AN:
...Sorry for long postponement!
I blame work and a serious case of my muse abandoning me for this chapter; either way, I finally did get it up and I do know what's happening next; probably some drama. dun dun duunnn.
If I missed your review response below, just let me know, I answered all the ones for chapter 54 (for ff), 52 (for my labels); nevertheless, again, if I missed you, I'm sorry, it wasn't on purpose and, again, lemme know.
Special Shout Outs:
Randichele: I totally can imagine what might happen if she tries to run again, who knows, maybe she'll try and run again. ;) Sorry the wait was so long, but I hope it's enjoyable, nonetheless. :)
Lady of Sign: Yes, yes he did. haha. ;)
IA: Yay to satisfaction! haha. I can't wait either. haha. And I'm glad that you're glad that you were right. / She is! And there's actually one arc of the comics that she comes back - but in order to do so she would have had to die in the ocean, not the way she did, so alas, she's dead for good. :'( It was a great movie, I must concur.
Highlander348: I hope my PM helped, if not, just let me know. :)
NerdAlert101: Not much Caleb x Nat in this chapter ( at least, not together ). There's is a slow build. haha. Sorry about the not so soon update (in general to my last one) but, I hope you enjoy it nonetheless. :D
To all my reviewers: (All beautiful 5 of you) you guys rock, thank you for the continued encouragement, and for taking the time to review, it means a lot!
To all you non reviewers: you rock too, and I'm glad you're still reading!
Additionally: to my newest readers and reviewers, awesome!
x
The girls were all sitting at a beaten down but sturdy wooden table immersed in a heavy conversation with the bustling noise of Nicki's drowning out any part of their conversation that could have been overheard, as well as providing them with an odd sense of seclusion despite the overt liveliness of the bar.
Each girl was vividly aware of their male counterparts scattered around Nicki's; Reid and Tyler playing a game of pool, Pogue playing some public kid at foosball, and Caleb sitting at an empty table a few down from their own, his dark eyes scanning the crowds, looking for any potential danger or threat as each boy gave the girls the space they had asked for in the safest way they knew possible – and though the girls were aware of the men, all of their eyes were on Avery.
They had each spent the last half hour, listening to Natalie describe what had happened to her just a couple of days ago and as Natalie's tale had ended, all of the focus shifted to settle on Avery. It was finally time for her to divulge the secrets she had kept close to her chest since her eighteenth birthday; a watered down depiction of her ascension would no longer be enough because as Natalie came closer and closer to her own ascension, things were spinning more and more out of control for the female Parry; until Natalie wasn't just a danger to herself, but a danger to everyone and anyone around her.
"Find an anchor." Avery finally instructed.
"What?" Elizabeth inquired after sharing confused looks with both Natalie and Lace.
"An anchor," Avery reiterated in her low, husky voice as she leant forward and pressed her hands to the table's surface. "Find something that grounds you, that helps focus you, because without it… without an anchor," Avery's jaw clenched, her chestnut eyes twisting with obsidian sparks as she met each of her sister's gazes, "You may very well lose your mind."
Elizabeth and Lace physically drew back at that very threatening omen; they were already toeing the lines of sanity as it was, barely able to keep a grip on reality and stay fully functional on a day-to-day basis.
"What was your anchor?" Natalie asked; her fingers curling into her jean-clad thighs in an attempt to keep her face devoid of the same emotion so easily twisting Parry and Simms' expressions.
Avery's mouth pursed, as though she were reluctant to answer Natalie's direct inquiry, and she was. "I didn't have one…" She confessed, watching the way her friend's features twisted in equal parts concern and disbelief; Avery felt their resulting fear like a two-ton mac truck ramming straight into her chest.
"And by the time that I was lucid enough to figure out that I needed one, I was too far gone." Too far gone into the depths of fear's insanity that she could barely even breathe, let alone operate past the debilitating fear that crushed her soul and warped her mind to find some substantial meaning in her life and hold onto it. "And no matter how hard I tried, no matter who or what I thought of, I couldn't ground myself…I couldn't come back." She had been trapped within her own mind for what had felt like decades, but had only been mere minutes.
"But you made it, you're here." Lace countered with a trembling shake to her voice, her ivory skin three shades too pale.
Avery's fingers curled into the chipped wood beneath her fingers, before she forced herself to admit to something she hadn't ever voiced allowed, "I'm not so sure that I did, that I am." For months that thought had plagued her, and she knew it would always continue to plague her; the bleeding doubt that she hadn't come out of her ascension intact, that she had come out a different person than when she had gone in.
One second, she had been Avery Nicole Danvers, the next, she had become some darkened, twisted version of herself – one of her few fears was that she had lost some piece of her sanity as she drowned under the pressure of nightmares she hadn't ever experienced before.
And that truth, Avery's confession, resonated deep within each young woman as they each sank back into their chairs, so much emotion bombarding them, so much fear… because if they truly thought about it, if they focused on Avery, they would realize that since her ascension she had become more withdrawn, more distant than she had been before it.
They would have realized that whenever she was caught staring out into the distance as she so often was, there was a subtle feel to her disposition that made her seem inapproachable, even to them; made it seem as though she were existing on some other realm that went far beyond anything the others could ever comprehend; made it seem as though she wasn't actually there, even if she physically stood beside them.
It made Elizabeth wonder if the darkness that she had been sensing beneath Avery's chest – the dark, blinding and unsettled power that churned near violently inside of Avery and was scented with a deep, embedded dose of malevolence – had anything at all to do with Chase and everything to do with what kind of monster lain beneath her sister's skin.
Avery let her words settle before continuing forth with coming clean to the sisters that would need every tip she could give them. "In the final days before your eighteenth birthday, you'll begin to find it harder to control your powers, and the resulting urges in regards to your powers persuasion. You'll get little tastes of what your power will be like after your ascension, and your control over your abilities will be sporadic, at best. When it finally happens," Avery gazed down at the table splintering beneath her curled fingers, seeing the wood, but not noticing it for she was trapped in the memory of the experience in which she currently spoke of.
"You'll experience a pain unlike anything else you've ever felt before; whether it be mental anguish, physical pain, or imagined aches. Any semblance of control snaps until you can't even remember what control felt like. Mental shields collapse until all you know is the fundamental foundations of your powers, raw and completely exposed. There are no filters, no constraints, no restraints."
Lace lost her breath, Elizabeth gave an inaudible whimper and Natalie physically flinched at the way Avery was depicting an event none of the girls had ever feared as much as they did in that one moment.
"So what does that mean for us?" Elizabeth questioned, her tone wavering, her fingers trembling.
Avery pulled her gaze upward, forced her dark, haunted eyes to meet those of her covenant's. "It means that you might need to be physically restrained when it comes your time to ascend." Avery answered, looking directly into Elizabeth's discolored gaze, Elizabeth's eyes ringed with a vivid pulse of gold. "That primal heart of yours won't be tamed, Liz, you'll be wild mass of raw, primal emotions. The animal part of your soul could very well take over." Avery's gaze flitted to Lace, "All those lines you see, Lace, the chaotic but organized way in which they wind around each other like a jigsaw puzzle? They'll blend together until you can't tell one line from another. You'll be submerged beneath a sea of colors until those lines wrap around you like individual nooses, pulled tight and taut and unrelenting."
Finally, Avery turned her impenetrable gaze to her closest friend; Natalie, however, already had her suspicions about her own powers and didn't need Avery to spell it out for her.
"All of my defenses will crumble," She murmured lowly, speaking just loud enough for the others to hear though she was really speaking to herself, not them. "I'll be bombarded by thoughts, by feelings without any means to stop it…Avery," Natalie searched her friend's dark gaze, "It'll crush me."
"Not just you," Avery countered lowly, "You'll project." Avery glanced at Lace and Elizabeth, both girls sitting shocked silent, their fear clearly mapped out along the planes of their faces. "It's then that your powers will transform. Any new powers will submerge amongst the old and there's no telling what that transformation will be or how dangerous it will make you."
"Natalie," Avery turned back to the bronze haired girl, "If your powers are already developing in such an offensive way, you're not just a danger to yourself, you're dangerous to anyone in your vicinity; you don't just run the risk of projecting onto them," Which could very well snap anyone in proximity's mind like a nimble toothpick, "You run the risk of completely obliterating them."
Avery shut her eyes against the sudden onslaught of Natalie's very vivid bouts of fear. "That's why," She said hoarsely, pushing past the fears scraping at her mind, "You'll need to find an anchor. Something to hold onto so you have a fighting chance against completely destroying yourself and anybody in a close enough vicinity."
"How long does it last?" Elizabeth questioned.
"Sixty seconds – but that sixty seconds lasts a lifetime and you'll be unstable for hours afterwards."
"That's why we didn't see you until the morning after." Lace murmured in a soft, suddenly understanding tone.
"I couldn't control it," Avery agreed, "I couldn't keep it internalized," She then shut her eyes against the last confession she planned to make, "I killed three people that day."
Lace flinched; Elizabeth and Natalie's heads snapped upward and around so fast that Avery could almost feel the vivid cracks and pops that accompanied the quick, sharp movements.
"How—" Natalie trailed off, uncertain of whether or not she wanted the answer to her unfinished question.
"Heart attacks; I literally scared them to death." Avery explained, she didn't want to tell them these things, didn't want to scare them anymore then they already were; but they had to know.
They had to know just how dangerous ascending was going to be, they had to know so that they wouldn't suffer through the same thing Avery had been forced to suffer through…the same thing that she was still suffering through. "I also drove four sound-minded people to the deepest depths of insanity."
"Y-you never said anything," Lace objected softly, wanting an answer to why Avery had kept such a painful event silent, especially when it was so obvious that Avery was still being tortured by it.
"How was I suppose to tell you guys that?" Avery implored quietly, though earnestly. "How was I suppose to stomach the idea of telling you guys that you could very well wind up taking a life?" Avery's dark gaze pinned Lace, "Even if your gift seems so innocent, so harmless right now; Lace, it will turn on you." And Avery feared that it would hurt Lace the most considering that it would be so completely unexpected for her power to turn violent.
Nothing else was said after that, each girl lost in their own thoughts, their own struggles, as they tried to determine just how they would protect each other, as they tried to determine how they were to protect themselves.
As they sought for answers to questions that could very well determine the difference between life, and death, Caleb watched on from his spot just a table or so down. He did not like the way the girl's conversation looked to have gone. It left his gut feeling twisted and a sort of restlessness in his veins that urged him to do something to stop whatever it was they were each going to face.
Looking around Nicki's, Caleb could see that the others, his brothers, felt just the same as he did, each of them watching their sisters with concern and discomfort which should have made Caleb feel better about their situation, but it didn't. The fact that his brothers were feeling as restless, as antsy as he was, just left Caleb feeling even more hopeless; they were four of the most powerful beings on Earth, and they could do nothing to help the few people who meant anything to them in this life.
It was fucked up, and Caleb hated everything about it. He was the eldest, it was his job to look after the coven, and he couldn't. He could only sit back and watch everything unfold – he was a fucking spectator.
It was at his last thought that his eyes caught Reid's cut, determined gaze. Both boys held the eye-lock, both sensing the same urgency within the other; the same desperate need to protect something that couldn't be protected and the resulting self-deprecation that came with knowing that they could do nothing.
Their shared sense of urgency should have helped them bridge the gap that Caleb had created between he and his pale-haired friend, but it only pushed them further apart because in their shared gaze, each boy challenged the other. Caleb silently telling Reid that he wouldn't put up with any more of Reid's bullshit, and Reid warning Caleb that he would not be separated from Avery.
Caleb felt a fiery rage seep slowly into his bloodstream as he read the challenge, the proclamation in Reid's countenance, and as the flames of rage stoked every nerve ending in his body, Caleb wondered just how long he could keep his control before he and Reid finally dealt with the issue they had managed to avoid for the better part of a year.
By the way Reid's gaze shifted to Avery periodically through the night – each time softening Reid's hard jaw and cocky smirk – Caleb gathered that it wouldn't take very long for his control to dissipate and for he and Reid to go toe-to-toe, fist-to-fist. Caleb would have despised fighting with one of his closest, one of his only friends had he not been more than a little positive that when the time came, he would win; not only would Caleb put Reid back into his place, but he would once again be Avery's primary source of comfort.
What Caleb didn't realize, and wouldn't for a while to come, was that he hadn't been Avery's go-to man for years.
All followers, favoriters, reviewers, non-reviewers, continuous guests, and first-timers: I hope you enjoyed!
Hope everyone had an awesome Memorial Day!
Until next time,
x
