Author's Note:
Hi all, welcome back! This is the final chapter before the finale chapters, so you could say I've been looking forward to finally getting here.
Heads up: I've changed telepathic thoughts to 'quotations like this' to make them stand out from the text more, since there's quite a bit of that in this chapter and I needed to make it easier on the eyes.
See you on the other side!
Layman Scripts
A fanfic by Pseudinymous
~ 29 ~
- Screaming into the Void -
Jazz had never liked telling lies.
The Ghostwriter and Randy were working on a Plan. They sat next to each other poring over a large sheet of paper, something that might have put you in mind of a complicated blueprint had either of them actually been engineers. To Jazz it might as well have been in Arabic, but she thought she might be able to understand it better by sidewaysing her way into Writer's thoughts.
What a nice idea for a perfect, ideal world.
Unfortunately, Jazz's closest interpretation of this incomprehensible plan was that it was rather like staring into the mathematics of a Picasso painting, except the numbers were missing and the Lady depicted inside was judging you from angles that didn't even exist. It smacked of physics barely graced by mortals, and after getting that far she decided to quit while she was ahead.
… But she didn't much like feeling useless, either. And in the end, as she trudged out of the room those two were using as a study, wasn't uselessness a far more heinous deed than lying? Uselessness was the reason she'd had both of her arms broken. Uselessness was the reason she'd been left to lie helpless on the floor.
Uselessness was the reason her brother had been kidnapped.
She had a responsibility to Danny, and it was this knowledge that let her steel herself against the potential repercussions of her own actions — she was his elder sister and it was her duty to do everything she could to save him, all other things becoming secondary. And she wasn't going to be able to do any of that by simply sitting and waiting as had been suggested.
Jazz slowly rounded the corner.
Her first instinct was to creep through the library in the shadows, but she soon realised this in and of itself would produce the sound of guilt: instead she opted for a shockingly normal waltz across the living area, not even registering the ectoplasm she had stained across the floorboards during her scuffle with Technus. The Script of Sin and Grace sat unassumingly upon a side table next to the couch, waiting for her.
This… this was it, wasn't it?
… Every shred of morality, sympathy, empathy… gone and replaced by an inner tranquility that could compel the victim to achieve anything without guilt. In equal parts it seemed a temptation as much as a waking nightmare — without limits like that, maybe her goals would be within her grasp, perhaps she wouldn't be so held back. But what of her values, her inhibitions, the things she strived for? If she touched this, would she lose herself too? Would she lose the very will to do good?
… What if she became hedonistic and gave in to the promised feeling of calm? Would she even care about Danny anymore?
Gracing that parchment with her fingers alone would be akin to playing with fire. But stealing it and hiding it away for later would be too obvious — the Ghostwriter was sure to find out and try to stop her. When she thought about him her insides squirmed — he cared too much, and he was far too scared of losing someone he was only barely getting to know. It was a given he'd react poorly even at the first hint of what she was doing.
As Jazz gazed levelly at this thing, it took on its own sinister aura. The Script of Truth and Lies had been a slow uptake of potent telepathic ability, while the Script of Cause and Effect had flooded her system in an instant of a second. How long would she have before this one worked its way in? Writer was still the only thing between her and the negative effects of the other two scripts. To accept that she might have to tell him eventually was to accept this raw deal for what it was — a hand full of absolute junk, where the stakes were high and good decisions no longer made sense.
… She was being slow, giving away too much time to her thoughts. A bit horrified at her own inaction, she listened carefully for the minds of those two brothers and found them still hard at work. But then, just as she was making a mental promise to herself to tell the Ghostwriter should the softer aspects of her character begin to fade, just as she swallowed and was reaching out above the table in this empty room, she realised it was far from empty at all.
Jazz's head snapped around like a cat that'd just been caught trying to push mother's high china off the mantle, her hand still hovering in the act above the parchment. The ghost had concealed herself within the shadows between bookshelves, something Jazz had not thought to check for because she was sure Mira had gone to bed. She had not.
'You don't want him to know, do you?' thought Mira, sliding out into the open.
Just how had she done that? Her thoughts were surprisingly difficult to avoid, almost as if she'd managed the feat of telepathy herself. In fact she hadn't, but years of trying to scream out to people using her mind alone could result in some strange effects when an actual telepath was in the room. Jazz's mouth hung open, but there was an advantage to this — Mira had chosen a method of communication that wouldn't be overheard.
'… Are you going to stop me?' asked Jazz, sending her thoughts clear and sharp into the ghost's mind. Mira's gaze fell guiltily until she managed to shake her head. 'Why not?'
Now unhidden, Mira rounded the couch and settled down in front of the side table next to Jazz, her legs crossed on the floor and her head eye level with the fated Script itself. 'You're going to try to kill her, aren't you?'
Jazz didn't want to answer, but the odd gazing expression coupled with those wide curious eyes demanded it
'Once she's gone, it won't matter. The power will go away and I'll be fine. That's what the old books say.'
Mira hesitated before her reply. '… But,' she managed. 'I don't think the Sorceress has ever been killed before.'
Mira seemed to have an inflection in her thoughts that she hadn't ever quite managed in speech, at least in Jazz's experience; perhaps after everything that happened her mind was simply working better than her mouth. That would imply the reason she was thinking instead of talking might be two-fold: not only would she not be overhead, she also wouldn't have to struggle through the effort of speaking.
… Jazz had an odd aside, here, where she found it interesting to note that ghosts could clam up like that at all. Jazz had always assumed clamming up was like a kind of speech centre malfunction, but ghosts literally didn't have brains. At least theoretically their processing centres were hidden within their cores, maybe their souls — and yet something so esoteric could also be prone to such mundane malfunction?
But she'd seen the Ghostwriter trip over himself like this as well. It was hardly a stretch of the imagination that a human equivalent of the flashbacks he'd experienced might be described as PTSD.
On another note entirely, Randy had said that ghosts were born of their own obsessions. Did that mean there was potentially much less mental difference between human and ghost than she'd ever thought? Could it be true that their minds really were an exact parallel of their human selves, even the psychological flaws fuelled by hormones and all?
Jazz kept her eyes closely trained on Mira as she filed the information away for later. 'I'm willing to take this risk to save my brother,' she thought, carefully. 'Worse comes to worse, Writer will have to fix me afterwards.'
'But that's not the worst thing that could happen,' said Mira, and she steadfastly refused to expand on such a dangerous-sounding idea. 'I'm scared for you.'
Jazz shook her head. 'You don't need to be. You don't even know me.'
'But you still helped me.'
Jazz decided not to broadcast the fact that largely she had helped Mira because her possessed doppelgänger was probably going to attempt murder, but at the end of the day everyone's entitled to their secrets. Instead, her eyes wandered off from both the Script and from Mira. 'You're welcome.'
It took a moment, but after some contemplation the ghost very quietly slipped around to the table, reaching out to Jazz. That strange fluid way she moved still stunned her a little, just as it stunned everyone else, and when her hand fell upon Jazz's shoulder there was no way she could have avoided listening. Thoughts ran through that ghost like liquid and offered themselves up with crystal clarity, so much so that Jazz felt as if she could almost see them.
'About saving people, I know a little,' she said. 'If you think you still have a chance left, then you should follow it all the way to the light. And if the light goes out, then you should run away as fast as you can.'
They both stared at each other, trying to read further in. And then, Mira vanished.
The air was heavy. Mira had left it that way, somehow, like a strange sorrowful Cheshire Cat who couldn't manage its wicked smile. Jazz could feel the weight of an important decision for which there was no right answer, and it seemed as though even Mira herself hadn't been sure about what she'd been saying. As for why she'd disappeared — perhaps she'd teleported to some other part of the library to protect a secret, or some other piece of information she didn't fancy making public. Or even more likely, perhaps she just wasn't strong enough to continue.
Whatever the reason, it barely mattered. Mira probably wasn't with it enough right now, nor wise enough, to be taking advice from. Their conversation had clarified little
… But somehow, as her thoughts swirled around her head, Jazz felt oddly more alive and courageous after talking to her. Her gaze slid back to the script.
… Why shouldn't she, when there was no other correct answer?
With a deep breath in, Jazz took it between her fingers and listened to the energies it hid just below its papery fibres. Wasn't it funny how, as she picked it up, she felt almost as if she could make out the invisible words hidden to everyone but the ghosts themselves?
Wasn't it funny how emboldened she became as she grabbed the parchment, willing it to take her faster…
The Ghostwriter thought he noticed a change in the air, but made the mistake of deciding it wasn't the Sorceress and therefore unimportant.
"Your comrade might be right," said Randy, cutting through any minute section of distraction Writer may have had. "If the Sorceress really is a ghost that takes advantage of higher dimensional space as her primary ability, then it would explain many of the other abilities she has that seem excessive or inexplicable otherwise. It's not to be taken lightly."
"I'll be fine," muttered the Ghostwriter, who was used to Randy by now and had an idea of what he was trying to obtusely express. "It's a matter of whether I can think faster than she can act, isn't it?"
"I think it's more than that. Much more than that."
"On what sort of scale were you thinking?"
Randy gave a long, almost rattling sigh as he gestured vaguely at the image below his fingertips. "How much of an affinity does she have with the dimensions above? What kinds of changes can you make in a higher dimension without effectively destroying parts of the dimensions below? In the end theories are useless for this purpose — we're three dimensional beings with three dimensional senses who can understand only what we live in, and to an extent those below and the universes parallel. This brings us even more questions: to what extent can you know about the higher dimensions, and to what extent can you change them? Is her mind somehow able to process higher dimensional planes and objects, or is she merely able to abuse them in a simplistic way? I don't even want to think about the matters of energy use, because jumping through this and that uses energy on a scale of the Earth's sun, which she's apparently getting from the ghost cores she's torn open and absorbed." The ghost paused a moment to think, his eyebrows grouping together uncomfortably as he massaged his temples with his free hand. "It's beyond horrifying to contemplate."
… He wasn't joking. This was significant, and not because Randy's power effectively locked him out of making lie-based jokes, but because he'd just left so many variable open and flapping in the wind. He was never one to leave out information, especially if that information could make him feel more important or intelligent than someone else, so by this standard their omission was glaring.
Other parts of that speech, however, made the Ghostwriter even more uneasy, because it was through this that he realised very quickly he could not hope to properly comprehend higher dimensional space. Even as he wished for a mind and the senses to cope, even as his core started to roar to life in the hope of making this desire true, he found it did nothing. He was no more or less able to imagine a world in five dimensions than when he started.
"Figures," said Randy, followed by a short stiff laugh so morbid it would've been out of place at a funeral. "Either the higher planes simply don't exist, or your powers dwell in three dimensions only. Between you and I, my money's on the latter."
This… something wasn't right.
The Ghostwriter had been a ghost, a pleasantly feared ghost, for a number of decades now. He had gained his power and watched it grow rapidly in scale until the very fabric of space would bend to his smallest whims, all because he typed out the instructions on a keyboard. It didn't matter that he didn't use it often — the rumours spread anyway, and it wasn't long before most ghosts had heard of his power, looked at the enormous scale of the lair he'd accidentally generated, and run away as if this made him some sort of terrifying monster. He could have done anything.
… Being told there was something he couldn't do — nay, something that was beyond him entirely — that felt startlingly like a bizarre fever dream, where suddenly the world had stopped making sense and there was something perpetually scary even in the absence of anything that should cause fright.
"… What makes you so sure higher dimensions exist if I can't picture them?" said the Ghostwriter, after a moment.
"Easy: all of the parallel ones," said Randy, who waved his hand as though it were obvious. "Though I suppose dimension isn't the correct word for them. Disregarding the semantics, the Real World and even the Abyss have to connect to our world through something else, and our best guess and only culprit are mechanisms in the dimensions above. Without them, both would be totally inaccessible and separated from each other, and probably couldn't even exist in the first place. Without a higher dimension to keep them joined, there wouldn't be any space to move through if you tried to cross."
The Ghostwriter began to pace. At first it was because he was simply stretching his legs, but this soon became because his entire situation suddenly felt much more uncomfortable than it ever had before. He'd effectively been thrown out by jurisdiction — even the walls and all of the books stacked into them felt uncharacteristically as though they were laughing.
Fool! they would jeer. You thought no one could match you? What kind of arrogance is that?
… Jurisdiction. Jurisdiction. For some reason that word stuck fast in Writer's head, zipping about from ear to ear and trying to grab his attention. There were a number of things the Ghostwriter had always seen as beyond his jurisdiction: life, death, and most aspects of the flow of time. Time was an interesting one because although he could freeze it, he rather suspected this type of freeze had much more to do with everything simply stopping rather than time itself coming to a halt. Going to the past or the future, however, that was something Clockwork regarded as sin. Feeling bold, the Ghostwriter had tried once or twice. It had never worked. Was that perhaps more to do with Clockwork actively defending his own domain?
… Life and death, too, were represented by other beings thought to be gods, rarely seen in the real but witnessed all the time. There was no logical reason the Ghostwriter had these limitations at all, so it was only natural that he might feel as if he'd been barred by those unfathomably powerful entities themselves.
What did that make the Sorceress?
Was it possible that she held jurisdiction on the dimensions above, rendering them inaccessible and incomprehensible even to him? Was it possible that she, too, was a type of Guardian?
Even more importantly, if she were to become somehow compromised, would it be possible for her to lose her grip?
"You're thinking about something," said Randy, slowly. "What might that be?"
The Ghostwriter finally stopped his pacing and dropped his gaze directly into the scarlet red eyes of his brother. "What if it's not a limitation? What if the Sorceress herself is somehow denying me access?"
Randy scoffed. "Under what pretext?"
"Well, if Clockwork protects the timestream from me, and other concepts that have entities attached to them are barred too, wouldn't it make sense? Otherwise I would've—" he stopped with a lurch, suddenly realising what he was about admit to. "It feels like that," he finished, lamely.
Randy politely said nothing, but it was clear from the odd crooked expression near his mouth that he'd been careful to read the subtext.
"Anyway, it's something…" the Ghostwriter muttered, trailing off. "Might be an avenue worth exploring."
"At your own risk, John," said Randy, after a moment. "Until then, you might have better luck manipulating the dimensions you actually know."
There was something oddly comforting about biding one's time, but in a situation like this it also caused acute streaks of anxiety.
Randy had asked for it. He wanted to try thinking his way through the situation one last time. The Ghostwriter had offered to manipulate reality to make his mind work faster, but Randy had been wary of this, and although he didn't seem to mind having an enormous amount of information jammed into his head in less than a second, he was far less keen on the idea of processing it all in as little time. "Knowledge isn't wisdom," he had said, before sitting down at a worktable and becoming good friends with a pen and countless pieces of paper.
Initially he had arched over his brother's furious scribblings. There was mathematics there that the Ghostwriter couldn't understand, and likely never would.
Feeling a bit like an extra in his own living space, he began to wander through the living room instead. His mind was still sharp in order to detect even the slightest movement from the ghost they were about to attempt to kill, but she was so far frozen in this slice of history that it begged belief she could control any part of any dimension at all. When he took his mind just slightly away from that he started to notice the other things in the world around him. For example, Jazz was sitting half cross-legged, half-leaning on the couch, staring off into space through the window that had its curtains closed. Her eyes eventually tracked him as he moved through the room, but she didn't open her mouth until he sat down.
"When are we going to do this?" she asked, carefully.
In lieu of his heart, he knew in his core that it would have to be soon. There was a sense of careful urgency about her, her words measured and calculated as if she were stealing herself for things to come. It was a horror to him that she was probably reading his own nervous thoughts, but deep inside, he was rather sure she was nervous too.
"Randy's taking his time," said Writer stiffly, debating if he, too, should stare aimlessly into the curtains. "I've learned a lot, but I can't think of anything else."
"So we'll go when he's done, then?"
There was something oddly direct about the way she spoke, but the Ghostwriter gave it the benefit of the doubt. "Yes. We'll go. Are you sure you're still going to come?"
Jazz drummed her fingers on her lap. "I'm probably safer where you can still see me," she admitted, quietly. "Since distance might hardly matter."
He didn't want to explain how true that was. He paused, stuck within this uncomfortable interstice as if he himself was in an odd kind of suspended animation. "—Have you seen Mira?" he asked, after a moment.
"I think she's sleeping."
"Oh."
Something didn't seem right, here.
Maybe it was the way she gazed intently at the fabric of the curtains, something subtle to do with the way she moved, or an odd inflection in her voice he'd never heard before. It set off an unease within him not unlike one encountering the uncanny valley, everything much the same and yet just slightly inhumanly different. His mouth twitched.
"Jasmine," he began, slowly. "Did you touch that script?"
The silence and guilt was palpable. She wouldn't even meet his eyes.
In the end he just couldn't find it within himself to be angry. Instead a deep sadness, kind of like a dark pit from within his stomach, opened up and drained the colour of the things around him. "I shouldn't have left that there," he muttered.
"You shouldn't blame yourself," said Jazz, and there was a bit more emotion in it that time. "I — I was going to do it even if I had to search for it first."
He didn't look at her. "I don't think I can blame you, either," he managed, after a moment, and at once he had her attention. "If I were you, I'd have done it too."
"Would you?"
The Ghostwriter paused. "Probably."
A few minutes passed. Over the course of them, Jazz slowly descended from reasonably well put-together to looking genuinely frightened — her hands trembled as she lifted them up, and her voice refused to stay on exactly the one note.
"If you can't do it, you can't kill her, then just do this: give me the last script."
Horrified, Writer said nothing.
"Promise me!"
The Ghostwriter did something odd — he swallowed, an action so foreign that it felt startling and uncomfortable, and yet he had wanted to be able all the same. "I promise," he managed, voice breaking. "But only — only if the situation is completely out of control. Only if I'm about to… only if our lives are at risk, Jasmine."
"Yeah," she said, with much less fire. "Only then."
With the emotional temperature of the room jumping up and down like this it wasn't long before the writer could stand to sit no longer. He tapped his index finger on the length of the arm not once but twice, then pushed himself out of the chair until he was midway in the air. His hands took on that uncharacteristic tremor as all kinds of thoughts whirled around his head, and finally he looked back to Jazz as if he were completely helpless.
"What did we do to deserve this?" he asked, finally, breath nearly stolen. "I just wanted to live quietly."
"Maybe we just have bad luck," Jazz suggested, quietly. She'd already done all she could do to prepare herself, and now this waiting was the only thing between them and whatever the future held. "I don't think we did anything wrong."
"We didn't accidentally commit some type of heinous sin?"
Jazz's eyes rose slowly to the ceiling. "Who knows? I don't believe in fate, but at least… I think this was always probably going to happen, even before we met each other."
"You're sure?"
"I think you know better than to expect divine retribution."
The Ghostwriter slumped midair. "At least if it were that, there'd be some sort of reason."
Something seemed to change within Jazz, almost as if a part of her was turning off and another part rebooting. Her body language changed; at first by a marked halt in her nervous movements, and at second by the way her muscles suddenly relaxed. At least part of this seemed to be of exhaustion. Writer watched this odd display collapse into itself very much in front of him.
"When this is over, what do you want to do?" Jazz asked, eventually.
The question caught him off-guard. He'd asked the very same thing of her not two nights ago, but he'd never expected to have to answer it himself. He was a ghost! The very definition of a creature of habit! By all means he intended to trudge back to whatever he considered a normal life and settle down into the masses of papers that were his fiction, simply using his imagination to vividly hallucinate until he wasn't sure what real life was anymore. In his mind he hadn't even recalibrated any of this to include Jazz, because he just hadn't had the chance to think of that yet.
… Wait, didn't all of this mean he had a kind of girlfriend? He hadn't even thought about that yet, either. The word felt strange on his tongue even as it remained housed firmly within his head.
"I'm…" he managed slowly, trailing off as he thought. "I'm not sure. Probably try to separate my power back into the keyboard and then…"
… Go with her?
Jazz gazed at him expectantly, and he knew well enough by now that gaze's express purpose was to wean more words out of his mouth. Perhaps she placed a greater value on the things he decided to consciously say over those he had thought, of which he had fair less control.
"… I want to see the Real World properly again," he said, thoughtfully. "I'm not sure why it took all these years to try going back."
"You wanted to, then?" she asked. Her eyes were big and curious — something he both loved the look of and cringed at when he realised it was her way of dragging out even more information. That didn't stop it from working, of course.
"Have you ever felt like there's a line you probably shouldn't cross?"
Jazz said nothing. He guessed the answer was maybe and filed the information away for later. "… You should sit down," she eventually said instead. "You're just sort of… hovering there like you don't know what to do with yourself."
True enough.
When the Ghostwriter collapsed into the couch beside Jazz, he couldn't decide how to process it. He still felt tense and on edge and like he was going to fall off the side of a cliff at any second, but there was also a part of him that linked in with her, made him feel oddly as if he was going to be alright. That maybe everything could be alright. In lieu of confirmation, he fidgeted.
"You missed out on a lot, didn't you?"
His hands froze.
"Writer… what was your life like before all of this? I mean, when you were alive…"
Somehow he got the distinct feeling she wasn't reading his mind — in fact she had not been for quite some time now, and indeed it might be that she was trying to respect his privacy as she quizzed him. He could choose how he responded to this. He could gloss it over, maybe, even avoid the truth, or he could simply…
"Quiet," said the Ghostwriter, after a moment. "I didn't do anything particularly interesting."
Details. She wanted details. His eyes wandered over the rest of his library as he thought back.
"I did admin work for the college part-time, mostly filing papers and correcting reports. The rest of my time was spent at home."
"Reading and writing?"
He sighed. "Shocking, isn't it?"
"Well… it was largely the life you wanted, wasn't it?" Jazz asked, carefully. His lip seemed to curl.
"There were plenty of things I wanted that I didn't allow myself to get, or didn't put the effort into because I was too engrossed with books. Lots of things I didn't see because I had this illusion in front of me that there was still plenty of time. I didn't go and earn the money to travel because work at the college was easy and I could write on the side. I didn't worry about paying debts off faster because the only rent I paid was a paltry amount for my parents' attic. I didn't want to take full time work because I would've had less time for writing. The opportunities were there, but inaction is a beast of its own."
Jazz was slowly wrapping herself around one of his arms and to say he'd barely noticed was a gross misrepresentation of the truth: he had most certainly noticed, but there was another part of him doing his best not to clam up and make a fool of himself in front of this woman. "You never really went outside other than for work?" she asked.
"You're surprised?"
"No," said Jazz, not unkindly. "I'm not."
"… You know there was a time I was more social," the Ghostwriter added, thoughtfully. "It used to be that Randy would drag me out through town to go to those quiet bars and house parties and other things like that with his friends. It's just that it stopped happening after he died."
"Would you do anything differently if you could go back?"
And at this the Ghostwriter smiled crookedly. "Ghosts learn. But seldom do we ever change."
"So you're saying you'd just go straight back to how you were living then? Even though now you're saying you want to do all of these things you missed out on?"
"I'm saying that if I didn't know I was going to die at twenty seven, I'd probably fall back into routine and habit and never make the money to do those things."
"… Really?" she asked, and he noted that it sounded maybe even a little sad.
"But it's different now," he continued hastily, Trying His Best. "It's not as if I need money anymore. I guess I could… pick up and go anytime. Like I went to Amity Park."
Jazz smiled. "But that means you did change, you know."
"I—"
"That's it, I'm done," said Randy, loudly announcing the fruits of his research to the room at large, breaking straight through whatever strange moment it was the couple were sharing. "The conclusion is that I know fuck all about what you're walking into, and the safest option is probably for all of us to sit here in frozen time for the rest of our existences."
Silence. Randy seemed to notice the two of them on the couch and his face went crooked. Even Jazz couldn't work out what emotion that was. "My timing could use work, evidently," was perhaps the closest thing he'd ever managed to an apology.
"… Really?" said Jazz, after a moment. "That's it? You don't have anything else?"
Randy offered up a shrug, somehow managing to stare at two people at once. "Considering that all of the lore and literature disagrees with itself, and not even mentioning the small fact that not even bending reality can yield knowledge about the higher dimensions and their functions, no, I do not have anything else. We're at the point where speculation might just cause confusion and misunderstanding, something that could be in and of itself more dangerous than not knowing."
"… So I'm probably doing this blind after all," concluded the Ghostwriter, carefully, and it struck Jazz that he didn't even look to be shocked. "Does that mean you're still in favour of the first plan?"
"Seems to be the best we have." Randy seemed resigned, and Jazz caught a touch of wistfulness from the thoughts he had implored her not to encroach. "John, I… need to ask a favour of you, before you go."
"… What's that?"
"… I have no offensive power to speak of, you know," he said, quietly. "Mira, too — if the Sorceress were to come here, bypass whatever security you put in place, we… she'd be able to do anything with us."
The Ghostwriter seemed to be getting the gist of this even as he didn't respond.
"You have to lend me a copy of your power," said Randy, and it occurred to Jazz that she could never have before then imagined a version of this man who was pleading, and yet here he was. "I don't need all of it. Just something I can use to hold her off. Escape. Anything."
Writer stared at his half-brother as the gears inside his mind ticked over, running over a half-dozen arguments in his head before they could boil up into trouble. "… Randy," he said, "You've never had this power before."
"We studied it together. Many times. We know how it can be used, its potential—"
At this point the Ghostwriter freed himself from Jazz's arm and turned around on the couch to face up to his brother completely. "But you've never used it yourself, Randy. You… understand that your knowledge of this is purely in the theoretical, don't you? If I hadn't been through decades of it developing like it has, I wouldn't… there's no way I'd be able to control it. The only reason I can keep things together at its current level is because I've been ready for it to break the bounds of my keyboard for… years…"
"Something small is all I need," Randy continued, apparently ignoring him. This wasn't pleading — it was begging. "I know we've had our moments in the past, but… John, you need to trust me about this. Especially this. Mira's likely a secondary target, and I—" he stopped, barely avoiding choking up, in one of the rarest moments of weakness. "I don't want to die, John. I can't do it. Not a second time."
After that, the Ghostwriter didn't need to think twice.
"I'm amused you seem to think I've no clue about this situation," said Clockwork, darkly. "What do you think I've been gazing into all of this time?"
The Observants at Clockwork's door were Not Happy. They tried to barge straight into the clock tower but Clockwork blocked all of them with his staff and glared daggers in return. "Don't you have better things to do?"
"That ghost is capable of altering the course of history, the workings of all things!" one Observant bellowed. "Is this how you define a waste of our time? Our life's work would be as dust!"
"Your life's work was never inherently important."
The three Observants who had come to negotiate with and/or arrest Clockwork (as appropriate) didn't like this at all, and made another attempt at crowding into the lair. Clockwork, however, was not taken at all with their attitude, their skillset, or their law, and slammed the door in front of them instead. It glued shut with a heavy sense of finality, overtured by the sound of several quite effective deadlocks.
"Observant!" Clockwork barked, calling forth the only one who lived with him, and the only one he tolerated. "It has dawned upon me that you have not yet left the Order."
"With all due respect — they would no longer accept me within their presence," it admitted, appearing form behind one of the pillars that might, in a normal construction, have kept the tower standing. "I could not face them."
"You find yourself too nervous to formally withdraw?"
There was a pause. "Clockwork, they would take me away."
Clockwork drummed his fingers along the length of his staff. "Do they really think I would leave the Dimension of Time without adequate protection? Such a proposition is laughable. Nonetheless the situation is precarious, and as for what lies beyond the time stream, I have little jurisdiction."
Was he talking to himself? The Observant wasn't sure and decided instead to simply listen. It was almost always better than opening the mouth he didn't actually have.
"In light of this," said Clockwork, slowly, "As you are no longer so bound by duty to the Order, I have a small errand."
"But I cannot go outside—"
"Allow me to deal with them." The ancient time ghost's eyes flashed a much brighter red than usual, and the Observant tried desperately not to flinch. "It's about time I bought a little bit of creative freedom for the both of us."
The Observant stared towards the door. He'd never doubted Clockwork — to do so was stupid, and it was true that the Order had often held the Master of Time in contempt for this very reason. He could see that much more than the average could fathom, and so often his bizarre behaviour led to strange yet surprisingly tidy solutions. Was the same really going to be true this time?
"… What type of errand?" asked the Observant, carefully.
Author's Note:
For those of you who stayed with me so long into such a marathon of a fic, thank you. You're the real angels out there. Bless your metaphorical cotton socks and heaven help you for what I'm about to write next.
It won't be long, now.
