82- Guardian
"There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love." – 1 John 4:18
To live in the belly of a monster is, indeed, different once you know it is moving around you instead of you moving through it. The haunting of a home becomes more violent once the spirits know you know; there is nothing to hold back. The world is vastly, overpoweringly different when you recognize that it isn't dead, but that it is alive. Such a thing was tangible now, plucking the hairs on Francine's arms like strings of a cello- singing its horrid song in the back of her mind as its choir hid in the shadows of her peripheral, strung its finger slowly, lingeringly down the spine.
This world did not want her where she was.
That's how the three were as they ran through the darkness, filling the hollow bones of a living thing. Francine kept her hand tight around Sammy's as he guided them with his voice.
A pipe burst as he said to turn left at the scratched poster of the Butcher Gang.
The floor broke upon when they came to the crossroads, forcing them to jump over the gap.
And the lightbulb that swung over the hall exploded and left them in the dark when Sammy said they must be getting close.
Joey did not want them here.
It didn't cross any of their minds, however, why he wasn't trying harder, because if he surely was, this would have long been over; what's three souls to a god?
From experience, they should have known.
There was simply too much that begged to be controlled.
As Francine listened over the yelps in her own breath and the shouts of her shoes against rotting, chewing floors, she heard this world scream. The patchwork universe was becoming undone over and over again, stitches falling at the seams before being sewn up like skin in a surgery before her very eyes. A glance to the wall- a searcher. It was throwing it's arms up, pounding against the wall that was breaking apart between them. She screamed and the wall closed shut again, the most sickening squish as it was crushed between boards before it could reach her, only part of it to touch her being the splash of ink on her side.
Alice urged her along, despite her body's insistence to freeze. Francine didn't notice the panic in the other woman's expression; the angel was so strong, so insistent even as she was voluntarily putting herself within all that she detested and feared.
Just for her silly cherub.
At one point, the screech of Norman sounded down the hall, a man refusing to be subdued. Pound, pound, pound. Surely, he wasn't that strong. And yet the floor quaked to its foundation every time, throwing the three to the ground like turbulence throwing passengers on a plane. A pinball bouncing back and forth, hardly allowing the woman of flesh and blood to stand as the world tilted back and forth. Ink ran between her fingers as they softened her blow- ink running like a stream that grew more and more forceful as it tried to stave her back.
It didn't need to be said aloud it was just like when she first looked for Mr. Drew, king chained in the depths of his own castle. But now they sought for his beloved son, and just as she escaped death to find the father, so would they find him. They had to; there was no choice.
But then, of course, the worst was to come.
Stress, stress, stress. Blood pressure in black veins going wild. Francine heard the hum, and as she looked back there it finally came. Behind her, filled with emptiness- everything horrid in a human heart taking all the color, even beginning to drain the dye in her clothes with its hungry shadow:
Hummmm...
It reverberated, filling their chests as she waited, and waited, and waited, for surely it was going to come, stopping in place as amid the chaos, something far graver waited to eat her up.
…
...
...
Drip.
Her eyes shot wide just as tendrils like ink spreading in water soaked out of the giant stain behind her back. He was here. The lord had come.
"We have to move! NOW!"
And her volume increased the grey shroud's size and sound. In the darkness grew shinier and shinier a moving figure, a body slick with the same thing that made her friends alive and yet was not kind to her at all- not anymore. Alice ordered her to keep her head forward, but she couldn't help it. The shake in the angel's tone- the sheer panic- it only gave Francine more reason to look at what she was afraid of. The teeth underneath sodden horns seemed pearlier with each limped step, bouncing back and forth in and out but overall gradually into sight as the seconds passed faster and faster. Steps sloshing into a run, run, run. Hands coming forward, reaching, grabbing, clawing-!
"I CAN'T-!" the old man's voice screamed all around them.
Alice gasped and turned around finally to see him too, just as horrible mercy would be rained upon the one of them deemed most precious.
"I CAN'T LET YOU!"
Francine, the slowest, screamed.
And just as their God swept down his mighty hand to reclaim his beloved lost lamb- so close that his pained breath was not only heard but felt underneath her skin and into her own lungs like an infection that made it hard for her to breathe too- Francine saw his giant, gloved hand ready to save her be shot down with a blurred force. She fell back into Sammy, who shouted himself in terror and held her close as they skidded to a halt once again.
Alice, as Joey had known, was always her guardian angel.
The seraph panted, her legs outstretched and ax ready to swing again. The demon screeched, bleeding at the wrist and staining his white glove, murky drops of his own soma falling from bulbous fingertips and into the living wood that carried his blood and that of all his treasured children. He took another, stunted move and Alice swung the blade from over her shoulder again, groaning with rage and effort as the wood of the handle was parried by a wet yet solid arm. His breathing, as with Francine, filled her ears, and the eyeless gaze of the demon burrowed into the holes in her face like parasites eating her inside out.
But it did not stop her. Maybe it never did before, either. No matter how scared she was of the demon, she had never complied with his will to keep her in her place. Alice always came back, came back to reclaim the day as her own. It was only fitting that the final day, too, would pass much the same way.
Francine shouted her name, Sammy the only thing keeping her from running to save her friend, and that was all Alice needed to believe once and for all...
...That sometimes the progress of another means more than all of your own. Love requires a sacrifice, and Alice indeed loved her.
"GO! I'll be fine! The worst he can do is KILL ME!"
Her grimace twisted across her face until after the longest second in the world, her lips had curled up. She was a broken doll learning to smile once again- both so another may as well but also so that she too may have opportunity to smile again someday-
Sunshine. She missed sunshine. Hand in her hand, seeing Francine happy and alive.
…-With her.
In retaliation to such hope, the demon bent his arm is such a way it shoved her back, hair thrown around her face and getting caught in her halo. Her head was thrown down, but with horns pointed at him like a bull and the slit of her eye visible was filled with daggers that had waited in a sheath for a very, very long time.
Time to see if they had become rust with all these tears shed.
"Fix this, and maybe it'll bring me back."
And with that, she threw herself at him again, not another word, not another look. She would come back, somehow. Her soul would either remain in the ink, die forever, or feel daylight again, and so there was nothing worth ceremonial grace or last words of wisdom. Alice was ready for anything that came after this, even if she'd never live to see heaven come down to earth, or even if she was there as hell would raise out of the ground.
Francine couldn't stay to watch the eternal struggle of angel versus demon as her prophet blindly pulled her away, but she refused to shut out the sounds that chased at her heels, grew dimmer and dimmer and yet pierced her even worse the farther it seemed to be. She heard the angel curse, she heard the seraph scream, and then distantly- just as they found the door- she heard the woman finally pass away. Her voice croaked sweet with those two tones, different ones that both loved and loathed everything Francine brought with her. And so maybe it was worth such split feelings, as it killed her in the end- perhaps something worthwhile to die for.
They both hoped so, even if only one of them had seen it coming.
Susie returned to the very thing she hated most, her black and white puss soaking into the floorboards as she saved a life, metal door closing somewhere she would never be able to see. Just as they had met, Alice knew that there was a door that was never supposed to open for the strange, nosy girl but did so for her all the same.
Her purpose from the moment she stepped foot into Joey Drew Studios was to be an angel. And now she was finally what she wanted to be all along.
Morning would break before this woman once again.