A/N: Is it just me or is Grimes literally Helga Pataki? At least in this fic, the physical resemblance is so exact that you really should just imagine her as playing the part of H.G.P.
So for this chapter, I am departing heavily from what we have known as my prose before. Consider this something of an experiment, but also a return to a much more raw, poetic form that I had years ago. It just felt right for this chapter, as we see the aftermath of the party through Helga, and then through Arnold.
We are working towards the next big reunion soon! Keep courage in your heart for these two. They need it!
Keeping Arnold, Chapter Nine: If She Wears a White Dress; If He Behaves His Very Best
"It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane." - Philip K Dick
Ugly rotten raw riot wrinkled in long stitches with yellow sap and tar of pus in between the threads, big globs of coagulated blood tumoring around the stiff razor wire neat in rows lacing the spaces rent in shredded shards folding by clefts the suddenly severed, once firmly fully whole halves of Helga's heart, unweaving themselves in lightning chorus lancing long and inevitable.
Wounding words were never written so prettily as prose put in proper airs as the breathing heaved out in shiver-whispers by Arnold, sky blue and true and simple, strong: I was engaged to Lila.
By oath and by vow the purest principle of affectionate amity shoved asunder in shadow forms. All created could crumble within this verse, words worn as proof against weapons of cruelty and envy. And he, oathesome and long of promise and form, architect of the phrase within the stirring complex cavity of her heart. None nulled the nimble nighted roar of her rarely reared unburdened umbral love, than the swung cudgel cunningly kept secret until the swing came round: I was engaged to Lila.
Currents swift and terrible trembled through her tin limbs, held at akimbo angles awkward and angry to her nature, a furious form thrown to accessory of motion in the swirling nebula of calculated chaos of her stride, so suddenly stilted. Stumbling, shaking, stupefied, Helga held reality in shapes abstract and awful in her awareness, tenuous tenebrous and trembling at the edges of vision and experience. Lines crossing and plaid striped lights scissored the gaps, obscuring the path her twitching trembling limbs hurtled her headlong down with disregard to dangers.
Mind a furor, uncabled, jacked out of reason into lower awarenesses, deeper in the rolling round winters of thought, senses and sensation simply ceased to make sense. Wrestling tumble in the deeper trenches of panic, theorycrafting, woolgathering, a slave trade in struggle to simply understand.
Massacre massacre massacre massacre massacre! Riot riot riot riot riot! Hell hell hell HELL HELL HELL!
Torturous thoughts swiveled from ear to ear, bouncing back through her eyeballs and pushing out tears, foaming at the breakers of eyelids squeezed in pain to see, waves crashing in agony foam through forest of thick lashes caked, mascaraed, fashioned to please. Dark rivers ran down features curled in hate, pushing through creases of rictus torment, teeth bared in junkyard threat.
Upside down reality squashed and sat on the limned edges of thought, pushing through inescapable gravity the hideous memory of the meteoric pain of 'I was engaged to Lila."
I am in Hell, I am in Hell, this is Hell, I am in Hell.
Every microscopic filament and incorporated shard of her tall, crooked form shuddered against the hated phrase, coherent frequency of "NO" reverberating, river-ran through, coursing the catastrophe of dim, dark, umbral denial she begged so prettily to be untrue.
What do I do, what do I do? What am I? Where is this? This is Hell.
Grotesque grip of giddy grim, clutched at abdomen warmed by alms, sacred communion calmed within cornucopic sea of fertility, a holy offering still warm, hot, plasmatic and white, white, white, still within, still within, so messily forgotten and now the reminder, the clamor and the call of union recently yoked, many times over in passion and in need. Still within, still within, still within!
O, to be freed and washed of this wretched stuff of life still within her!
Tumult of the soul, oh urchin, greedy in all forms, grappling with the insides, like a diamond mine, paid for in blood many times over for a preciousness, a valued gift, a ransom too high. Helga, sickened to nausea, overwhelmed by the hostage of herself she paid for the privilege of Arnold, wished and wishing for an oblivion of the self.
Unmake me! May the fleshy forms of my fingers dig through this petty pink barrier of skin and unravel every vein and capillary woven in scripture of his name! Unsex me, rid me of this gender and this figure built cell by cell to compliment his, tear from me this womb and these pillars of life at my hips that sing and bear fruit for anything less than myself! Scoop free my marrow, pluck out every hair, rid me of these breasts, my teeth, these eyes, this nose, these limbs, tear them free, unmake me! Unmake this that is Helga! Unsing the song that hummed me to breathing, if every breath thereafter has been in harmony for him! I am an obscenity, a filth, a dowry for a Liar Prince, a Beggar in Bridal Dress!
How does one reject that which defines yourself? If what is in your soul you find hateful and obscene, if the very weave of the fiber of your being is a loathsome, abhorrent needle in the skin, what else is there but to destroy everything, and hope that there are enough pieces left in the aftermath to rebuild something recognizable.
Helga spiraled into herself, pounding feet with pendulous purpose on concrete cold and uncaring, pushing herself towards the ugly rim of some awful horizon of tomorrow, the navigated hunting paths of a Neolithic, savage time and place of brutal messes and blood, entrails, meat, bone, viscera, corpse.
Reject me from this hateful Earth! O Gravity, reverse your prideful course and cease your inevitable pressing of my wretched form! Hurtle me bodily, my silhouette aflame with the speed of this ejection, relativistic speeds stretching me thin and infinite, until the bonds of my essence snap successfully and I am rent apart as I blur past the lonely edges of remote solar systems! In this lonely neighborhood between stars, may I freeze and may the eons see my atoms depart from one another until I am Gone! Helga Geraldine Pataki!
Bounding, braying in madness and wroth of wrinkled wounded affection, a massive ribbed and boney apparition of some distant specter's past looming in impenetrable silence where a shadow should stalk behind her, Helga came by instinct or by miserable fate to the very position in space where once a little blonde boy of immeasurable kindness and light blinked quasar streams of white and silvery starlight cream, the moon, the little flavor of flame and honorable piety to goodness gave to Helga her Heart.
Drenched as by a flood of hate sweat, shivering with fury and pain, Helga stared at the bow-topped reflection of that distant past in the street-front window, now Woman, now fully Made Whole by the stirring of something unnamable she shared with that Other.
The contents of her stomach pushed themselves painfully past her teeth, she bent double and a miserable shriek pulling with that emptying spill. That gruesome bile sputtered and spat from the open wound of her mouth, so recently kissing around Arnold's body, so recently a red wet flower pressing love into the warmth of a chest she spent a lifetime wanting, contained within it every last ounce of kindness in her heart for Arnold Shortman and Lila Sawyer. Every brutal heave was the verse of a prayer to curse them dead.
Helga Pataki wiped her mouth, renewed and made unwhole, broken into what may someday reassemble and shamble into a shape resembling the H.G.P. of a distant yesterday, and stared at the empty creature that shook, thin and skeletal, in the mirrored reflection of the street window, fogged by the heat of her expulsive explosive self-execution.
Arnold held the biting cold ice pack onto his face, standing dumbstruck and numb in the quiet gloom of the kitchen. Helga had gone, a terrible storm of fury from the building. He heard her pained shrieking, inarticulate and wordless, echoing down the street for blocks until the din of traffic drowned it out in the extreme distance.
He had never seen anyone so angry and hurt. He'd never imagined such fury. Words and thoughts escaped him, and he merely stood shirtless in the empty spaces of the kitchen, waiting in between his heart beats to make sure it wouldn't stop.
Within the honest heart of himself, Arnold knew he deserved the rancor and violence he withered under from Helga. Hideous regret and guilt had piled in him, mounting impressive peaks of outlandish nightmare with which he was resigned to clash himself against in an endless Mea Culpa. From the moment he betrayed his true heart for the appeasement of another's grand fantasy, he set himself down a path of false righteousness. Now there were two women in ruins because of the clumsy, too-naive fumblings of an ocean of good intentions and a hearth built of empathy over restraint.
Arnold sat in the kitchen chair of his youth, trembling from the adrenaline crash and the nauseating pain of a bruised cheek bone. Her strike was true, but had just barely missed a critical structure that would have ruined his face, perhaps permanently. The blue bulge of the ice pack stank of rubber and Freon, but dulled the angry heated throb of the fateful impact enough that he could manage to move his jaw.
How did this happen?
Arnold knew full well how it happened. It had been his hand on the blade that cut and severed the bonds they painstakingly, fearfully exposed themselves to build. Months ago, when we squatted in front of Lila's wheelchair and made a promise neither he nor his spirit had the capacity to keep. An empty promise as meaningless as the wind it took to speak it, but bullying and bowling over everything in its calamitous path like a Jovian hurricane many planets in scale. None were totally blameless, none escaped unscathed without a morsel of blame pinned to their vests, displayed. Lila was just as shakily aggrieved and guilty to him, asking of him an impossibility, crunching him to her wounded body and daring to utter forever. Helga hoarded blame; within the atomic furnace of her stellar fusion heated heart, unforgiving and unyielding, an avalanche of flame named Envy penetrated the shrine to each other they built with their bodies.
Her open mouth in passion.
Selfish, sensual thoughts of sensations ghostly and recent invaded the trauma of the naked now. Helga had done things with and to him that even an active imagination would merely play at recreating; never had he lost himself in the exuberant joy of another, and never could he imagine anything as profoundly important to his soul. Like the unformed blade of some ancient smith, they were folded together, then hammered into one shape in thousands of repetitions. She was the forge and the water that quenched their heat. He was the hammer and the unmoving anvil. Working in whirlwinds, flesh melded, Arnold and Helga had touched the lights within themselves together, daring for that unspeakable spark to close the gap between their individualities by means of a love so hot and pure it was elemental.
And in the wake of such a sacred ritual, a hymn finally joined by two voices in microscopically perfect harmony, the hideous blemish of the mistaken past profaned every space and corner of their shared temple of worship. Every Icon was desecrated. Every Image blasphemed. All forms of Truth in the hallowed halls gone.
What was left to salvage? What even could be done? Was there even some alchemy of effort that could miraculously transmute the dense and lifeless lead of this corpse of a thing into the vibrant living gold they found together again?
Drunk thoughts, exhausted images of a bleak future alone in San Lorenzo taunted him. Squeezing his eyes shut, Arnold struggled to seek answers against the galaxy of flashes of lights against his eyelids, the apparitions of sight lit in defiance against the backdrop of willful blindness. What writing on these inner walls could be shone upon by those haunting motes, those shapeless dancing forms of imagined visions? What was within his heart except the false wisdom of a too-old man called Good, who saw all his works crumble to ruin and naught in the end? What victory in this bleak and blasted wreckage, despaired Arnold, could bring something resembling a repaired and healthy tomorrow?
The absolute lunacy of accepting another human being into your heart, and placing them within your identity, and rebuilding the walls around yourself to accommodate this new shared existence, and changing the locks so that they could come and go as they please, and nodding and saying yes this is how I wished to live, and pushing every nervous fear and nightmarish anxiety of betrayal or abandonment or-worst of all-apathy down into the basements of thought where they could not ever dare to disturb you, and living knowing the storm is coming every day and doing absolutely nothing to guard against its destructive passage, and simply trusting that everything will be all right with them in this piece of you now, is a naked bravery of exceptional stupidity and the single most important facet of the shared existence in human experience; without this conscious insanity, executed against yourself, what would be left except billions of scared strangers simply waiting to die?
And so Arnold, struggling with his own betrayer's heart, resolved to discover what, if anything was to be done about Helga.
Helga collided with the room when she entered it, frightening Brian into dropping the glass of water he was drinking, the concussive force of her re-entry into a Human space blasting everything around them with titanic calamity. Eyes hot with rage, the prime, elemental Helga wildfired against the walls of their apartment, the glass-tearing pitch of her shriek splitting the seams of their enclosed ceiling sky.
Helga, galvanized by this new vibration discovered in incoherent, indecipherable agony, vibrated the very air around her with this fever of fresh broken identity. Extreme fragility laced throughout with iron rebar, a lattice of exquisite construction and permanent strength, an Eiffel Tower of herself, shot through full of holes yet standing tall and proud and iconic. Brian was electrified by the verve of her effervescent, manic exultations. She barely noticed his presence, for what is a man to a goddess but one of countless others? In the terror-cadence of her heart, which beat in wild defiance of the hideous criminal injuries that rent it in twain, what room was there for the petty mewling existence of a mortal man extruding his unwanted irritant self into the perfect calamity of her newfound spirit?
Colors never seemed to touch her as she floated in speeds too fast to track to take him.
Brian held helpless hands in protest against her, struggling with laughably pathetic strength of a single human being against the all-consuming, unstoppable juggernaut of her rage hurt. Helga laughed his folly into his mouth. Resisting the kiss of a horned beast, stepping blood-slicked and gore-flecked into the innocent wood of some callipygian nymph to wrest that innocence away, was as laughably impossible as asking tomorrow not to come.
His blood filled her mouth as he filled her teeth. She became dizzy at the taste of it, teeth painted with the rushing copper water of life. When Helga parted him from her, she dropped her head back and laughed, trophy of her viciousness drooling in scarlet down her cheek, then jaw, then a swift line down the swan's curve of her neck. To fill her teeth with this eager prey, leaping as a frightened rabbit accidentally into the pursuing jaws of a wolf, to taste the sour tang of fear in the flesh and the sharp note of pain in the blood, and to conquer this moment, to reckon it hers, and no one else's, that is what rolled laughter from her throat. That is what had her throw Brian headlong away from her, a snarl of disgust escaping her like a beast.
Into the nest she stalked. Her feathers were mottled and molded, and she had the mind to correct them into shining silver brilliance again.
She heard the coughing, the dragging, and the spitting of the man she marked behind her, Brian folding his limbs under himself for purchase, struggling to rise to the sink and spit the black clot of scabrous blood she sheared out of his tongue. A disastrous song hummed itself in her blood-smeared lips as she regarded the pathetic inch-high reflection of the creature she used to be staring frightened at her in the mirror. In no time, this wretched, unwanted vision would be exercised from her imperious gaze, and only the majesty of this new, royal flesh would shine forth, a terrible radiance. All powerful. Without form or boundaries. Untouchable by the weapons of Man. Unharmed by Arnold, and invincible to Him.
Hands orchestrated a chrysalis symphony of change, cascading the harsh astringencies of bleach through the gold wheat of her hair.
Color drained from her, washing down the drain every happy yellow she ever knew.
A bath so hot she blistered scoured every cell he had ever touched from her skin.
Helga stepped from the nest, renewed, different, savage and beautiful and full of predator's grace. Brian watched her, appropriately fearful of the Lioness stalking him in circles through their shared spaces. The scent of sex clung to the air. Blood tinged this fog, Brian's blood, spilled unwillingly and gulped by both hunter and victim in shared communion: of Brian's blood they both tasted, and now she would taste his flesh.
Pressing into his space, molding the heated and raw and pink form of herself against the weak shape of a man, Helga willed his passion into fullness. A delighted hand touched him, eyes full of lightning and dark with the hunt. Brian offered up the moan he had held for seventeen years, a pretty gift to the goddess that commanded his flesh into compliance.
His hand pressed against her. He struggled to push her away.
Helga's heart stopped, then exploded into murderous fearful beating.
Sick panic rose with tsunami suddenness within her. The Sun Goddess' skin shed. Peeled away, it left The Girl naked, afraid, trembling, rejected again by the weak hands of men.
Unspeaking, Helga retreated to her room, no longer a nest but a cage. Curling in the meaningless safety of the bed empty of Arnold, Helga's tortured heart begged for quietude and oblivion. She wanted to recede, to have the corners of her vision darken and retract until only a pinprick of light remained, and to have her hearing roar with quiet until her ears rang, and to feel the annihilation of a dreamless sleep drape her into nothingness. She prayed for this. She prayed to a nameless form she gave no shape to take Today from her, and keep Tomorrow for the bargain.
At last, sleep came.
Arnold stood suddenly, brought to the present from unpleasant memory by the persistent rapping knock of someone at the front door. He was not expecting anyone, and the small percussion was too gentle to be Helga. He set the ice pack down on the table, walking briskly to the front door. Swinging it open, the concerned faces of Phoebe and Gerald looked up at him from the stoop, apparently unsurprised by the state he found himself in.
He stared at them silently for some time, his face a passive expression of antipathy.
"Arnold," Phoebe started, and Arnold walked away from the entrance, leaving the door open. He didn't feel like talking - his face hurt too much, for one - but he knew that they had something important to tell him, and answers for questions he intended to ask them.
The two of them stepped tentatively into the kitchen, silently watching Arnold, shirtless, refresh the ice pack with new cubes. He didn't try to be quiet about rummaging in the ice bin in the freezer, feeling that this tiny tumult was enough to express his exasperation.
Phoebe sat at the table, visibly searching for the words to say to her friend. Arnold sat across from her, leaning back in the chair, holding the ice pack to his swelling bruised face. Watching her.
She finally started to speak.
"Arnold, we understand that you broke off your prior engagement with Lila." Silence. She pressed on. "We also understand that your informed Helga of the same former arrangement. I'm guessing she did...that."
"Shit man, you okay?" Gerald couldn't hold his tongue any longer, the tension in the air between the old friends palpable and suffocating.
"Helga nearly took my head off. I'm pretty sure she cracked my cheekbone. It's a good thing I know how to take a punch the right way, or we'd be doing this in the hospital."
His two friends winced. He found himself feeling oddly hostile to the gesture.
"She tore out of here in a frenzy and told me to never speak to her again."
"Wow, that bad, huh?" Gerald clicked his tongue, crossing his arms in front of him. "She sure doesn't pull any punches."
Arnold just looked at Gerald, unsure if that was intended to be a joke.
"Well," Phoebe interjected, "what is important right now is what we do next. The next steps are critical, and time-sensitive, we don't have much time to act before-"
"I'm sorry," Arnold interrupted her. "Next steps? Act? You've lost me, Phoebe. I intend to honor her request. She sealed it pretty convincingly. It was hand delivered."
Gerald and Phoebe blushed at the admonishment. Still, Phoebe pressed on.
"Arnold I am sure that if you logically look at this situation, you'll see that it is salvageable and a product of passions inflamed and let loose without restraint. If cooler heads prevail, and with a little luck, we may be able to reverse the damage that has been done."
Arnold felt a little ill at the thought of approaching Helga again. He'd never forget the chilling look in her eyes when she demanded he never speak to her again. She was deadly serious.
"Phoebe, I appreciate you wanting to help, I really do, but this isn't going to be something we can just talk out."
"Listen to yourself, man. You're always the one that says we can just talk things out." Gerald sat next to Arnold when he made his point.
"It's not that I'm not willing to talk, it's that she is violently opposed to the idea. If I could just explain myself, maybe she would understand and we could move past this. But you didn't see her, Gerald. You either, Phoebe. It was bad."
Phoebe and Gerald looked at each other with worry. The look concerned Arnold, but also made him suspicious.
"What? What do you two know?"
Phoebe slowly pulled her phone from her purse, swiping the screen a few times and then showing Arnold an image on the high definition screen. It was Helga, staring at herself in a storefront window, haggard, wet with sweat, her eyes occluded with blind berserker fury.
A caption over the top read, in white block lettering, "LOOKS LIKE THE DATE DIDN'T GO SO WELL LOL"
Arnold narrowed his not swollen eye and grabbed her phone. "Who sent this? What is this?!"
Gerald sighed and pointed at the phone. "An unknown number sent that picture to me, to Phoebe, and we're pretty sure everybody from PS118. Including Helga, is my guess."
Blitzkrieg confusion toppled Arnold's self-control. He felt himself start to hyperventilate. Who could be mocking her? Mocking him? And why?
"It's Fuzzy Slippers, is my guess." Gerald held eye contact with Arnold when he shot him a confused, disbelieving look. "He's the only one well connected enough in Hillwood to get a picture like this and distribute it so quickly. We got this text maybe twenty, thirty minutes ago? And came here right away when we did."
"Fuzzy Slippers? The fake person you made up for your stories?"
Phoebe shook her head, taking her phone back from Arnold's still outstretched hand. "Fuzzy Slippers is a real person. However, Gerald and myself were never able to puzzle out their true identity."
"How? That was all real?"
"Well, sort of," Gerald started. "It's a really long story, but the basic gist of it is that, Fuzzy Slippers was an urban legend himself for a long time. I'd hear a rumor or a tall tale and it'd have his name attached. Hell, sometimes the stories would be about people we knew, sometimes it'd even be about us, but I never heard nothing about the actual person behind the name until middle school."
"Why? What happened then?" Arnold was amazed this was the first he'd ever heard of this story. What else was Gerald keeping secret?
"Fuzzy Slippers started to move against folks. Rumors started getting uglier, then there was evidence of some private stuff getting leaked, and people started getting really hurt. Like, real hurt. Nadine moved away it got so bad. Rhonda had to lay real low for a bit."
"You act like this all came to an end? What stopped it?"
"Well, we did." Gerald flashed a grin. "Really, it was mostly an accident. Fuzzy Slippers got sloppy. Phoebe and I were on their trail for a long time, years, trying to map out their movements based on the timeline of secret events that were getting outed. We even set up a sting."
"It was Gerald's idea. We decided to purposefully rendezvous in a somewhat conspicuous, but still only privately known to ourselves location and...begin our romantic relationship. We set the location along a known path of travel that we had established as a pattern for Fuzzy Slippers...our intent was to catch them in the act, or at least catch one of their informants."
"What we got was even better." Gerald pulled something out of his back pocket, setting it on the table. Arnold recognized the book Gerald had let him borrow to find Helga. The little black book with all the secrets of Hillwood carefully scribed.
"That's how you got this? Fuzzy Slippers gave it to you?"
"Nah man. Dropped it. We almost saw 'im, and started chasing the sonovabitch down. I don't know if they dropped it on purpose to lose us or if it was an accident. Either way, it stopped everything. I mean, dead stop. Fuzzy Slippers vanished man, just gone into thin air. All traces gone. The scent dried up. So we stopped chasing. It's been a long time since we heard a damn thing from Fuzzy Slippers."
Arnold set the ice pack down on the table, digesting this story slowly. "So what, you think that they came back, specifically to harass Helga and me? Why? Who would want to do that?"
Phoebe calmly put her hand on Arnold's. "We're not sure. We very carefully eliminated the possibility that Fuzzy Slippers was anyone from PS118. I went over the data myself. Everyone from PS118 had something extremely terrible happen to them because of Fuzzy Slippers. Everyone. It's someone from the outside, and someone who is particularly invested in all of our personal inner lives. My theory is that your return somehow inspired them to return to activity. Unraveling the meaning behind this move will be the key to discovering their identity and making them stop for good."
"Why me though? Why Helga?"
"You're the most prominent target. What better way to announce your arrival than to capitalize on this disaster between you two? Everyone at PS118 will know that he is back, and capable of hurting us again."
Exhaustion permeated every cell in Arnold's body. Emotionally exhausted from the roller coaster ride of breaking things off with Lila, then the miracle of the party and Helga's show, and then the live-defining heart-trauma of reconnecting to her, followed by that final hideous moment when she left him, stricken, Arnold felt incapable of handling this new development. It was most certainly unwelcome. His body ached; Helga had not been easy on him tonight, at any juncture. What was left of courage in him felt vestigial and remote to his access. If facing Fuzzy Slippers required that he harness his heart, he'd need time to find a new way to harness it.
A slow, molasses crawl thought of sweet sickness grew inside him. What he found most repugnant of it was that only he could have the perspective to think it, as abhorrent as it was. He voiced this awful thing, hoping to dispel it by means of speaking the ridiculousness of it aloud.
"It might be Lila."
If they were surprised or shocked, Phoebe and Gerald couldn't be seen expressing it physically. Maybe Arnold was too exhausted to notice the nuances of their expressions any longer.
"It's not possible," Phoebe finally said.
"Yeah, you're right," Arnold admitted, relieved that he could forget he thought it.
"It can't be her, because she has been hurt by Fuzzy Slippers maybe more than anyone else," Phoebe explained further.
Arnold rubbed his eyes. He felt like finding this Fuzzy Slippers person and giving them ten times the treatment Helga had given him.
"Well whoever it is, we'll need to talk about what to do tomorrow morning. I'm too tired to keep this up tonight. Too much happened."
"Agreed, a fresh start tomorrow is just what we need. Why don't you meet us at the diner?"
"The diner? Again?" Gerald sounded annoyed. "Why don't we meet him here? I'm tired of pancakes."
"Does that work for you, Arnold?" Phoebe sounded patient.
He rubbed his cheek with his fingers, pressing into the sore spot of contact. He really just wanted to sleep and end this nightmare of a day. He wanted to see Helga. He wanted to hold her again, and to apologize, and make her understand.
"Just tell me you've got a plan." He sounded desperate enough to surprise himself with the force of his pleading.
"We do. It's a good plan."
"A helluva plan, buddy. We've got something big right around the corner. You, Phoebe, and myself, all going with Helga to her dad's beach house next weekend."
Arnold didn't have the energy to be surprised anymore. "Of course that's the plan. That's exactly what we need, cramming Helga in a beach house with me, the guy she just decked. Perfect. Listen, I'm too tired right now to worry about how that will possibly happen or work. I just need to sleep. I'll see you two in the morning."
Arnold saw his friends out the door, politely but firmly refusing to hear any more details of this new development. They were crazy. He felt simultaneously blessed and cursed to have such insanity on his side.
When he tenderly laid his head on his pillow, still smelling of Helga's faint perfume and the bodily scent of her, the coital mingling of hers and his, Arnold immediately fell into a fitful, troubled sleep, full of dreams of a sun goddess that melted his wax wings.
Helga's eyes cracked open, slivers of darkness of her room betraying that it was still evening, or at least early morning. Something nudged her weakly, no doubt the selfsame nuisance that pestered her awake moments before. Bleary-eyed, exhausted to the extreme, and only dimly remembering the tumult of her evening thus far, Helga pushed her naked form up into sitting, and peered down at the side of her bed in the darkness to assess whether she meant to violently abjure the vexation daring her to break slumber.
Brian shook gently in the darkness, holding his hand over his mouth, darkness slick over his fingers and face, skin a pale canvas that moonlight shone silvery white.
Helga's mind awoke to full alertness at the thick smell of blood coming from Brian, mingling with the sharp tang of the taste of it, ghostly reminder of something terrible she had done to her loyal friend.
You can't even control your anger, a cruel voice spat at her from the corners of her mind. Helga's hand flipped the lights on in a flash, brilliantly illuminating the darkness of her room, shining her attentions to the chaos of her previous passage, laid out in gruesome diorama before her very eyes. Those same watering crystal blue eyes held contact with Brainy's, now rolling and fluttering into unconsciousness.
She had wounded him most viciously. She recalled biting into the fat flesh of his tongue, drawing blood. The sick memory of drinking this made her ill, and willed up the contents of her stomach onto her bed, mostly a sticky web of mucous and the brown clots of what she had drank from Brainy in her fury.
Clothes found themselves on her, she wasn't sure how, and she was belting Brian into the passenger seat of his van, trying not to panic.
The reward for your loyal love is a lifetime of pain, that sinister feeling called to her again.
"Shut up!" She shrieked. Brian's eyes opened a little, and he turned his head to regard her in the driver's seat of his van, confused.
Great, now you're talking to yourself, Helga. But for real. It reminded her of the time Arnold had left. That terrible time, filled with violence and ugly memory, and hurt. What had brought her to self-control had been lashing out and hurting herself. Now, it seems, someone she loved dearly had taken her place in her stead. She pressed her foot harder on the accelerator, hoping to outrun her conscience.
She fireman carried Brian into the minor emergency, helping him fill out the paperwork and giving him water to drink. He held on to consciousness for the majority of the wait, holding onto her hand as well, and holding his mouth.
I can't believe I did this because of Arnold. She was certain Brian would never want to speak to her again, once he could start speaking.
I did this because Arnold betrayed me, she realized with a sick shock. He asked Lila to marry him. Somewhere, in some stinking jungle, the same jungle he told me he loved me and kissed me for the first time, Arnold got on bended knee and presented a precious ring, sick with butterflies and hoping for a future with someone else. Not just anyone, Lila Sawyer.
Helga felt an awful thing clawing at the edges of her awareness, threatening to pull itself lurching into strength again, scrabbling and clawing at the cage she hemmed it in. A fury in her with overwhelming strength begged for release again. She felt so good when she let go. The violence in her felt amazing when she let it loose, and she didn't feel so weak and powerless any longer. Arnold robbed her of all her agency, he took everything from her that made her feel normal.
But he did say 'was,' a small, trembling and fearful voice spoke up. She looked at Brian next to her, sleepily, weakly watching C.O.P.S. on the waiting room television. She chewed the inside of her lip nervously, unwilling to let that kernel of hope find purchase in her heart.
Brian got called and she stood up to help him. She was surprised when he stood under his own strength, shaking his head for her to not follow him in. Fear touched her, as did worry. What would he say?
His hand lifted from his mouth, and he smiled a red smile at her. "It's okay," he slurred. "I just bit my tongue."
Helga fell back into her chair, hands going over her eyes so he didn't see her start crying again. Brian didn't even blame her. He didn't even think to blame her. Overwhelming guilt harried her heart, harassing it into hysterical pounding. She felt faint, and got herself a paper cup of cool water, hand trembling as she drank.
She was worried about Brian. But, she realized, she was also worried about Arnold.
Oh god, I hit him. I really hit him. I hit him as hard as I could. I put everything behind that punch. I really hit him. I can't believe I did that, my sweet Arnold, right after I had finally confessed my truest, most tender affections and expressed them physically with you! I can't believe the exclamation point at the end of tonight's sentence is a literal punchline, delivered in fury, with an encore of nearly biting my best friend's tongue out. What a hideous beast I am, what a shambling mess of aggression and anger. What is wrong with me, that my reaction to Arnold's painful confession is to try and kill everyone? Is Arnold's broken past really so terrible?
Helga sat with her hands in her eyes, worrying, arguing with herself, her newly silvery white hair a cascading curtain around her features.
Can I forgive him for this? Should I? Is it possible to give up his first engagement and forgive that it didn't belong to me? Do I have the required grace to forget that he's been with Lila before he was with me? Can I stomach the feel of his hands when they first felt her?
Can I live without him if I can't let it go?
Helga didn't have the answers. She put everything she had into tonight's performances, the party was a massive release of ten years of pent up history and frustration. Every day of missing him was in those songs, every moment she had bitterly missed his presence calibrated in verse and harmony.
But all of that was an expression of their past. She didn't know what their future would look like. It didn't exactly have a good start.
You had him, you held him in your arms. He was inside of you, and you bared your soul to him and he accepted it. Never forget this night, she swore to herself. It infuriated her that she was unable to remember that impossible joy without also remembering that ugly admission. She felt angry that Arnold had ruined this long-awaited connection with his stupid history with Lila.
Maybe you can have him again. That same little voice spoke up in her heart.
She looked up when the door opened, Brian coming out with a cleaned up smile. He slapped his prescription in her hand, taking her arm to walk to the van while she read his script.
Vicodin. Brainy's gonna have a good time. And I can get started worrying about how I'm going to apologize to him.
After starting the van, looking over at Brian's exhausted form start to fall into sleep, Helga tentatively allowed herself to think: And apologize to Arnold.
Despite herself, she realized, as she drove them home, she could not imagine a Helga without Arnold. The beasts within her that haunted the sacred spaces of her heart threatened to destroy her and everyone around her when she harnessed her passions, but Helga Geraldine Pataki loved Arnold Shortman, and she would just have to learn to control these violences. Nobody was perfect, not even him. There were bound to be complications. She would find a way to try to forgive the unspeakable crime of not being First.
She realized with a sad, grim determination, that loving Arnold was all she knew to do. There wasn't a next step without it being taken towards him. Somehow, someway, there would have to be reconciliation. She hoped she had it in herself to find it, and that Arnold would receive whatever apologies she could muster up.
The alternative was an oblivion she dared not name.