A/N: Hey guys! Thank you for your patience, I'm truly sorry I had to take a break like that. I'm back now, well, sort of. I can't promise that updates will happen every week (will probably be closer to every second or third depending on the state of things), as my hand is still not properly healed, but I can write a little. Figured you guys would prefer that over total silence. So baby steps, but rest assured that I will never abandon this, it might just take a while longer than planned to finish it.

I have to devote a special thanks to Anni, the guest reviewer, since I can't write you in person. Your comment made my entire month and made me wish so much that I could just sit down and start writing again. Thank you, truly. And thanks to the rest of you also – I'm not in the habit of collecting first-borns but I appreciate the offers ;)

Well, on with it.

Fiona woke to the warm scent of her man and the embrace she was wrapped in. Her first waking thought was that she never wanted to move. Never. Because when she did, he would move and he would look at her. He would see the pain on her face that she could no longer fully hide and he would ask once again if anything was wrong. And lying would stop working soon, because he already knew and his gentleman patience was slipping up. Soon he would start demanding.

She didn't want to look to the side, because there would be a mirror on the nightstand and she would see the gleam that no longer fooled him. She would see the slight yellowing of her skin, soon so visible it wouldn't fool her daughter either.

When Misty finally showed herself, Fiona would kill her dead. Not because she was dying quicker – this might even be a relief, because she was about fed up with this miserable half living anyway – but because it was causing Cometh and Cordelia such pain. Cordelia, who Misty would rather die than hurt if she could help it. Cordelia, who she had been hiding from for five days now. So much for the love of her life. Or maybe Cordelia was right, maybe something was terribly wrong. Sad thing that she was too stubborn or too fooled by those imaginary voices to go and find out.

Fiona didn't get to think much else, because Cometh groaned and started to wake up. He moved slowly, with the daze of a man half asleep. She prayed he would just succumb to it again.

Then faith proved its hate towards her, Cometh turned and the feeling of his eyes on her face was too magnetic. She turned her own head to his side and greeted him with silence.

"Good morning, beautiful", he said and his warm smile of unknown bliss or maybe just temporary amnesia tore at her.

"That's a goddamn lie", she said. Her voice lost its sharpness in these early hours of morning, but the scoff never faltered.

"Why is it not a good morning?" He asked and added: "Because surely that's the only one of my statements that could in any way be false."

Fiona shook her head and looked into the ceiling. "You're unbelievable."

He leaned in and kissed her shoulder. "If you refuse to tell me what's making you sick, I refuse to acknowledge its presence. Would you like some breakfast?"

She shook her head again and then got up to get dressed. There was a dull thumbing in the back of her head and it took her a while to realize that it was the hangover. The prize for being sober too long is that you stop being immune to the hangovers, once you slip. And it was a sorry amount of alcohol to get a hangover from at that. She groaned and went to the bathroom to get just a moment of peace from the look on his face.

When she came back, he was making coffee. He had taken the eggs out too in case she changed her mind. There was a glass of water beside it and some salted crackers: The hangover meal. He handed her the water and she took it without a word. She held it there in her hand, watched the water twirl around, but didn't drink it.

"You don't usually refuse beverages", Cometh said and Fiona chuckled humorlessly.

"You shouldn't have let me drink last night."

"Fiona", he said with that voice he used when she was being difficult. It came with the look of staring at an endearing lunatic. "You know better than I that I can't stop you from doing exactly what you want to do. I never force your hand in any direction, but I was there the whole time. As I'm sure you remember."

"I do. It wasn't that much", she said with a scoff and felt like she was on trial. Like some goddamn teenager.

"I know." He moved close to her and carefully slid his arms around her waist. He moved with a slow caution as if she was a cat on the brink of escape. She took a few sips of the water and felt like she could throw up. Not due to the aftermath of the drinking. Not because her liver was quite literally stealing her hours away. But because she realized that she was going to tell him.

She sat the glass down, looked back up at him and said: "I want to marry you" – the surprise registered with such obvious joy in his eyes that she almost didn't choke out the rest, but she had to – "but I can't. I'm not going to be here for much longer and getting married is just too goddamn stupid when I'll likely be dead within two months. This is not some idiotic teenage love story we're living and there's too much goddamn paper work. Cordelia gets the house, it stays in the name. You don't get that and she and Misty need whatever money I have left to make due, so you can't have that either."

He didn't cry. She wasn't sure if she had expected him to. For the time being, he looked far happier than he was supposed to and Fiona had the suspicion that he had chosen not to hear anything but the very first part of her speech.

"You foolish woman", he said with a voice so warm it hurt in the weirdest way. His grip around her body tightened. "I don't want your money or your estate. I don't want my own money or anything I own for that matter. I only want you. And that goes for whatever time we may have."

She had to free herself of his embrace then. "You're not listening to me, Cometh. I'm dying! Nobody marries a dead woman!"

"Tell me what's killing you?" She hated that he was so calm. It made her feel like she couldn't breathe, as if he was projecting all his sadness into her chest and she felt it for the both of them.

"It's cirrhosis. Closing in on end-stage liver failure. By their prognosis I'll be bedridden by the end of the month. Gone in two. They can't find a matching donor and I will not put anyone of you through trying to give me your body parts." – He opened his mouth to speak – "That includes you, mister, so don't you dare offer it!" She felt her voice breaking. God she wanted to run, to scream at him, make him do something other than stare at her with that creeping sadness. She had it right; he had found her out, guessed her sickness and she had just robbed him of his opportunity to save her. But she would have none of it.

He nodded slowly, his expression determined. Then he absentmindedly held up a finger, as if to pause her, while he walked past her. He went to his coat by the door and rummaged through the pocket. When he turned around there was an unmistakable little box in his hand.

"Christ Cometh, have you just been carrying that thing around with you wherever you go?" She snapped, but he didn't answer. He opened the box and the light reflected diamonds, three of them, the middle one a little larger. It was tasteful, the diamonds not overly large but big enough to steal attention from every other piece of jewelry she owned. Cometh picked it out of the box, put the box aside on the table and held the ring between his two fingers as he walked back to her.

He stopped in front of her and held up the ring.

"Whether there will be a wedding or not, this ring is yours. And you will wear it, because I love you. It doesn't have to be a wedding. It can stay like it is between you and me right now, but you will let me be by your side until you are no longer breathing, whether that's standing or bedridden. Is that a deal?"

Fiona looked from the ring and to his eyes and back again, his words echoing all the way to the soul she wasn't sure she had. She found that she was trembling. At last, she looked back at him and she nodded.

"Okay", she said and her voice had been stolen away, but he heard the whisper. He picked up her hand, ignored the trembling or marveled at it on the inside, and placed the ring on her finger.

Then he pulled her in and kissed her. There was a smile in his kiss, not triumphant as she could have imagined, but one of an emotion much purer and finally it all released in her chest. Tears sprung to her eyes, but she felt the warm spread of happy in her bones and only that.

O0O

Colors. A scary amount of colors. So different from the attic of the Goode mansion. So many sounds also. Jaws snapping, scaly feet retreating. Heavy, deadly tails swinging in the mud and then the splash of water as they fled. No one Kyle knew could ever claim to have seen alligators scared, not even Misty, but now he had. And he had no words to tell anyone.

When the riverside emptied out, he started to realize they would not kill him. He couldn't get himself killed off like he had promised Zoe. Zoe. She was the only thing clear in his brain; everything was as muddy as the ground he sat on. He had to get back to her.

The creature of Kyle got up from the ground and started walking. He was faintly aware that he was just a creature now. He was no less a bug than those which crawled on his skin when he sat still long enough. Except for when he was with Zoe. His mind came back out from the dusty corner it hid in the remainder of the time. He could form words. He had long, coherent thoughts. Something about her presence made him try. Made him work through the fog and be a person. All he saw out here was green and her tears with his inner eye. He would make her smile again. He remembered her from before, always happy. He remembered nothing else. Only vague emotions and clouded pictures. Darkness and the image of his old house. Repression and his mother. Blood and his mother. Fear and his mother. Fear that she would touch him again and he couldn't tell her to stop because it would hurt her feelings and she would cry for days and threaten to kill herself and she would-

Kyle's head collided with a tree as he threw himself into it to get his brains back on track. He crashed his skull into the body of the tree until there was a mushy hole in his forehead and no more pictures in his head.

Then he started walking again.

He had forgotten what his old apartment looked like. Home was Zoe now and home he went. It was dark out, but he worked the dark better now. He felt more at ease here, he belonged here. All that brightness was for the living. The rightfully living. He emerged from the forest and was somewhat pleased to find himself still wrapped in darkness. He shied away from the streetlights, walked the shadows until he reached his destination.

What he found was a lot of yellow tape. The door was closed and there was no light on. The place looked cold and abandoned.

No Zoe.

Kyle turned and started walking to the other place he thought he could find her. His body moved with slow across the lawn, heading for the outer borders of town where all the rich people lived and where the Goode mansion was. Where she was. Kyle remembered Misty as a friend, but a part of him shied from her with repulsion. Or attacked with panicked fury, because when she was close something overtook him. The power that had made him alive again was frightened by the power within her. She could kill him. A part of her needed to and he could feel it. He thought a part of her even wanted to, because he's a walking, never-healing injury and he mocked everything she was just by being. He felt that clearer than anything else. Clearer than even Zoe sometimes. It wasn't strong now that he couldn't see her and the mental picture of Zoe overshadowed it, but it was close and he couldn't fight it. Kill or be killed. That was how it was when opposing forces met.

There was ruffling in the grass and then a voice called out for him.

"Hey! Kid! What're ya doin' here?"

Kyle turned around and a police officer came towards him. He recognized the badge in his belt.

"Are ya Kyle Spencer? We been lookin' for ya." He came closer, his forehead creased as he took in the sight of Kyle, maybe trying to determine if it was him. "Hell, son, what happened to your head? Look, ya gotta come to the station. We needa talk to ya 'bout yer moth-"

"NO!" Kyle bellowed and lunged at the officer. The officer recoiled at first, ripped the walkie from his belt and started screaming into it. He didn't get any coherent sentence out, before Kyle threw himself over him and his fists started to rain down on the man's mouth until he stopped talking. Bone broke apart under his fists, teeth dug into his knuckles and sprung away. The officers legs kicked and his hands ripped at Kyle, but he wasn't strong or fast enough. Kyle didn't move with slow anymore, his brain had clicked into a singular mode, panicked and focused on getting the image out of his head again.

He stopped when the face underneath him didn't give any more fight and the frantic limbs stopped poking at him. He got up and turned towards the house, he was headed for. He didn't want to look at the dead man, because he knew he had done it again. Done damage. Zoe didn't like that. It made her sad.

Kyle stopped in his track when he realized there was another man watching. He almost fell into the shadows, but his eyes were alight and the light blue of his cap stood out against the dark. For two or three seconds they stared at each other. Then he ran, as fast as he could, in the opposite direction Kyle was headed. Kyle stared after him for a moment or two, vaguely wondering who he was.

Then he turned and headed for the mansion.

O0O

Zoe had become something of a permanent extra hand at the house. Cordelia was a mess these days. She had admitted that things with her and Misty was better, they were on the right track again, even if there was still a long way to go. Zoe rejoiced at this, holding onto the hope of her inspirational couple still existing. It made the world just a little less bleak. In spite of this, Cordelia was still out of her usual composure, because Misty hadn't given word in days and it was getting to a point where Cordelia's extreme anxiety on the matter started creeping under the skin of the rest of them. Cage kept asking for his mama and no one could tell him anything. Zoe often took him out in the garden to give Cordelia the time she needed to climb walls and break down the monsters in her head. Cage called them that sometimes.

"Mommy's got monsters in her head", he said, when he didn't call them 'talkers'. Cordelia said the first might have been her explanation for her illness. The boy was too smart not to notice, but too young to understand anything as complicated as psychosis. But he was reaching the 'monsters under the bed' age and that he could relate to. Cordelia swore no one had ever used the word 'talkers' though. That was his own.

Zoe didn't mind being the extra hand. She needed her mind occupied. Time alone with her thoughts was torture. Sometimes she feared she was turning out just like her mentor, although she had promised her she would try not to wallow up with grief and succumb to monsters in the head.

She couldn't miss him. She did, but she couldn't.

Sometimes she stayed over at the Goode mansion too. Cordelia had looked at her with worry the first time she asked and then asked why she didn't want to be home.

"My parents are travelling", Zoe just told her. She didn't want to be alone at home and Cordelia understood.

"Do your parents know what happened to Kyle?"

Zoe shook her head. "No. They just think we broke up, because he went to school upstate." That was his plan after all and she had told them this. Cordelia tried to dig more, but Zoe didn't let her and Cordelia caught on quickly enough, stopped asking. She told Zoe she couldn't pay her babysitting hours for all the time she just stayed over and Zoe assured her she didn't need to. So Cordelia made up the spare guest room and that was the end of it. Zoe secretly believed Cordelia was relieved to have the extra set of hands.

She sat curled up on the couch with a book, when Cordelia came down from the first floor after having tugged Cage in for the night. The words jumped around on the page in front of her and she turned the pages slower and slower. She wanted to be so tired she couldn't keep her eyes open, before she tried to go to bed. Then maybe she could sleep. She barely noticed Cordelia sitting down, but she caught her looking when she started nodding into sleep and jolted upright. Cordelia gave her a warm smile.

"Go to bed, honey. You look exhausted."

Zoe sent her a small smile in return. Cordelia had begun to call her by these nicknames and it made Zoe think of the mother figure instead of the mentor. Cordelia was so different from her own mom, soft and fragile to Catherine Benson's strict and robust, but both of them warm all the same. Both of them able to reach beyond their own struggles with that nursing atmosphere Zoe seemed to crave. She sometimes had half the mind to ask Cordelia to be her stand-in. But she never did. Instead she gave her a hug and said: "Thanks for letting me stay." It felt silly to say on some level, because it was the third night in a row she had done so, but she said it anyway. She heard a faint chuckle in her ear and a gentle rub on her back.

"You're welcome", Cordelia said, just as she had the other nights as well. As if she never took the gratitude for granted.

Zoe then released herself, somewhat embarrassed at the rush of emotion and excused herself to go brush her teeth. It was so early in the evening still, only the bedtime of a three-year-old, but she was drained to the core. And she wanted to give Cordelia just a few moments to herself. She thought she could at least do that, with all the privacy she robbed her mentor off these days.

The dark outside the window of the kitchen barely registered with her, until the moment she saw the shadows move. First it appeared only a glitch of the dark, maybe a distant tree caught in the wind or something other, but then it moved closer. Came up the isle. Zoe almost choked on her toothbrush when she recognized him.

"Kyle!" She didn't realize how loud she had shrieked until Cordelia came running into the hallway. By then Zoe was already on her way towards the front door.

"What's happening?" Cordelia demanded.

"Kyle! He's out there!"

"What? But I thought-" Zoe didn't hear more, but ripped the front door open and ran out to meet him. He slouched in his walk, his steps dazed and his gaze singularly focused on the door. Until he saw her; then his face and entire posture lit up. The waxy appearance of his skin in the porch light seemed to give room for more lifelike features and his smile was almost real this time.

"Zo-e!"

Zoe forgot for a moment that he was a living dead and she overlooked the weird bloodless hole in his forehead, because right now he looked too alive for her to believe otherwise. She flung her arms around his neck and hugged him. He couldn't give warmth anymore, but even so it appeared in Zoe's chest, the heat transfer of the undying perhaps. Kyle finally put his arms around her and hummed with satisfaction.

"Zoe- be careful!" She heard Cordelia yell. She slipped out of the embrace and turned to find her standing in the doorway. A low growl started at the bottom of Kyle's throat, but Zoe stopped him.

"No, Kyle. Cordelia is a friend. She's family, okay?"

Kyle looked down into her eyes.

"Fami-ly?"

"Yes, family. Her son too. You remember Cage, right?"

The work behind Kyle's eyes was extensive. His eyes almost spun with concentration and then he gestured for something small. "Cage? Lil bo-y?"

Zoe nodded and couldn't help a smile of relief. How he was even alive, she would have to ask another time. There wasn't even a scratch on him, except for the one on his forehead. And if the alligators had reached that far up, his head would no longer be attached to his body. Yet he was still in one piece. She brushed his blonde curls down over the white wound in his forehead and said that yes, Cage was the little boy.

She turned back to Cordelia, who stayed inside looking worried.

"He won't hurt you. I don't know how he's here, but he won't."

Cordelia looked at her for a while. She seemed to recognize something in Zoe's face – what, she didn't know – and then nodded.

"I believe he's calm with you. I'm glad you have him back. But I can't let him in the house."

"I understand. Can he… Stay in the attic again?"

Cordelia appeared to contemplate it. "Can you promise me that he stays up there?"

Zoe shot a quick look at Kyle. He stood calmly by her side and followed the conversation like a slow motion tennis match and with curiosity. Once the growl had stifled, there was nothing threatening about him. Zoe nodded.

"Yes, I can promise that. And he'll be my responsibility."

Cordelia sighed. She didn't look happy, but she agreed. "Okay." Then she closed the door, but left a small creak of light for Zoe to find her way back in. Zoe debated whether to stay in the newly found feeling of substitute home or settling in with Kyle in the attic.

O0O

Misty wandered around Laveau's house. She knew Laveau had a big family, but they must have gone somewhere else, because it was dead quiet in every room. Except for the violent noises coming from a chamber at the end of the hall, the room Damian was in. Misty was not allowed in there and the hold in her head was now so strong that there was no way she could enter without her mind going fuzzy. She didn't even near it, because the compelling voice in her head had her in an iron grip and the strangest kind of nausea followed, when she so much as thought to disobey.

This was the reason she was no longer trapped in the cage all day. There was no way she could leave the house, no matter how much she wanted to. And apparently Laveau had grown tired of cooking her meals. This way she could do it all herself. She was compelled not to speak unless spoken to, not to look for escape, not to 'do any of her witchcraft' – Laveau still seemed clueless to her actual abilities, but too appalled by her to ask.

Despite all these rules it had taken her all of five minutes of her new restricted freedom to realize what was behind the door down the hall. She looked at Laveau with a knowing expression, until the woman caved and hissed: "What?"

"You brought your boy back", she said and Laveau's eyes grew wide. The hate made room for genuine surprise for just a minute.

"How did you know?"

"The air tastes like death." She didn't say it with disgust, only as a simple fact, but it set Laveau off. Perhaps it was too much of a reminder, because she forced Misty back in the cage and drew the doll out. Misty screamed for hours.

She wandered the halls now, but she had found herself compelled into a person she never thought she would be; someone afraid to speak, afraid to even think in case the presence in her head picked up on it. The sound of Laveau's footsteps through the house was somewhat endurable, but the cold aura she felt in her mind whenever Laveau was about to compel her to do something left her cold with terror. It was so much worse than the fuzziness she had experienced at the beginning of this entrapment. And it had started to feel ever present, a constant malignant hum of alien presence.

At the other end of this long hall was the opening into Chantal Laveau's beauty salon. The doorway had been bolted shut and Misty hadn't seen the sister in here once. Only one man ever came into the house and that was Chinwee. She had learned him by name, because Laveau spoke it. She never addressed him herself. She was supposed to hide whenever he came in and in the event that she didn't have time, she couldn't speak to him. She had stopped trying now. Anything to keep that mind numbing nausea away. The needles she could handle, but the grip on her brain was too much. She sometimes wondered if this was how Cordelia felt, when the voices took over.

Rapid footsteps stole her attention. She already knew that it was Chinwee and she read the agitation in his run. So did Laveau because she appeared from the staircase to the basement around the same time Chinwee made an appearance.

"What is it?" Laveau demanded.

"That boy you brought back. He on the run again. Done killed some cop by his mama's house."

Laveau's eyes narrowed and she snarled with frustration. Her head snapped over to Misty and she uttered words in a language Misty didn't understand. But her body did and it obeyed immediately. Everything went black.

She woke up back in her cage, curled up in the corner with her hands around her knees. The basement was empty and there was nothing to distract her from the sickening hum in her head. It was the aftermath of a full overtake. Laveau hadn't wasted energy on her this time, hadn't wanted to fight with her in case this was the day she tried to resist. She had overwritten Misty's mind completely and made her lock herself in here. She had done this before. The keys to the cage, which normally hung on a hook on the wall just outside now lay tossed aside on the floor. When she locked herself in, she couldn't reach the hook and thus threw the keys away so she couldn't reach them in case she became strong enough to fight the voodoo grasp on her mind. She hadn't so far.

After a while Laveau came back, furious and agitated. She didn't talk to Misty at all, but started gathering ingredients for some potion. She did that sometimes and Misty understood nothing of it. She used nature in a way that was completely beyond Misty's grasp. She had no idea the wild could be abused like this. By now she had figured the grainy powder, which had made her this living puppet, came from the same sinister abuse of the nature she knew and loved.

But right now something else stole her attention. Kyle had killed someone and she needed to know that this faceless policeman was his only victim. She stared at Laveau, hissed at her and scratched on the bars and the wall until she finally got her attention.

"If you don't stop that, I'll bring the doll about."

"I gonna keep going 'till you tell me if he hurt my family. Use all the needles you wanna."

Laveau stopped her potion making for a minute, turned to watch Misty. She measured her for a second and apparently decided to humor her.

"It was only the cop. He's with your family now, the boy, but he ain't hurt them or Chinwee would know."

"What did you do to them?"

"Don't get coy with me, witch", she said and pointed her finger. "I'm not the wicked one here. I only erased some memories so those damn cops stay out of it."

Misty thought it was a lie at first, but something told her Laveau was being honest. Madness usually is honest work. It was grief from losing her child; Misty could see it in her eyes every time the subject of Damian came up. She had not yet seen the boy, but his presence was there in the house always. Like a ghost in the corner, a shadow in every word the Voodoo Queen spoke.

"So you helped him? Why?"

Laveau laughed, mocking, but with traces of genuine amusement.

"Please. I want your family to myself. Ain't nobody gon' help them, but I can't have that police all up in my business while I do it. Now shut up and let me work!"

And Misty was forced into silence. She snarled instead, because she still could. The Voodoo Queen ignored her and focused on her potion in progress, all the while mumbling words in that foreign language. Misty only watched her, hoping that at least her continuous stare would ruin Laveau's concentration. If that was all she could accomplish from here, she would have to settle for that.

It didn't work though. Hours later Laveau laughed with triumph from somewhere at the other end of the basement and then came back to Misty, wearing a smile that made the hairs stand on the back of her neck.

"We're ready", Laveau said. "Time to do your part, witch."

"No", Misty said. She knew it was a fruitless attempt, but she would fight this all the way. Even if the spinning in her brain tore her head off, even if the hum exploded her ears. Even if the nausea turned her guts inside out.

Marie Laveau smiled and the mania flashed in her eyes. "You can't disobey me. You will help me."

"No."

There was no needle at first. She went straight for the compelling. Misty's insides wrenched, the hum in her mind became a roar, while Laveau yelled at her in the foreign tongue, and the words were needles in themselves. Misty stumbled back, doubled over and threw up. She sank to the floor and then came the real needles. They poked all the way up and down her spine and Misty lost all orientation. She withered on the floor in blind agony, hoping that this would kill her before she could carry out the revenge she was compelled to exert.