seat, pleading with his god that it turns out all right.
The picture shows the twins in costumes, dressed from head to toe in facsimiles of the grim reaper. They are sneaking softly, quietly past a large monster made of candy, followed by the man-child in a gorilla suit and the girl's two friends. Quietly they tiptoe past the creature as it searches for them. Quietly they make their way to the door, but they are without one person.
The man-child stands at a line of talking plastic skulls, hand poised to press down and listen to its levity-bringing quips. The children call out softly to him, trying to get him stop, but is to no avail. His hand descends and the skull lets out a raucous cackle and tells a terrible Summerween joke.
The monster sights them then, peppermint eyes squinting and liquorice mouth set to baring candy-corn fangs. It hisses and grabs them up one after the other in its many hands. With a swift gulp, it devours the boy and his sister. Her friends shriek and howl in protest, but all it does is irritate the monster.
It twists and pulls the larger of the girls like taffy, stretching and pulling until her bones dislocate and her muscles and ligaments tear. When she falls limp, it slurps her down like a noodle.
The man-child is drawn and quartered, pulled apart like a Christmas cracker, and crunched into pulp by its sharp saccharine fangs.
That leaves the remaining girl. She reeks of piss and tears at this point, so unable to think that she stammers out gibberish instead of pleading for her life. Disgusted with the state of her, the monster doesn't even bother playing with her. Instead it swallows her whole, trying to not get any piss on its taffy tongue.
Revenge exacted, it burps loudly and pats its stomach, shifting back to its lanky "everyday" form. Woe be to anyone who crosses paths with that beast, lest they offend the mighty spirit.
Somewhere, a child is hit by a car, taken before her prime; sometimes, a hair-dryer takes a bath with its master; somehow, the man is getting more angry than sad as the images change once again.
Now the TV shows the twins, looking startled, as a large man swears revenge. "I'll make it so your parents never meet, and you never come into being!" He screams as he is carted away by the two large, musclebound goons.
They do not heed his warning. They begin to forget.
First it is their names. Who are they? Who were they? Where do they belong? Do they belong? Everyone they were sure knew them doesn't know them and if they do not know their own names, how will people be able to help them?
Next it is their favourite things. Did the boy like trees? Is that why he wears that cap? Does the girl like meteorology? Her sweater suggests she does. Are they friends? Are they lovers? They're twins aren't they? Then when is their birthday?
He begins to fade first; he goes fuzzy around the edges then translucent then transparent then gone. She cries, but doesn't know why. Why is she sad? Was there someone next to her? Where is her family? Does she have a brother? Who is she? Why is she fading? Where is she going? Who did this? And she is gone.
The man got his revenge, they were never born. With their undoing undid everything they had done in that town—every time they had saved the town from one destruction or another—and soon the future he was from became an even more desolate wasteland and he was to blame.
If only if only...
Somewhere, a clock gear slips and a second passes by uncounted; sometimes, a dictator writes down the wrong phrase and history is written wrong; somehow, the man is no worse off than before.
Nonexistence, he determines, is a better fate than some of the other Cycles. He settles back in his seat and waits to see what the next Cycle brings, weary and wary.
The static parts to show the twins, their elder relative, and their portly friend, a pig in tow, running from a large flying reptile of old. Something that should have died out long ago but somehow survived. The boy screams at the portly man that he is sorry for calling him useless and that he shouldn't have. The girl cries out to the elder that she forgives him. They cry. They know they have no chance at escape; their only hope lies fifty feet above them, with no way of reaching it. The flying dinosaur comes closer; their fate is sealed.
It is not cruel to them when it takes their lives. Instead, it is quick and precise, severing the proper parts and dragging their limp corpses one-by-one back to its nest. There it feeds its young with the remains of the four humans and singular porcine being. Its young feeds off of their corpses and grows strong.
Soon the rest of the prehistoric group are free of their amber prison and wreak havoc on the upper world of the present. The small Oregon town falls to shambles and the rest of the state does the same. Then the entirety of the United States is overrun with the prehistoric lizards. There is no hope. There never was.
Somewhere, a scientist falls victim to her own experiment; sometimes the subject is a victim; somehow the man finds that Cycle to be more pleasurable than most. While, he reasons with himself, death is not the preferred outcome; to die to bring about new life is just as wonderful as not existing in the first place. It is a mere few seconds before the next Cycle appears on-screen.
The girl kicks and screams as the mechanical mockery of her most hated enemy lifts her high in the air. The mech swings one metal fist and slams her brother against a pine tree some ways away. She howls louder, verbally reaming apart the portly boy inside the machine until his anger gets the better of him.
"You will listen to me and you will become my queen!" He demands, not noticing the girl's battered brother running forward to leap onto her metal subjugator. Just as the young boy is about to land on the mech, the portly blond turns and allows him—without meaning to—to smash his way through the robot's eye.
The brother punches the blond in the eye, mirroring the shattered entrance he made, pushing gals further into his small fists. "That," he shouts, "is for my sister! And this," he swings again, catching the pudgy boy in the gut, "is for the Shack!"
They scuffle; sometimes the boy is winning and sometimes it is their nemesis. The robot, mirroring their enemy's actions, swings wildly and accidentally smashes the girl against the cliff face. Blood trickles from her lips and the back of her head. Her passing is quiet and goes unnoticed.
As the fight climaxes, the blond boy having the upper hand, taunting his foe with cheap shots and barbed words, something goes wrong. One foot is misplaced and the robot they are in tumbles off of the railroad tracks that supported them hundreds of feet in the air. They fall downward, free-fall rendering them weightless. The boy remembers his sister and cries out for her but the shock of falling loosed the blond's grip and she is gone. He thinks it is the blond's fault that his sister is dead. They share the blame.
It is mere seconds before the robot crumples to the ground in a heap of metal and glass. It burst into flames and soon the rubble was smoking ash. If one looked close enough, however, one could see scorched bloodstains on the remains and two small skeletons locked in eternal battle. A tragic scene. One of the boys is a scapegoat, the other an angel. Take a wild guess as to who filled which role.
Somewhere, and angel gets its wings ripped from its body as it plummets to the depths of Hell; somehow, the automaton uprising is prevented by a paradox; sometimes, the man with the eye in his forehead swears that this isn't what he wants.
He just wants to try his hand at something new. Something, far more difficult than just passively watching the Cycles of others pass. He sighs and watches the screen as the next Cycle comes into view.
They are not violent in nature but when their creator insists on them doing something, they must do it. The girl and her friends fall back as the blond clones attack them. That they are children is no matter to their master. He just needs them to keep their secret safe. No one can know.
Sometimes, a Blu-ray disk is scratched and the climax is skipped; somewhere, someone is crying over spilled milk; somehow, there is no interruption between this Cycle and the next.
They gang up on him. Sure, they are him, but they are Legion and they are strong and they are furious. They all want their turn with her. "Why should you be the only one of us to get her?" One cries.
"We deserve it as much as you do!" Another adds.
A third just hisses and spits, garbled language falling from its imperfect lips.
"Because she isn't an object," the original cries, pushed against a wall and frightened. He knows they outnumber and outclass him. He knows he's in trouble. He still can't help but feel outraged on her behalf. "She is a person and she gets to choose who she da-hangs out with!" He stammers over the embarrassing part, unsure if anyone other than his clones can hear him.
Even if anyone else can hear him, they do not assist as the clones overwhelm the boy. He is buried under a pile of bodies, five in total, as they batter him down. Their numbers give them the advantage and they trap and imprison their creator. They lock him away (no point in getting rid of the original if they are expendable enough to die from liquid contact) and take over his life. No one is the wiser.
Somehow, a man sneezes hard enough to pop his eyeballs out; sometimes, a second opinion is wrong as hell; somewhere, the man knows there is a Greater Good laughing at him.
Creation is hard. To breathe life to these people only to watch them die again and again and again, as if their only fate in the Cycles of Life is to perish. He laments that he cannot have a more direct hand in things, that he cannot bring them the joy they deserve. Then he realises that his internal lamenting has caused him to miss half of the next Cycle, which oddly went off without a hitch.
The corpse of the teenager and the man child litter the ground in pieces, picked clean by the monster the boy brought to their place of employment. The beast is toying with the remaining workers, the boy and his twin sister. They hide, breath ragged and hearts pumping while they wait for their inevitable demise. Not only is the creature strong and violent, but through miscommunication, it has gained even more strength, on top of the ability to exhale fire. It is a terrifying creature. The twins aren't sure how much longer they can last.
The answer is: not much longer.
The girl exhales sharply after holding in her breath for so long. It's all her fault! If she hadn't given that thing the key to its cage, they wouldn't be in this mess! tears prick her eyes and her nose begins to run slightly as her emotions catch up with her. Her brother tires to calm her down but it's hard to do that when you're trying to be quiet for fear of dying. Too late he manages to calm her down. The monster knows where they are and heads to their position. It lifts the large piece of furniture they have been hiding behind and tosses it away with little effort. It lifts the two children to eye-level, where it plans to savor its victory before the finishing blow. It's eyes glow ominously and it funnels all its mysterious energy into its hidden talent: showing someone their worst nightmare.
The twins see each and every last one of their Cycles flash before their eyes. They see their parents cry over their corpses or their gravestones multiple times. They see their friends dead, their family dead, their sibling dead. They break and this makes them so much sweeter than before.
It devours them without a second thought. A wonderful dessert.
Somewhere, a man is run over by an ambulance; somehow, the writer physically battles their demons; sometimes, the man feels as though it is not worth a damn in the end.
Why? Why bother? What good will come of these multitudes of Cycles?
Then it hits him. He can make a trade. His eternal existence for a happy Cycle for these kids! The man grins, face splitting in joy and wonder. Why didn't he think about this before? What a brilliant idea!
He sits down at his desk, the same desk where he created them in the first place, and pulls out a golden quill. Dipping it in an inkwell of blood, He begins to write on the parchment laid before him.
My name is Dipper. The girl about to puke is my sister Mabel. You may be wondering what we're doing in a golf cart, fleeing from a creature of unimaginable horror. Rest assured, there's a perfectly logical explanation.
Somehow, he gets through it all, despite the pain he is putting himself through; somewhere, a man awakes with an idea so brilliant it's mad; sometimes selling your soul is a good idea.