The chaos became too much; objects clanked against each other and against the walls or furniture they rested on, some falling, some cracking as if an invisible hand had punched them quickly. Tate attempted to calm Mel down by reaching for her, Zandra continued yelling orders at the owner to let her brother go while Jeremy attempted to yell at his sister to leave with him now that he could partially move, absolutely refusing to believe or attempt to find reason behind Zandra's constant "I'm dead!" statements, and Hayden, much like Tate with his beloved, attempted to calm Zandra down and find some sort of shelter regardless of if what she wanted more than anything was to understand what the hell had happened to make everything around the house tremble and move with the motions in which it did.
"Mel, please." Tate called, watching as her hands trembled and the tone of her skin paled, making the black of her eyes contrast more against the palette that her frame had become. He ducked, moved to the side, watched as things fell from their places once and again and again from everywhere around him; even the television had cracked in its corner. "Calm down! Breathe!" He said, but to no avail. Zandra kept screaming behind him, and all Tate could do was try to address the redhead so she could calm down enough to let Mel calm down. "Zandra! PLEASE. SHUT UP." He screamed, turning away from Mel, and using every ounce of internal strength he had to throw the command.
"Don't you yell at her, Rambo!" Hayden demanded, taking a step forth to push Zandra behind her.
"Zandra, please." Jeremy pleaded to his sister as he pulled on her hand, tugging and flailing his other limb when his sister didn't comply. "Please, just come with me!" But still nothing.
"Then tell her to shut up, will you?" Tate quickly commanded Hayden as he took a step forward himself, trying as much as he could, to ignore the other sounds around the room, the voice of that boy he felt a dry and horrible hatred toward included. "Mel needs to calm down." He announced as if it weren't obvious.
"She's doing this?" Hayden wondered, yet before her question even finished, Zandra pushed her to the side to yell at Tate herself, leaving the other redhead to stare at Mel's nearly frozen frame in shock as Zandra pulled her hand away from Jeremy's in a way that completely broke her already dead heart.
"TELL HER TO LET HIM GO." She yelled, pointing with one hand toward her brother behind her. "DO IT!" Zandra demanded.
"CALM THE FUCK DOWN!" Tate mirrored Zandra's tone, taking yet another step forward that only took him further from Mel and closer to a probable psychotic attack brought forth by anger. "Or I will fucking make you calm down."
But it became all too much; the screams, the things moving, the power radiating from every single one of Mel's limbs, breaking the veil between her and the part of her that withheld so much power as the one that made everything on the living room float and circle about as if the objects alone had life. It had been exactly the way the fire had started in her first home, but thankfully a fire hadn't been warming the room up from the fireplace prior to her loss of control; it had been exactly the way she'd felt before the enormous window in her house in London exploded and ended with it the life of the very soul she'd seen trapped in young Jeremy Pierce's mind, but, again, thankfully there no window rested anywhere near them to explode in such manners. But everything did float around in circles, and even through her blinded rage she could see the ghosts around her ducking out of floating objects' way; and though she wished she could stop it, though she knew she had the power to stop it, she didn't. The anger, the fear, the confusion were all too great, and the commotion in the room only made everything worse. "Zandraaaa-" The familiar voice tooted around the room above all the voices, making Mel's heart twist and everything in the room to spin faster.
But then a silence reigned the room; a guttering silence after an interrupted word that made the clinking of the floating objects seem like nothing but a whisper, a silence that seemed all too familiar to Mel. And as the veil of a memory clouded every single one of her senses, everything in the room fell to a horrible crash against the wooden floor; some untouched crystals cracking, breaking and shattering, fire pokers stabbing the wood on the place they fell, electronics crashing to their places where they'd floated held by their own chords. And soon after, the silence broke by the echo of a horrible pained scream.
A brand new commotion exploded in the already tense room.
Zandra ran, the echo of her scream tooted from every wall in the house, her hands lifted to attempt to catch Jeremy's frame even as he only stood frozen on the place he'd stopped to beg Zandra to go. Hayden shortly moved as if anything she did were to be able to help the horrible situation that had enfolded, and Tate? All he could do was take a couple of steps closer to Mel, because regardless of his sudden dislike of the situation, he knew what it meant for Mel.
But every single person in the room watched as one of the only two living people in the room coughed blood, his eyes falling slowly until they fell to the source of the pain. Jeremy's eyes rested on the deeply black fire poker that drew through his stomach, making his once white clothes suddenly and slowly stain with the deep shade of red, as blood flowed freely from the wound. And then he was falling, Zandra's hands wrapping around him as much as they dared to not hurt him anymore and cushioning his fall as she knelt along with his falling body.
Meanwhile, many steps away from the little group, the echo of a hated flashback mirrored within the owner's mind. "Oh, no." She whispered. "No, no, no, no." At first they were words; actual words that left her lips in an urgent tone, but after, with hues shining a sad grey the voice echoed no more, and all that remained were the soft movements of Mel's lips as they attempted to form the silent plea to a deity she didn't even believe in.
"Jeremy!" Zandra Pierce's voice echoed through the room as if it were a tunnel created solely from the emotions that bled through the young redhead's tears. "No, Jeremy, no." She whispered, caressing the soft brunette curls of the whimpering boy in her arms. He attempted to breathe, but all that followed were struggling chokes of blood as he trembled in his sister's arms. Once and again, and again, torturing him with dying breaths as the blood slipped into his lungs and drowned him beat by beat. The tears of his sister fell on his blood stained features, and his blood spotted on her nearly albino skin. "Please, no." She cried, holding Jeremy as close as she could without hurting him any more than he already did.
Of course, any and every movement hurt the young green eyed boy. With the pain cursing through his veins Jeremy felt as if every agonising second was an hour, one more in which he needed to attempt to breathe and fail, for all he could feel was his throat blocked by his own flowing blood. That was it; he was going to die, and he didn't know what he could do but wait for the darkness to take him away. He wished he could apologise to Zandra, to Caroline, he wished he hadn't been so harsh to his sister back in that alley, for maybe then she'd have left with him. He wished he hadn't chosen to knock door by door only to end up in that house; though it did bring him to Zandra, and thus probably remained the only thing he didn't wish he could change. "Za-ahn-" He tried to speak, but every syllable broke by the choking sounds that seemed to be his last song.
"Shhh." His sister soothed even as she held his frame close, and allowed her tears to clean his face. Loss seemed to echo in the room, from Zandra, from Jeremy, even from Mel as she watched the scene unfold before her. "Don't speak." Zandra whispered, and Mel's own mind replayed a scene much like the one in her living room; one centuries back, with her features holding her dying husband's in her arms much like Zandra's own held her brother's. The same person, the same face, yet such a different mind.
He continued calling her; Harry, his voice leaving like a long forgotten echo from the mind of the dying boy. It attempted to soothe Mel as she stood frozen there, and even as Tate threw his own attempts at comfort in the form of a hand in hers, even as she watched Zandra hold the stilling image of her brother against her chest, all Mel could hear were the comforting words of her once beloved Harry McClair. She wanted to understand; she wanted to know if it was purely her imagination gone wild at the shock of having seen his image once again. But how? How could it possibly be just her imagination? How could it actually be him?
Could she be imagining the way in which he called her name? Could she be imagining the scared tone that attempted to appear calm as it soothed her with words that she could have sworn she'd never hear again. He was scared, trapped in his own little corner of Jeremy's mind, and even then he swore to her that it was all okay, that the few moments had been enough and worthy because he never thought he'd see her again; but he was scared. Especially as Jeremy Pierce drew his last living breaths.
A silence overpowered the room when the struggling breaths of the bleeding green eyed boy stilled. The only sounds were those of Zandra's own cries, her tears flowing freely against the unmoving frame of her beloved little brother. She apologised; soft little whispers tooting in the direction of the now dead boy echoed slowly as she attempted to ask him to forgive her for having left him alone, for having lied to him, for being unable to convince him to stay away when everything was done. But it was as if she apologised for every harm she'd ever done him; for every single time he'd angrily called her Barbara and the one time he claimed Zandra to have broken his heart. Even though she knew he couldn't hear her anymore, for he stared blankly and unmoving toward some spot on the ceiling, no breath, no sound, not one thing that gave way to any sign of life in the green eyed boy, and even those eyes that usually seemed lively with colours that only Zandra knew to see, were void of life, void of anything that made the broken bloody corpse anything more than just that: a corpse.
But then the true entity at fault of the corpse laying in her arms as well as her own death became prominent in Zandra's mind. It was all she could see, all she could think, and all she could fault as every fibre of her being lit up with red rage that she had only ever seen her brother possess. All those times watching Jeremy's hands turn into fists, or angrily beat at his punching bag in the made up gym back in her apartment, that Zandra had wished she could understand in order to help him; she understood his ager then. She understood the way in which anger beat at her insides, scratched at her brain in ways that could drive her crazy, and all of it was directed at one person alone. And she stood right behind her.
"This is your fault." Zandra spoke with broken breaths and an equally broken tone as her hands slowly moved to set the shattered body of her brother against the wooden floor. "Him, me; every freaky thing that happens in this house, it is all your fault!" She yelled, standing from the floor so she could face the silently crying owner behind her. Zandra's clothes were bloody; stained with the source of life that had drained slowly from her brother's frame, making her look exactly like what she had become: an angry vengeful ghost.
"Zandra." Hayden warned, standing slowly in mirror to the other redhead and taking a step closer. Every single second seemed less possible than the last, but all she could think of was that, regardless of the lack of living people in the room other than the owner, if what Tate Langdon had said was true and Mel had been the one to make things move the way they had and her eyes, she thought. Well, she didn't want to get on her bad side; dead or alive.
"Step back." Tate Langdon warned, once again inching forward until he could stand a good ways in front of Mel. "Or she's not the one you're going to have to worry about."
"Tate." Melanie Fray whispered from behind the blonde boy, but no one could hear, for she remained too shocked or broken to speak in tones higher than the softest of whispers. Her eyes continued frozen and fixated on the bloody image of Jeremy Pierce, unconscious, dead, bleeding in her living room floor. Everything else? Well, everything else felt like a whisper to her. Because she'd heard him; Harry, she'd heard him die along with Zandra's brother. It had been like seeing her once beloved die in her arms once again.
Steps away from Mel, Tate remained fixated on the redhead before him. There'd actually been a moment in which Tate hadn't known if he'd ever be able to kill again, not with the manners of which he'd changed due to the two women that had so incredibly helped him and loved him at different points of his existence. He doubted himself, he hated himself, what he could do and what he'd done. But at that moment, as he looked at a pain struck redhead yelling accusations and stepping forward toward the woman he loved, all he could do was imagine himself strangling the life out of her. There was a point, after both ghosts walked forward, in which Zandra and Tate met in the middle of the room; she'd been so intent on facing or hurting Mel that Tate had been able to hold her before she could even come anywhere near the frozen Mel steps behind him. "No!" He yelled, anger radiating through him in a familiar way that made every single one of his dead cells fire up dangerously. Zandra moved, jumping, scratching, marking Tate's skin with thin red lines across his face; but because of him, the commotion ended as quickly as it had started.
There was a crack of bones; one that stopped any and every flowing and accusatory word from leaving the redhead's lips, and then her body fell toward the ground in an ungraceful pile of unconsciousness once Tate let go of the redhead's face. "What the fuck?!" Hayden quickly yelled, running to attempt to cradle the body of the redhead who'd been fired up with grief and anger all at once only seconds prior. "Tate, what the-"
"Shut up, Hayden." He spat, heart beating loudly against his ears and breathing as if he'd just ran the longest of races. "She's already dead, anyway. Just get her out of here." He ordered, motioning quickly toward the halfway open basement door. But Tate watched as Hayden started to attempt to argue, which only made Tate's eyes roll. "For fuck's sakes, Hayden, we've got enough problems as it is, don't you think?!" He yelled, his hand quickly lifting in a quick motion toward the dead boy, steps behind Hayden. Surprisingly enough the redhead wanted to argue once again. "JUST GO! NOW!" He yelled, allowing every single ounce of his anger to slip through the words life a knife of their own.
Thankfully that was all it took for Hayden to leave. Moments later, what felt like a little too long to Tate - but clearly hadn't been because the green eyed redhead still seemed unconscious in Hayden's arms -, the only people in the room were Tate, Mel, and the dead body of Jeremy Pierce. "Mel?" Tate asked the frozen woman as he slowly approached her. But before he could reach and touch her, an eerie white light illuminated a corner of the room, and before Tate knew it, Mel had gasped, a tear slipping from the corner of her eye and ran in the direction of the light. With a frown of confusion as much as curiosity, Tate Langdon turned around to see what had just happened. And he became even more confused.
The light seemed to radiate from the body of the dead boy; from his wound, actually. And from it, the image of a man seemed to have formed quickly enough for Mel to wrap her arms around it. It wasn't a man; it was a boy, barely eighteen if he dared attempt to guess at his age, and from what little Tate could see of the boy from the angle in which he stood, he could see that the boy's clothes were a distant cousin of the clothes he'd worn for Halloween. And his arms were as much wrapped around Mel's kneeling frame as hers were around him. What the- "I'm sorry." Tate heard Mel speak, and that alone made him take a step back. "I'm sorry, Harry, I'm so sorry." She cried, and Tate watched as the long digits of the boy's hand brushed upon Mel's long black curls. "I knew I could hear you, I knew you were there, god, I'm sorry. Harry, please, I'm so sorry." Harry? Tate wondered, taking yet another step back.
"Melly." The voice of the other boy spoke, making Tate's insides turn because of the gentleness of the word that, if his memory served well -and it should, since the story had been told to him only a couple of days previous to that moment-, was exactly the nickname Mel's husband had adopted for her since childhood. "It's okay." He said, "I forgave you long ago, Mel, it's okay."
Tate wasn't wrong; he couldn't be. Not with so many details clicking in place, he simply couldn't be wrong. It was him; somehow he'd ended up here. It was the Harry McClair. Mel's Harry McClair, her husband.
Was such a thing a horrible joke the universe thought of to play on Tate or what?
To Be Continued
