By now, I imagine you've come to expect a sort of linguistic maturity from me; after all, I am a creature of impeccable lexical taste, a logophile with a lifetime spent crusading for the fine, dying art of the English language under my belt. I recognize that. So while I feel I must be entirely accurate in recounting my thoughts at the time of this encounter, I do sincerely apologize for the ineloquence.
Because all I could think in that moment, as I jumped up so fast I knocked my chair backwards, was:
What in the frivolous, fresh fuck.
The man I thought of as an uncle bent over, bracing his hands on his knees and panting for breath. "It's Scarecrow. Her people are crawling all over the place out there."
Have they found anything?
Kaos shook her head, her voice coming out just as breathless. "Hard to say. But she must know that we'd try to get to her first."
Jeff snorted. "Yeah, like it matters. No one finds the mansion without Slender allowing it to be found."
I just kept waiting for the punchline to this sick, psychotic joke, for them to rip off their masks and suits like Scooby Doo villains. This was Kaos. Kaos. The girl I'd basically grown up with. She couldn't–she shouldn't know about this place. Shouldn't know about any of it. And my uncle, he was just a friend of my father's, a temporary fixture at the occasional birthday party, a background character in what I understood to be the world. This wasn't right. It couldn't be.
Do you suspect she was the one instigating things at the school?
With a groan, Kaos rubbed the place on her nose where her glasses normally sit, like she always does when we're neck deep in calculus. "Yeah, I do. I should have known it would be her–the whole thing's got her grubby little straw fingerprints all over it. It's so obvious, I mean–Elizabeth's just the kind of victim she always went for."
"Excuse me!" My voice came out about half an octave higher than it typically did. "I hate to cut into your tactical report, but would someone mind explaining to me just what in the lukewarm hell is happening in my life?"
Finally, the two of them seemed to notice my presence, but much to my extreme dissatisfaction, neither of them looked even the slightest bit astounded to see me in this setting.
With wings.
"Uh…it's been a while," Smith tried lamely. "Did you…get taller?"
My eyes narrowed. "Who even ARE you people? Since you're obviously not who you said you were! Are there any more of my acquaintances I should be expecting to waltz in, hmm? James, maybe? Xavier? I'm sure the god-forsaken mailman will be making his appearance any time now, since everyone and their second cousin twice removed is in on this elaborate pyramid scheme of a practical joke on me!"
Something like fear flashed in Kaos's eyes. "Hey, hey, hey, no need to get all worked up," she placated, holding up her hands like this was Jurassic Park and I was a damned velociraptor.
"Oh, but isn't there?" I seethed. "Because let me tell you something, Katherine, or whoever you are. I am teetering on the edge–nay, I am ice skating along it, I am performing acrobatic routines so elaborate they put olympic athletes to shame, I have just landed the world's first ever recorded sextuple axel jump on the brink of sanity, and I am one, singular misstep–or better yet, one impulsive whim, one faint, ethereal suggestion of l'appel du vide away from swan diving directly off of the deep end. And YOU–" I waved my arms, catching the two of them in a haphazard gesture–"YOU two are standing up on the bleachers, cheering for me to do a flip."
Now Slender was the one extending a hand, his voice somehow sounding firmer in my head than before. That's enough. We will provide the explanation that you are due, but you should be mindful of your emotions. I'm sure we'd all prefer it if you didn't snap into an animalistic rage at this precise moment.
"Some of us are trying to eat," Ben agreed.
The pressure of an unreleased scream built up in my chest, but I contained it. For now. My left eye began to twitch as I very calmly reached down, righted my chair, and sat back down in it.
"Smith" cleared his throat, scratching at the loose, brown hair against the back of his neck. He was as scraggly as he'd always been–a human coat rack, by all accounts–just a bit too pale and too gaunt to pass as healthy with skin that seemed stretched a little too thin over his bones. The bags under his eyes were ever present, the way his clothes hung from his frame characteristic. Once or twice, I'd speculated that his frayed mien might be a result of drug use, given the air of illegal mystery he wore, his anxious avoidance of drawing attention in public, the way he smelled of hungry secrets biding their time before swallowing him whole.
Turns out those secrets were even darker than those of a crack kingpin, apparently.
"I'm Liu," he started simply, shooting me an apologetic wince. "It sucks to be lied to. I get it. But throwing my actual name around could have been dangerous, both for me and for you."
I deadpanned. "You couldn't come up with something more creative than Smith?"
Jeff burst into laughter.
Clearly irked, Liu opened his mouth to respond, but the eldritch god beat him to it. Funny, how easily you can dominate a discussion when your voice is a psychic assault upon your fellow conversationalists. Jeff and Liu are brothers, he explained. Of my proxies, Liu has retained the most regular appearance, and as such, often acts as my formal messenger in more covert circumstances, like those your family found itself in.
"No, hold on," I demanded, slamming my hand against the table as if I'd been possessed by the ghost of Phoenix Wright himself. (If I'd given into my faithful comedic impulses, I'd have taken a fat swig of the nearest drink just to punctuate with a spit take.) "Are we just going to gloss over the fact that my honorary uncle is the brother of that thing?"
Jeff gasped as if offended.
"There was really no good way to explain me into your life," Liu continued, gripping the edge of the table and leaning into it thoughtfully. (I guess that's a yes to glossing over the convoluted web of quasi familial ties.) "A friend of your father's was weak, I know, especially since I'm so much younger, but you never seemed to question it too hard." He shrugged. "And it wasn't entirely untrue."
"I guess I didn't," I muttered. "I was too busy questioning if you were ex yakuza."
His brows shot up. "Yakuza? What, because I'm Asian?"
"Because you were always running from something!" I buried a hand in my hair, trying to make sense of it all. "Because you have scars like someone tried to cut your mouth open, because you've always got a knife in your jacket, because every time you pull out a credit card, it has a different name on it!" I paused mid crisis to look up at him, my brows furrowing. "Maybe a little bit because you're Asian. Fine. But that reflects the narrow-minded cultural assumptions of a child with a wild imagination."
"Oh, shut up," Jeff drawled from around his capri sun. "We're like a fourth Japanese, the most white passing people in the country."
"That doesn't make us not Asian," Liu corrected. "And maybe you'd look more like it if you hadn't done that to your face."
Frustrated, I dug the heel of my hand into my eyes. "It doesn't matter. I thought you might have been in some American gang, too, I didn't know. I didn't know anything about you–I had to fill in the gaps. Your bizarre behavior led my mind to generate a list of plausible explanations, and struggle as you may to grasp this, you being the meat puppet of an eldritch god was not at the top."
His frown lingered between guilt and sympathy as his eyes flickered down to the table. "Yeah. I get it."
"And you." Kaos flinched as I directed my wrath upon her, but even I could feel it giving way to hurt in my expression. "You were some sort of double agent the whole time? Keeping tabs on me? Ensuring that I remained sane enough not to mutilate anyone?" All at once, I could no longer bear to consider her; fixing my eyes on the table made them sting less. "Was a single fragment of our kinship actually real?"
Her ocean eyes softened. "Of course it was real, Alida. We met in middle school. It was a mission at first, sure, but do you really think a twelve year old has the capacity to distinguish between feigned friendship and real friendship?"
"I don't know what to think," I bit back. "For as long as we've been acquainted, you were merely playing a part. You're not my best friend. I don't know who you are." She opened her mouth, but I hadn't finished. "You were well aware of what I was, what I was capable of, long before I was. And you kept that from me. Secrets that could literally kill, and you concealed them. And worse from that, you allowed me to deteriorate under the suffocating weight of my impending insanity, of all my unanswered questions and all my explosive emotions, of concealing the facets of my truest identity from everyone, all alone, when you knew. When you've always known. You could have easily shouldered that burden alongside me, and yet, you chose to watch. So forgive me for readily assuming that I was never anything more than an assignment to you."
Her lips pressed together in a thin line–a telltale sign of restraint. But then, what did I know? Apparently nothing, at least about her.
In any case, the tables had turned, rendering her the one refusing to meet my wounded gaze.
A silence settled in, so thick and so heavy it evoked a sense of false claustrophobia. Silences like these were dangerous, deathly, like the calm before a storm. A warning. A doomsday prophecy, littered with the sharp shards of shattered human connection.
Though human is hardly a word I'd apply to any part of this maddening situation.
Liu and Nemesis were following my orders. The booming mental projection of a voice sent an earthquake rumbling through the planes of my mind. Those orders, in his case, were to communicate with your parents about matters particular to this mansion, to our existence and our plights, and in her case, were to observe your development and see to your peculiarities remaining uncovered. Any animosity you hold towards them for deceiving you should rightfully be traced back to me, as such was carried out under my explicit command.
The twitching of my eye persisted.
As long as I could remember, I'd battled for answers like brief gasps of breath before being dragged back under the surface of the unknown. Now, they were too strong in number, flooding my senses, drowning me with light rather than darkness, but drowning me all the same. Missing pieces were falling into place like rocks fall in an avalanche, clicking together more like the cock of a gun than a neatly unraveled mystery.
So I'll attempt to spell out this cacophony of realizations assaulting me simultaneously far from how I experienced it: one at a time.
One: Nemesis. The name he called Kaos by. Nemesis, if you're unfamiliar with the term, is another word for retributive justice, of fate, of inescapable demise. The diametric antonym of her false namesake, Chaos. Clever for her to disguise herself as such. But then, she'd always been clever.
And immediately, I registered that Nemesis was more than her name, if it was indeed her name at all. Reflecting upon the entire stint of our association, I could begin to pick out seeds of her karmic ideology innocently sewn into our mundane conversations, hints at the philosophies I suspected kept her heart beating, just as my desperation for freedom and belonging and answers and bloodlust kept mine. We all have our demons that drive us, after all.
All of this is to say, I'd always known that Kaos respected the idea of karma, at least in an ingrained, intuitive sense. Not like how you know which president is in office, but like how your lungs know how to keep breathing even when your attention is elsewhere. Subconsciously, subtly, like the distant, ever-present rushing of a river that fades into the background of your perception.
And now, I arrived at the avenue of wondering if this is what drove her to kill.
Because I knew, still just as intuitively, that she did. It was in the solemnity in her eyes, the set of her shoulders, the blight in her soul. It had always been there, but I had no way of recognizing it before.
Not until I experienced it firsthand.
Two: my family knew. My family knew. Just as Kaos did, just as Liu did. I doubt Xavier would have been privy to it, but was Clarissa? Certainly my father, with those gentle eyes he'd always seen me with, and my mother, overprotective in every sense of the word, were. It all made sense, now, the neurotic check of the locks, the hushed conversations with my 'uncle' just out of my superior earshot, and what I half-remembered as my mother's dying words. That she knew this day would come. Her bittersweet smile.
And even my maintained secrecy. How no one ever came knocking as I devastated my room in a nuclear rage, how they were so quick to believe any lie I covered with, how I managed half a decade without a single question or misplaced feather.
They, too, had abandoned me to the misery of bearing my oppressively feigned identity alone. Why? Why had they let me grow up in such terrible, encumbering isolation?
And three.
The Slenderman referenced an entire world beyond my own familiarity, a world in which existence itself was clandestine, in which threats only yet alluded to lurked in the shadows along with the answers I so craved. All my life, I'd struggled against the confines of the world in which I so achingly obviously did not belong, and all of a sudden, I found myself at the very threshold of one where maybe, just maybe, I could.
Once again, I heard that sweet, lilting siren call. Promises of the truth about my past, about my present, about my future. About the nature of this dark, arcane thing surging through my veins, biding its time before claiming its next victim.
No longer could I deny it, especially not in the name of protecting others. I owed it to Clarissa, now, to my mother and my brother and even to Elizabeth, to uncover the truth. To answer the call.
"I'll do it."
All eyes in the room, whether glowing or bleeding or empty or only partially manifested, snapped to my as my words settled in like dust. Or like fallout. I shut them out to focus on Slender, the one who had offered me a place in this fascinating new world, who held the key to my next beginning born from a fiery, ashen ending.
"I'll stay."