| THE HUMAN CONDITION |

CHAPTER XV: YOU'RE NOT REAL

"The loneliest moment in someone's life is
when they are watching their whole world fall apart,
and all they can do is stare blankly."

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby


MY MOTHER WAS DEAD.

I remember it clearly. I remember it like it happened moments ago, instead of in my days as a child, when Jared and I were just getting our permanent front teeth. I remember it like it was the worst day of my life, and perhaps if things didn't spiral out of control like they have in the past few months, I would have named it that. But now it was just a horrible, unwanted memory I can't erase, regardless of my happiest and unhappiest memories. It sticks to the back of my head, a lingering thought that comes and goes like rain.

Even on my own deathbed, Mom came to me in white. A head of black curls that looked unnatural, caramel skin glowing bright and ethereal, her hazel eyes a sentiment of calm I'd always craved since things first went wrong. She looked just as beautiful as the day she married my father, in a dress far too rich to have been what she'd worn on her wedding day. And I saw the pictures; her dress was a hand-me-down from her own mother's third attempt. It felt off-putting, yet I couldn't look away. Maybe I was a deer in headlights, caught in a trance by a mother's love, something I hadn't had for nearly a decade. But… I could barely stand to stop staring into her warm, cheerful, familiar eyes.

Her smile was so wide, it could tear the imaginary seams that kept her skin intact. A cheekbone rise that gave runaway models a stroll for their money, and indentations that faired horribly in hiding her age. Beautiful, in a way I'd never be. Timeless, even. So lovely and real and happy, I felt like the reality I was experiencing was just a rewind of times long past. Or maybe this was erasure of my worst memories. I was offered a life that would end all that had happened, and open up new opportunities.

None that included Paul, or mine and Jared's reconciliation, or Dad's final apology. None.

I wasn't a sentimental person, not in the least. I didn't care about things considered priceless and unique to others; some days, I hardly cared about myself. People were always just people to me, not very human yet not voids within skin, either. I could trash items I'd had for years without a single regret. I didn't have a thing, a dime, in my life I couldn't fair without, unless you counted pizza rolls as a non-necessity. I had people I loved, but they weren't without their faults, and I certainly wouldn't flounder if they suddenly disappeared.

But looking at Mom, I could have been sentimental. If I didn't grow up with a man and his hardboiled son as my only guardians, hailing high above me like titans, I wouldn't be here, in the wrong end of caring.

I felt her presence like an itch that couldn't be scratched. She stood before me, white, whole, alive, with this look on her face—I, I couldn't describe it. Or maybe, I just wasn't trying enough. Maybe I was pathetically dimwitted in regards to my emotions, something I'd heard enough to know it as truth.

There was no use in denying anything at Death's Doors. How could you, when there's someone behind it who knows everything about you, from your favorite sushi place to the night you lost your virginity? Your deepest regrets, your happiest memories, the things you love most in life, the things you passionately hate? They all exist in a realm of consciousness far beneath our peripheral and our senses, somewhere that our soul sleeps and rests within. Here within limbo, something I never thought possible but was experiencing alongside what I feared most, I couldn't bring myself to lie. I could no longer go on with deceiving myself. Time was limitless, but it felt like it was ticking fast, and I wanted everything out in the open.

Especially within this moment, the moment that limbo projected to me in the time before I was set to die. My mother was alive. And she was listening. She was watching. She was absorbing everything I was now like she didn't think I was a failure. . She had a smile on her face, a tilt that couldn't be fraud. The distance between us spoke volumes, as she neared, as her feet padded the fog and gravel of pavement that laid in wait from what was behind Death's Doors.

I was ready to speak. But so was she.

She stepped forward, bringing up my tearing, blinking eyes to meet hers.

"I'm sorry I couldn't see you grow, darling," my mother said, her first words to me in years. I couldn't remember her voice. I'd been so young, all I could do now to remember her face was stare at pictures. We hadn't recorded often from before her death. It made her soft words so much more valuable to me. I savored them with every syllable. "I'm sorry I left you so young. You have grown to be so beautiful. You're such a wonderful girl, Alissa. I'm proud to be your mother."

"Mom—" I choked. I choked on my next words, feeling like they were meaningless anyhow, like saying anything would ruin this moment when I wanted to cherish it anywhere I went from thence on. "Mom."

"I know," she said to me. "I know." Her footsteps echoed in the small space around us, as she reached forward and gathered me into her arms.

She embraced me.

My mother, she was embracing me.

Not my mother. Not my mother.

It's not real, I told myself. I even whispered it aloud. I said, "This isn't real." And it wasn't—I knew that. After Dakota's plans fell through and we both fell into a deep unconscious state, I awoke here, in somewhere that reflected what haunted me most: my mother's death. For years I couldn't move past it, and instead of confronting my past and seeking answers, I instead fell into angry patterns, choosing to be bitter when I could have easily chosen to let everything go. I would never get my mother back, and having the feeling of nothingness creep more into my conscious thought the longer she touched me without touching me, I felt myself gain the part of me that had been dormant since Dad first told Jared and me her line had went dead.

For the first time in years, I was beginning to see reason within the irrational. I thought about all the times I'd turned from thoughts of my Mother until she became a passing thought altogether. All the pent-up feelings of anger, disbelief, denial, spite—they washed themselves away, turning instead to exhaustion.

I was so tired. I was tired of fighting. I was tired of denying. I was tired of being knocked down every time I attempted to stand. My mother was dead, and no amount of self-pity and groveling at God's feet would bring her back. Looking for answers wouldn't get rid of the constant ache I'd felt in the wake of her passing. Nothing would; it'd sit there until I died in the decades to come. She was a memory now, permanent against my will. No amount of brainwashing would make her suddenly go away.

Even now, she was still a fixture in my conscience.

"You're not real," I whispered, biting down on my lip impossibly hard. My fingers clawed into her exposed back, a rage rising in me, until it was clutching my throat and I had no control over myself anymore. I didn't want her near me, I didn't want to feed into her gluttonous energy; she's part of him, she's not her. She's not Mom. "You're not real. You're part of him."

Of course she was part of him. Dakota and I, we were no longer within his rodeo, instead somewhere between his and mine. We were at a stalemate. He was nowhere to be found. But I knew he was somewhere. I knew he was eager to finish what he'd started.

He'd rendered me indisposed, scatterbrained, focusing on my own unsolved turmoil instead of the chaos dispersed by the fucker himself.

Looking into my mother's face, I felt bile. There was a bug in my stomach kicking and punching everywhere in reach, turning my innards to dust. I was breathless. It was hard to feel anger, or want to hurt someone, when the person you were looking at—the person you wanted to hurt—was someone you once loved with every fiber of your being.

But I felt it regardless. I knew deep within, I was staring into a conscious part of me wearing a dead loved one's face. Like was intended, I was angry, bitter, and broken. Dakota wanted me to let him in and do nothing to save myself from his darkness.

"You don't love me," I spat at my mother. I was close to tears and so angry. I wanted peace. Fuck, did I want peace. But this place was a cross between Hell and a nightmare. Nothing was peaceful here, and if it was, its foundation was laid in other people's suffering. "You're not part of me. You're a fucking fraud. You want to hurt me, just like he does."

My brain had turned off, replaced by the hatred and anxiety that had slowly grown inside of me for years.

Fuck you.

"Alissa, it's me. I'm her! I'm your mother," she cried at me, as I pushed and pushed at her, bringing her closer to Death's Doors. Where she'd fall into oblivion and never come back. Go to the afterlife, I thought, but didn't say, her excuses and pleas falling on deaf ears. Just fucking go. Leave me alone.

I wanted her to leave me alone.

Leave me alone.

I didn't want her here.

I don't want you here.

She wasn't real.

You're not real.

The doors swung open, and tentacles of liquid black shimmied from the cracks, until an entire canvas of black was awaiting me and my mother. It was tall, daunting, horrifying, more black than I'd ever imagined death would be—more ominous than anything a Stephen King novel might have ever projected in my childhood. I was caught between the person I was trying to make disappear and the tentacles as they slithered between my limbs and wrapped themselves around the woman before me's limbs. I watched as she screamed and squirmed, calling for mercy from me, her daughter, trying to grab hold of one of the doors as they menacingly tugged her backwards.

"ALISSA I LOVE YOU, THIS IS UNLIKE YOU, YOU'RE NOT A MONSTER! YOU'RE MY BABY! THIS ISN'T YOU—THIS ISN'T YOU! PLEASE—MERCY—"

A final scream fell on my ears, sinking deep into my core, before the doors swung closed. And her last words were lost forever.

You're not a monster.

Even if this wasn't real, even if this was a simulation induced by my mind as it struggled coming to grasp with what happened and why I didn't see her before she'd died, I was still stricken with horror. Grief. Paralyzed to the ground by the thought I was no better than monsters, if I could let my own mother be dragged to Hell.

It was not right that I remained. I wasn't a good person, not anymore. Too many things had happened for me to rewind my mistakes and take a different path. Everything was so fucked; no amount of apologies, pleas, and cries would save me from my own fate as a horrible person, as a hypocrite, as a monster.

I was no better than the atrocious things hidden behind that damned door, was I?

As if sensing my descent into a path only monsters could follow, the darkness crept in on me.

A slow clap emerged from behind me.

Oh no. I wasn't alone anymore.

I turned to meet the dancing blood-red eyes of Dakota, and his snow-white palms as they collided.

"Beautiful show," he told me, his words nothing like the silk from his previous appearances. It was hard and gravelly. As was his gaze. Neither looked pleased, and there was a tension in the air that couldn't be cut with a knife. He was barren of smiles and niceties, every last bit of charm replaced by a need for blood. It was no coincidence he'd come here to find me, and Death's Doors behind us suddenly felt like a guideline for how to die, rather than how to kill others. I was utterly trapped. "I have to say, I wasn't expecting anything like it. Cassandra Cameron, killed by her own daughter. Rather dramatic for my tastes, I will say—"

"She wasn't real, you fuck," I said through gritted teeth. "She's fucking dead. Killed by you. There's nothing you can say that will make me think I killed my own fucking mother."

Dakota laughed at me. "You're thinking you did at this very moment," he purred. "'She said I'm a monster. She loves me, even in her dying breath. Her cries—they were real.' Sound familiar, darling?"

"Shut the fuck up." I refused to look at him. My lip curled, and if there was a part of me that wasn't paralyzed, I couldn't feel it. "Go back to taking Viagra, or whatever it is you paste-faced seniors do to get it going."

"Trying to provoke me, Alissa?" Everything was a question with him. I refused to give answers. "You know as well as I do that your mother may be a figment in your imagination, but what you see is your perception of her before she took her last breath. It's your last memory of her. What you see here is a design brought together by your fears, your regrets."

What he said caught my attention. I knew then—his angle, what he was trying to get from antagonizing me. "Your architectural design," I said slowly, no longer staring at the gravel; our gazes clashed, cutting one another with the hatred hidden behind each sea of color. "What I saw earlier. The prison. What I felt earlier. The poison. It failed. That means something. Why did it fail, Dakota?"

A small chuckle left him. "Courtesy of you, darling," he said, in that same appalling purr. Then he paused. Dakota observed me, his brutal eyes leaving no part of my body unscathed. They came to rest upon my shirt collar, where blemished skin peeked out. "I see a pattern. You know nothing about your ancestry, nor do you mine. It makes you sloppy and uncoordinated. Your words are empty. I see you, Alissa, and you're not as strong as you claim to be."

"You don't know anything about me," I told him, finding it difficult not to scream or spit in his face. My patience had snapped. "So shut the fuck up."

"But I do know." Dakota ventured closer to me, wearing a hateful grin. "I know you continue on a war path as ignorant to my capabilities as your own family's deception. You thought your mother died from an ailment. You forced your brother to shift and he's lost to both you and your father. Your father and his associates think you're foolish. And I?"

He came closer, until he and I were seeing eye to eye.

"I think you're once bitten, twice shy."

A wind swept my hair from its resting place and tossed rightward into my mouth. I brushed a hand across my lips, the wet strands following the movement. Looking at where Dakota once stood, he was nowhere to be seen.

He thought he knew me. But I realized—he was mistaken. So very wrong.

"This world is neither yours nor mine," the killer said, but his voice couldn't be placed. I stood stock-still, just listening, never moving my eyes from where he'd been moments ago. "The two of us, we can shift and pull apart the pieces of our shared consciousness, but we will never reach compromise. I can hurt you here. You can twist and turn me into discarded parts. But this world is not reality. Everything is possible, and you and I? We're both game-makers."

"But why the fuck are we here? Not in that prison you call a mind?" I fought not to cry my words out, but they came out like pleas anyway. "Everything was destroyed. But everything here is complete."

"Nice eye," said Dakota, in a quiet, callous tone. Before I could blink, my hair flew again and Dakota was standing in front of me. My body lurched forward when he caught my jaw between his thumb and index finger, jerking it mere inches north. Our gaze was nowhere near friendly, a glare that friends and foes alike wouldn't dare sharing. If anything, this was bloodborne time enemies, people who wouldn't care if the other were dropped in a bath of hydrofluoric acid. People who'd do the killing themselves. "You're dreaming, Alissa."

No. No, that can't be right. Dad said… He said he wasn't Freddy fucking Kreuger. He couldn't be in dreams; he couldn't target me when I was most vulnerable. All his visits were during conscious states. Even now, I was sure I was in my Dad's office, making a complete fool of myself.

"You're a fucking liar," I snarled.

Dakota's eyes sharpened. "Strong words from someone so compromised," he whispered to me.

Before I could wrench myself free and continue to argue with his logic, his grip reached a suffocating degree of pressure. I had no time to cry out or plead; with just a slow close-in between his fingers, he snapped both digits together. And my jaw, once whole, was crushed.

Mobility became just a semblance of my procedural memory, my nerves searing, fucking searing, stabs of absolute agony shooting throughout my face. I stumbled away from Dakota's loosened grip, unable to shout, unable to cry, unable to speak—all I could do was weep.

Dakota approached me again—I knew this only because his footsteps echoed like ominous omens—and he whispered into my ringing ear, "Where's your head? This is all there. A nerve-ending not much different to dying in a dream. You know what to do, Alissa."

My hands were shaking, as blood dripped out of my broken mouth and down my chin. I was wobbling on my feet, my hands were shaking like they belonged to someone far more old than me, my head was screaming for me to say something, do something, anything if it meant release. Relief.

Dakota's words were only partly recognized in my thought frame.

This isn't real, I chanted, letting my hands reach up and hold both sides of my jaw. Crumbled, shattered, beyond repair. But this wasn't real, and the pain was all an illusion. He was enjoying my suffering, watching with lilting eyes. I was letting him have a free show, when I was meant to be wriggling out answers and searching for a way back home. This wasn't a part of the plan. Being in agony wasn't a part of the plan. I knew that, but this was hardly an obstacle I could have foreseen.

I had to close my eyes, because looking at him would make me want to just stay this way and let myself succumb to the imaginary needles jabbing my gums and facial structure from within me.

With one quick jerk, I put my jaw back in its socket.

"FUCK!" I screamed. I fell to my knees, holding my jaw. It still ached like absolute Hell, and it still felt like pieces were scattered within the sealed skin. None of it was real, though; my jaw wasn't actually broken. This was all a dream within a dream, an unreality within a tainted realm of consciousness. He was here, and he was plaguing everything he touched, starting with me. I knew the bruises weren't real, and the anxiety he'd caused me from each visit, it was all imagined. Everything he put me through, it wasn't even real—and how can you trust your own mind, or your body, if they're both feeding you lies? "You fucking… fuck…"

Dakota's smirk twisted into a smile. Almost genuine, if it weren't for the blood in his eyes.

"You'll wake, and it will hurt. You'll ache, and you'll wish for reprieve," he whispered to me. "Death is liberating, Alissa. Leaving your mortal body to be replaced by something indestructible and beautiful, that is a fate many would kill to have. You and your fiendish wolves, on the other hand—perhaps such a fate is unimaginable. That is why you will die without worth. You'll be nothing."

"You don't know me. You never have," I said quietly, simmering in my anger, my disgust. One could only take so many insults and wrong assumptions before things went to shit and human combustion became logically possible. I breathed in deeply, needing the composure; it had went long enough, this game of wit.

"I know you are a child who hides behind those who protect," said Dakota. He edged near. "Those wolves—their only worth to you is their ability to fight your demons. I know everything about you, Alissa. After all, I've seen your mind."

That's why he could crawl under my skin—why he could prey on my weaknesses and bring them into the light. He knew exactly who I was under the layers of bravado and abrasion. I was naked, mind and all, to him, and there was no possible way I'd ever match his strength.

"We're in your mind at this very moment," he said, coming ever closer. My skin crawled, my body reciprocating movement in the opposite direction. "Entombed here. There's no escape, Alissa. All but one."

Death, I could imagine him saying. He didn't need to form the word, stress the syllable. He didn't even need to clarify what was going on, where we were. I'd been avoiding labeling my situation, thinking it'd fuck my sanity over in ways I couldn't recover from, but there was no other choice now; I was trapped.

"I'm asleep," I whispered, it dawning on me. Why things felt disillusioned but real, why I was seeing my fears, why Dakota looked and felt less charming. I was in my own head, and so was he; he was able to read me because we were surrounded by my thoughts, memories, and feelings. It made me realize why the air picked up when I pushed my mother's memory through Death's Doors; my mind was a hemisphere unprotected from resolve, and the slightest change in temper would change the environment as well as the setting.

I clenched my fists and focused on everything around me. If my emotions were a tidal wave, then I could exploit them to wake myself up. I was sure if I died in my dream, I'd wake up alive and in pain. He can't come with me. He's no Freddy Krueger.

"How did you kill her?"

Dakota's marble face made an expression I couldn't place. "Many would not want the details of trivia so gruesome," he said thoughtfully. I stared at him, annoyed that he'd paused, and somehow he must have known I wanted him to continue. "Your mother… she was underneath your father's thumb as though she were an insect. She listened to him readily, cooked for him, dressed him on workdays. She was miserable, I could tell.

"I visited her one day. She wanted to take her life, you see. She had a kitchen knife at the ready, on the mark of her heart. When she saw me, she attempted to finish the task, but as an immortal, she had no chance of completing it. I asked her what had driven her to something so rash. And you know what she said, darling? 'I cannot take it anymore.'"

No.

That's not true.

She wouldn't.

She wouldn't—she, she wouldn't. She was my mother. She loved her husband; she loved me and Jared. She wouldn't just abandon us, especially not when we were children. Children, for fuck's sake. Jared grew up fast. He had to take care of me and our father when I didn't know how to clean or dress myself, when Dad was drinking himself into stupors every night. He fell into depression. It couldn't be because he killed her will to be alive.

He was stern and work-oriented, but he was caring and loving, too. He sobered up after a year spent in exile from his mind, and then he took care of us. We were a family with a gapping void where the middle should have been, what kept us grounded—and stupid, naïve me thought it was because of a fucking sickness. Dakota can't be telling the truth, it's not possible.

"You're fucking lying to me," I choked through tears.

Dakota's mouth curled into a tight smile, as though he enjoyed my pain. "Am I, darling? Ah, I must remember your father never told you the technicalities behind her death. An ailment—pneumonia, was it? Or cancer. And you believed him instinctively because what does a father have to gain from lying to his children?"

You're lying.

"You did it, you killed her," I said. The air picked up suddenly and violently, courtesy of the blind rage as it shot like a falling star through my bloodstream. The setting cracked and shook, turning to something black and sinister, the two of us in an unseeing darkness. "Don't fucking tell me she'd do that when she had kids. You expect me to just believe that? I'm not an idiot."

A light flickered, a shard that turned into something dim and plagued by moonlight; our environment had transformed from a forest floor that led to an oddly-put Death's Doors to a graveyard. Beside me was the tombstone engraved with my mother's name.

"You're the monster, you're the reason everything is so fucked!" I cried, and suddenly my hair was walloping my face, among us terrifying lightning, thunder, and winds. I staggered backward, unable to handle the pressure.

Dakota's charade broke, everything going from calm to ireful in seconds; and then, he was advancing on me. His lip was curled into a glower.

"You blame me? Me? I offered her life, Alissa," snarled Dakota. He circled me violently, a tumultuous force among the tornado winds that kept us stagnated; "She died because Richard was young, foolish, choosing one of the bitterest alternatives imaginable to immortality. She sought death when she knew nothing of the endless possibilities. She did not want a life with you and your father, nor that mutt of a brother. I know what her choice would have been. Your father does, too."

The way he worded it, he made it sound like Mom wanted to be by his side. In his narrative, she took every word from his mouth like water that quenched a heavy, unforeseen thirst, searching for something Dad never could have offered her: an eternity spent young, beautiful, and unable to feel pain.

She wanted death—or so Dakota's tale went—and was ready to take her own life. But Dakota, a beautiful, indestructible monster, came and offered her a life by his side. If she truly no longer loved Dad or wanted a domestic life, then it was no wonder he nearly took his own. I could not imagine living with the truth that the love of my life didn't reciprocate my love and found it unbearable to put up with me. I could not imagine Paul doing that to me. I couldn't imagine it to him, either.

It was all such a smack in the face, I couldn't even bear thinking it was real. He was wrong, he was a liar, and I was falling apart because of his lies. He was beneath my skin the way he knew he was so, so very capable of doing, preying on my insecurities and my weaknesses, rummaging through those parts of me I kept clamped down like yesterday's bad blood.

A devil on my shoulder, obscured by a veil of hair. Hovering over the controls, as I debated what to do, how to feel, who I was going to be in the next hour. He was everything I avoided, everything I hated, and he knew it, too. That's why he caught me in his trance instead of one of the men on the Council; I was inexperienced and clumsy, a child whose dealt hand was nothing more than immature quips. I was not an opponent; fuck, I wasn't even a target. I was just a game.

"She wouldn't," I said, but my voice betrayed me. It cracked until a shattered resolve. "I know she wouldn't. You have no fucking idea what you're talking about."

Dakota laughed. The winds picked up, and I was choking on dust and dirt; he was perfectly intact, just as indestructible as he claimed. I felt him grab my jaw and force me to look up at him. I looked into those damning eyes, the blood sending a streamer of horror through me. I gulped down my sobs, letting myself acknowledge what he was about to do, about to say—feeling an acceptance that I was doomed to have my head crushed and my soul compressed down into nothingness. He was powerful in every way, and I was weak, useless by any and all definitions of the word. So useless, so weak, that I was crying in the face of death, imploring that I wouldn't meet such a gruesome end.

Yet here I was, trapped in a dream I couldn't wake up from.

"I did not kill your mother, but I cannot reiterate the same for your grandfather," he whispered. "Like your father, he wanted a mortal life. He was content to be worthless. A tribal advisor, called upon to read from books and recite wise, meaningless words from dead, untactile wolves who fell prey to immortals. I crushed his skull in front of your father when he was young, no older than twenty. When your mother died, he felt that grief tenfold for he had experienced it anew from his father's."

A fucking monster—that's what I was looking at now. An it, who was willing to kill anyone and anything if it meant power. But he himself was no better than my ancestors, if he allowed himself to be changed only for him to be an advisor to a vampiric council. I knew little to nothing about his work, but I did know he was insulting someone that was no different from himself. He was just as worthless.

"You say that when you're just as much of a little bitch," I snarled back at him. He was caught off guard by my words, I could tell from the way his unwrinkled brow raised. "You're no better, Dakota. I know you left and took the bite to become an advisor to a council of monsters just like you. You know what makes you, Dakota? Hm?"

I inhaled deeply. He watched me, and I couldn't read his expression.

"Worthless," I whispered to him.

There was nothing I could do, nothing I could say, as the grip around my head reached an agonizing, excruciating level of pressure. I screamed and clawed at his paper-white hands, but to no avail. I had given him what I wanted, but it came with a cost I could not escape from—regardless of how good I was at running.

There was a crunch, then nothing. Absolutely nothing.

All that awaited me was a darkness I could not wake from.

Because Dakota had done what I'd provoked him for. He'd done what he had in mind since he first appeared in my mind.

I was reduced to residual bone and brain pulp as Dakota crushed my skull in his bare hands.


A/N: WELP this is my biggest cliff hanger ever, I think. What did you guys think? Did you like it? Hate it? Hope it kept you on the edge of your seat.

We didn't get a Jared reunion scene but that's mostly because I felt like this was the perfect place to end it. Sorry if that's disappointing.

FEEDBACK HAS BEEN SENSATIONAL, THANK YOU GUYS SO MUCH. I HAVE GOTTEN MY MOTIVATION AND MOJO BACK THANKS TO YOU ALL. YOU FUCKING ROCK

I'll be posting much more regularly as long as you guys keep it up with the feedback and critiques.

Until next time :D