Chapter 180: Goodluck
ÉTIENNE
"What the fuck are you?"
The thing wearing my brother’s face stared back at me, its eyes glinting with something familiar and yet terribly wrong. Grief twisted across its features, but that sorrow soured, congealing into a malevolence that Yann had never possessed. The mouth moved, and I saw my brother’s teeth, but the voice behind them was a parasite, crawling through each word, careless and hungry.
"I cannot be your big brother? Really? Why is that so impossible? Is it because Yann would not call you on your own filth?"
My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, refusing to shape a reply. The air felt thick, sour, and cold against my skin.
The thing’s lips peeled back into a smile that showed too many teeth, a flash of something predatory behind my brother’s gentle mask. "Maybe I am not Yann," it whispered, the sound slithering between us, quieter and razor-sharp. "Maybe I am only the shape your guilt decided to wear tonight. Or maybe the real problem is that Yann should have survived, not you. He would have known how to live with the aftermath. He would have made those men pay. He would have worn rage like armor instead of letting it rot inside him."
"Stop." The word scraped out of me, but the creature pressed on.
"He would have slit his own throat before letting them near enough to do what they did to you. He would have fought. He would have spilled their blood."
"Shut up." My hands balled so tightly my nails bit my palm, but the air between us only grew colder.
"He would never have taken it the way you did."
"Shut up, shut up, shut up," I choked, a tremor climbing my spine.
The thing’s next words slid out, slow and venomous. "Not like a wretch. Not like something so emptied of dignity it couldn’t even pretend to stand."
Sound vanished. My hearing tunneled, replaced by the roaring of blood in my ears. The words wormed their way through the cracks in my defenses, finding the old wounds I had tried for years to bury. Every syllable landed like a claw, scraping at memories best left unremembered, and for a moment, I could not tell if I was still breathing or if the thing’s voice had hollowed me out completely.
The apparition’s words did not stop, and neither did the creeping rot of its presence. Its voice was colder now, more clinical, as if it had rehearsed all of this in some dark corner of my own mind, waiting for the moment it could deploy every syllable with surgical cruelty. The light in its borrowed eyes flickered, not with humanity, but with the pitiless gleam of something that enjoyed the flaying of a soul.
"And when you finally did something, when you finally acted, it was not because you were brave." The voice grew almost bored, as if reading from a catalog of my failures. "No, it was to make yourself disgusting, to infect your skin with repulsion. If no one wanted to touch you, then no one would. That was your sum total of resistance, wasn’t it? Not courage. Not defiance. Just a simple, ugly barter: your own body for a hope of safety."
The words crawled over my skin, cold and sticky, and I could feel them burrowing beneath the surface, making a nest of shame in the softest parts of me. The field around us wavered, forget-me-nots crushed underfoot, their blue petals bleeding into the soil like tiny, shattered eyes. My hands moved before my mind could catch up, the violence in my blood older than thought, and I felt my fist collide with the apparition’s face. The contact was sickeningly real. Bone and sinew and the memory of my brother’s features gave way beneath my knuckles. But the thing only staggered, its expression twisting through surprise and delight before it came for me, mouth opening in a grin that showed too many teeth, some of them not even human.
We crashed into each other among the flowers, and for a time, I found myself winning. Rage had given me strength, a wild and unyielding energy born of every night I had survived, every humiliation endured, every secret buried so deep it festered into something sharp. I drove the creature backward, each blow releasing something old and necessary in me, a primal urge to destroy the thing that had made a home in my nightmares. The thing’s flesh was wrong beneath my hands, both yielding and unbreakable, as if it was made of memory and spite instead of muscle and bone. Its mouth kept moving, leaking words even as I struck it again and again.
"You do not know what I have been through," I hissed, the words torn from my throat, raw as open wounds. "You do not know the half of it."
The apparition grinned, catching my wrist, its fingers icy and too tight. "But if I am your guilt," it said, whispering against my ear, "and I know all of this in such exquisite detail, what makes you think there is any part of you I do not already own?" Its face pressed in close, the skin puckered and burned, the eyes black with accusation. I could smell the scorched hair, the copper tang of blood, the rot of old grief. "I know your type. I have always known your type."
With inhuman strength, it jerked me forward by the collar, its head cocked in mock sympathy. My feet scrambled for purchase, petals sticking to my skin. Its grip felt like frostbite, numbing and searing at once, and I tasted bile on my tongue. The apparition’s voice dropped to a low, intimate cadence that made my skin crawl. "The second you let her back into your life," it said, slow and deliberate, "your will began to corrode. Every wall you built, all the careful, terrible purpose you forged from pain, started dissolving under her gaze. You were always going to betray them, your parents, and you know it." The word "parents" landed heavily like a grave. "It should have been you that night. You, soaked in that special gasoline, the fire licking at your heels while they screamed for you in the smoke. I wanted it to be you. And deep down, beneath the rage you have nursed for years, you wanted it too. Because at least then, you would have found an end, a silence, instead of a lifetime of carrying what you should not have survived."
A coldness that was not just fear but recognition settled into my bones. The apparition’s mouth hovered inches from mine, and I could see the maggot-white of its gums, the way its tongue flicked over broken teeth. Its breath was the stink of burned flesh and regret.
My voice, when it came, sounded like it belonged to someone else, someone scraped hollow and left to echo. "I have tried," I said, every word thick and rough. "I have tried to be what was required. But I do not want to become a monster until nothing else is left. I want to live. I want to be happy. I cannot hold this rage inside me forever. It will eat what is left of me if I let it."
"In what world?" it said. "In what possible version of any future does this work? Her family did this to yours. And if you intend to spare her, the one person you will not put in a box, in what world can she look at the man who beheaded her mother and understand? In what world does she stay?" It leaned in. "You are not building a future. You are building a monument to your own delusion."
I did not answer.
Because part of me, the part I had not been able to fully silence since she walked back into my life, did not have a clean answer for that.
"And let me tell you something else," it said, its voice dropping to something almost intimate. "They are not at peace."
The words hit differently from the others.
"Your parents. How could they be at peace? Given what was done to them, given how violently they were taken, they could not have crossed over cleanly. You understood that when you saw Prim come back the way she did." It looked at me steadily. "Somewhere in your soul you already knew. They are out there. Wandering. In the specific pain of the unjustly dead who cannot find rest because the person who is supposed to bring them peace is here, in this field, considering whether Margaux Beaumont is worth his parents’ eternity."
"She was a child." My voice came out fractured.
"And what were you?"
I had no answer for that either.
"If you have any dignity left," it said, "you will make whatever time remains count for something. Curse the goddess for what she allowed. Let go of this mortal coil. The dead Theodore, the one whose life you have been living as a costume, had the right idea. He understood when enough was enough." It looked at me with something that wore the shape of compassion without containing any of its actual substance. "You do not have to make the choice actively. Just stop choosing to stay. The darkness is already here. Let it have you."
And it was right that the darkness was there.
It had been gathering at the edges of the field since the conversation began, thick and liquid in quality, pressing inward from every direction, and I could feel the weight of everything it had said settling into me, not as acceptance exactly but as exhaustion, the specific exhaustion of a person who has been fighting the same fight for so long that the prospect of simply stopping has stopped feeling like defeat and started feeling like relief.
There was truth in it.
I could not entirely dismiss any of it.
Maybe this was the end of the thread.
The darkness reached me.
It was cold and complete, and I did not fight it the way I would have fought it an hour ago, and it covered me from the feet upward in the way water covered something it had decided to claim, and I let my arms drop because they were so tired; they had been tired for so long.
Then I heard her voice.
It did not come from inside the field or from the darkness. It came from somewhere above and outside of both, the specific sound of Margaux screaming his name, screaming "come back," her voice breaking on it, the way voices broke when a person had gone past the limit of what they could contain.
And then: if not for me, for the revenge.
But I heard only the first part.
Her.
Not the revenge. Not the boxes. Not the years of construction and careful terrible purpose.
Her.
Something in me reached upward before I had consciously decided to reach, my hand extending toward the darkness’s ceiling, toward wherever her voice was coming from, and where I expected to find nothing, my fingers found something. A light, gold and overwhelming, the specific gold of the light that had come from her hands in the corridor when she had not known where it came from or what it would do.
I touched it.
The field dissolved.
The darkness dissolved.
I came back through the surface of unconsciousness, gasping, the air going into my lungs with the force of something that had been denied for too long, and the first thing I saw was her face, very close, wet with tears she had not bothered to wipe away, and the first thing I felt was her hand holding mine.