The One where Vi stalks her ex online and in person.
The woman catches her eye the second she steps onto the dance floor. Her footsteps are firm, assured, weaving her way effortlessly through the throes of dancing men and women. She sticks out like a sore thumb, even though she’s dressed in the appropriate clubbing attire–a white, iridescent halter top that shows off the curling golden curliques trailing down her dark arms, and a glimmering skirt rattling with gold sequins. It’s the way she carries herself, a regal queen among drunken commoners, making a slow but sure beeline for the bar.
Vi pretends she doesn’t notice her and watches her approach from the neon-pink reflections of the glasses she’s polished and replaced on the counter. She grins at the girl who furtively slips a napkin with her number scribbled on it across the counter. 5th one this week. When the girl leaves with a final salacious look, Vi wipes the glass in her hand with the napkin. The woman in white draws closer.
“Mylo,” she says to her coworker, who’s been bopping his head to the thudding music and procrastinating from work for the past 15 minutes, “I need a bathroom break.” Mylo hums, spiky hair bobbing up and down, and Vi slips away from the counter just as the woman reaches it. Behind her, she hears Mylo say, “What'd ya want, Miss?” The back door slams behind her before she can hear the woman’s reply.
It’s a cold, clear night, the winds having cleared the dark sky of heavy, hanging clouds. Vi reaches into the pocket of her well loved red hoodie and pulls out a cigarette, lighting it with a flick of her finger and taking in a long drag. The bitterness of the nicotine on her tongue grounds her. She takes another look behind her, calculating the minutes. Mylo will keep the woman busy for a while, but not for long. Making up her mind, Vi stalks down the street, cigarette hanging loosely between her teeth.
She makes it two blocks away from The Last Drop when she hears the voice. “Vi.”
She turns. She feels no surprise.
“Mel,” Vi replies, her voice giving away no emotion. “It’s been a long time.”
The woman nods. “So it has.” Time had left no mark on Mel. She looked just the same as she did when Vi first saw her among the swirling sands, thousands of years ago.
Vi looks at the ground, drops her cigarette, and crushes it under her foot. She wasn’t done with it yet, but the taste had soured in her mouth. “What brings you to downtown Manhattan?” she asks. She fears she knows the answer.
“I was looking for you,” Mel says simply.
Vi raises her head, narrowing her eyes. “Don’t you dare say–”
“--You’re the second one,” Mel interrupts.
“Fuck,” Vi curses, and punches the trash can next to her. It flies into a shop on the other side of the road, clanging against the glass. “Fuck.”
Mel looks at her, a resolute sort of mourning acceptance in her brown lacquered eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Vi mutters, sinking to the floor and propping her elbows on her knees. “It’s not your fault.”
Mel let out a hollow laugh. “I know it’s not ideal, but it is what we’ve been made for. Look on the bright side. We’re finally doing something useful.”
“How long do we have?” Vi asks, throat dry.
“I don’t know,” Mel admits, kneeling down next to her. “But the first seal has been removed. Then I got the message to find you. I suppose the second seal is coming soon.”
Vi buries her face in her hands. Every thousand lives she’d lived had led up to this moment. She was the second in the machine, the second gear to turn. And she’d set into motion two more, which would bring about the end of the world. The end of humanity? The end of Hell, or Heaven, depending who won in the end? The end of the entire fucking universe? She didn’t know.
“Who do you need me to find?” Vi asks finally.
“I can handle Jinx,” Mel says.
Panic seizes her like a hand closing around her throat. “Mel, you cannot,” Vi hisses. “It’s my job. I’m the second. Jinx is the third. This is how the wheels turn. In order,” she stresses.
“I will find Jinx,” Mel repeats calmly. “The world is ending, Vi. I don’t know what will happen to us after that. Do we continue to exist in an eternity of nothingness? Do we die, our destinies now fulfilled? And if we die, is she the one who’s going to take us? When there’s no one else left in the world, will she vanish, too? I don’t like those odds, and neither should you.”
She sets a heavy hand on Vi’s shoulder.
“Vi,” Mel says firmly. “We’re entering the final days. It’s time to set things right with her.”
She remembers midnight blue hair dancing in the wind, escaping from a thick braid, fanned against white sheets, wound tightly into a bun the day she left her for good. It hadn’t been that long. Just 84 years. A second compared to the tens of millions of decades she’d lived. And yet. And yet.
Vi clenches her fists and straightens back up. “Do you know where she is?”
“The last time I saw her, she was in London,” Mel says softly.
“Still?” Vi scoffs. “Right. That should be easy then.” She stuck out a hand. “I suppose I’ll be seeing you soon.”
Mel smiles faintly. “I suppose so. We’ll meet you in London.” She takes her hand and shakes it with the firm air of a diplomat.
“It was good to see you, War.”
“Always a pleasure, Conquest.”
She takes a plane to London. Vi could have teleported, but planes were one of her favourite human inventions, and with the end of the world looming on the horizon, she wanted to remember it. She flew Economy, because she was cheap that way, and because the seat was so uncomfortable against her spine it would be impossible for her to fall asleep, therefore giving her 8 hours to conjure endless scenarios of their reunion in her mind.
Of course it had to be London. Vi was no stranger to the city. Over her very, very long life of burdening immortality, Vi had learned not to become attached to anywhere. The world was constantly changing, and one day your favourite bathhouse might be razed to the ground and the water might run red with the corpses of dead children. Forests eroded to deserts and buildings and casinos rose like hulking iron giants in the sands. Empires toppled and humans killed each other and then died. Instead, Vi became attached not to a place, but a specific someone . And that was her fatal mistake, because everything she held dear, Vi loved. Including London, despite its dreadful weather.
Caitlyn. That was her name. She had many names, uttered in fear and in reverence by humans for millennia, but Caitlyn was the name Vi knew her by.
A few years after they came to Earth, Powder and Vi reminisced about their arrival, picking shards out of scattered memories and trying to reconstruct a full picture out of them. Both of them remembered being thrust into existence with a voice echoing repeatedly in their ears, so loud and so constant they fell to the ground and held each other, because if their hands were not around each other they would have torn their ears out, trembling in fear and confusion. Vi heard the word WAR thundering in her ears, and saw glimpses of fire and blood flashing behind her closed eyes. Powder later told her that she saw fog made up of tiny particles squirming into human orifices, and that it never came back out. If they did, it was in the form of black rivers of blood. Then there was the chanting, the insistent repetition of their purpose, their name, their existence. That was Their way of letting them know who they were. It was the divine equivalent of passing on information in an email.
When it was finally over, they lay in the centre of a crater in the desert, spanning metres and metres. Exhausted, Vi rolled over to take her first proper look of the person next to her. Powder had the short, stubby appearance of a 5 year old child, short, choppy blue hair and large eyes that glistened brightly like an oasis against the yellow-brown sand around them. From Powder’s perspective, Vi looked to be around 10 years old, her hand nearly double the size of Powder’s small one. As they looked into each other’s eyes, she heard the voice again. “Pestilence,” They hissed in Vi’s ear.
Vi got up to leave first. She clawed her way out of the crater, nails scrabbling against dirt and loose rocks, and stood at the edge, staring up at the moon for the first time. The light painted the endless sands around her, silver and white specks glittering and rising in small puffs beneath her bare feet. She curled her toes against the sand experimentally, marvelling at how soft it felt.
Then she heard a sob, and Vi turned to see the blue haired child in the midst of her shadow, losing their foothold and slipping back into the pit. In the moonlight, the tears streaked down their round face like liquid silver. Something within Vi’s chest twisted, and she suddenly felt very hot, spreading up the bridge of her nose and threatening to spill from her own eyes.
She slid back into the pit and picked the small girl up. It was much harder to get out this time, but in the end Vi had the child’s thin arms wrapped around her neck and their legs cinched around her midriff as she pulled the both of them out of the pit. The nape of her neck was cold with tears when the wind ruffled her hair, exposing her skin. Gently, Vi set the child on the ground.
Another tear escaped from the child’s lowered eyes. Vi swiped it away with the soft pad of her finger, and the child looked up at her, blue eyes wide. Vi stared at them, watching the delicate way their brows arched upwards and how the skin etched faint lies when they scrunched their nose. Their lips were pale, and then they fell open, closed, and then stretched in the shape of a crescent moon.
Vi mimicked the motion, and the child repeated after her until they were both wearing wide smiles, grinning like idiots.
In the morning, a group of villagers found them. In the first decade or so, they grew just like normal humans until reaching a certain limit of maturity. Powder and Vi spent about a century with them, learning their dialect and faces until the descendants of the original villagers tried to kill them, growing suspicious about their never changing appearance. From then on, they decided to be wiser about the amount of time they spent with humans, only staying with flocks for a maximum of 10 years before leaving.
Over the years, Vi came to care for Powder like a sister. She was the only constant in their evolving world, her only source of interaction. But decades after their nomadic life of joining and leaving different herds and settlements, Vi was beginning to sense a sort of restlessness in Powder. She couldn’t blame her. Powder was frustrated. Frustrated with having to bid farewell to good company all the time. Tired of moving aimlessly from place to place until they chanced upon another village. More so, she was angry that the Big Boss had discarded them on Earth with no purpose or objective, seeming to have forgotten them.
Eventually that all accumulated into Powder suggesting that they pop down to Shinar.
“There are people there building a Tower. They say it’ll reach the heavens,” Powder said.
“Is that so?” Vi commented wryly.
Powder’s blue eyes flashed pink, as they were prone to do when she was excited. “Vi, you don’t understand. They’re talking about achieving immortality. They could become like…like us.”
Vi froze.
When Vi came into existence, the Boss at the Big Top had the decency to give her a companion. Powder. She couldn’t imagine how devastatingly lonely it would be without her. They were lonely all the same, watching the friends they made in the early years die and watching villages collapse into dirt. Everything eventually became dirt. Except them. But that shared curse of living made them less lonely when they were together.
She had never entertained the possibility that one day there could be other people like them.
And so they went, finally reaching the building site a few months after, and found the area already abuzz with activity. There were people lugging large slabs of rocks on rudimentary trolleys, people setting up camps, their silhouettes distorted in warm fires. All around them they chattered, bickering in the same syllables of the same tongue.
Then Powder pointed to the Tower, and Vi’s jaw melded with the ground beneath them.
The cold winter air hits her the moment she steps out of the aircraft. Vi gives the plane a final longing look, and went off in search of a toilet. Vi was not going through fucking customs, because they were striking at the airport again and she really didn’t want to wait in line for hours. She was travelling light, as she always did. Shouldering her duffel bag, Vi pondered her next move.
In the toilet cubicle, Vi pulled out her phone, roughly jamming the needle into the tiny hole on the side of the phone until the sim card compartment popped out. That was another clever human invention Vi loved. The internet. Now Vi could spend her free time being chronically online, watching movies on illegal streaming sites and occasionally warring against the typical Trump supporter on Twitter.
When Instagram first came out, Jinx had sent her Caitlyn’s profile along with several winking emojis and a suggestion to “stalk” her. To her credit, Vi did not engage in said stalking, though she was now starting to wish that she had. “It’s public domain!” Jinx would say. She now repeats those same words to herself, justifying what she’s about to do.
She clicks on Caitlyn’s profile. Enclosed within the small circle is a blurry picture of Caitlyn’s side profile. a thick book reflected in her reading glasses. It’s a private account–because The Big Guy hated making Vi’s life easier, but linked to her bio is the instagram handle of a coffee shop.
With a little more digging, Vi finds the website of the coffee shop: “Page Grounds”. It advertises itself as a library-meets-coffee-shop fusion, the pictures showing cosy nooks and beanbags where customers can curl up with a cup of coffee and a book of their choosing. She scrolls down to where it says “Meet our staff!” in an elegant, curling font, and her breath catches in her throat.
Underneath the first photo are the words “our brilliant owner–Caitlyn Kiramman.” What catches Vi’s attention, however, is the book in Caitlyn’s gloved hands. The golden spine catches the light of the camera flash, illuminating the rough leather cover.
It’s Vi’s copy of War and Peace. Or rather, it used to be her copy. She left it behind the day Caitlyn left their apartment and she knew she wasn’t coming back. She squints, bringing the screen closer to her face. It has to be her copy.
On the front cover, where the word Peace had been embossed in golden ink, is a large black paint splatter and a messy white scrawl on top, spelling the word Death. War and Death. She’d thought it was pretty fucking romantic of her. Caitlyn had rolled her eyes when she looked at the spoiled cover, citing how Vi had ruined the clever oxymoron/juxtaposition/whatever literature technique of the title.
And yet here she was, holding it, the book in pristine condition for one that had been through the Great Blitz of London. She is smiling for the camera, the same smile Vi sees when she opens her wallet where the grainy black and white photograph is kept behind a plastic flap.
She lets her mind wander to what-ifs and what the hell does it mean when you keep a graffitied novel from your ex and you care enough about it to choose it for this photo, on this public website for everyone to see, and then shakes her head violently. She was not going to do this now. Vi scrolls further down to the bottom of the website until she sees the address.
Vi nearly throws her phone down the toilet.
Everything’s so familiar. Everything’s too fucking familiar. And yet everything’s changed and she’s no longer part of that world. But again, she never has.
The Tower stretched upwards, splitting the clouds where it sharpened into a peak. Along the base of the structure were steps, spiralled outside the walls. On the steps were people, hoisting stones on their shoulders, pulling stones skywards with long strings and queer, polished wheels, hanging out of carved out windows and shouting instructions to the people below.
Vi was not unfamiliar with human effort, but never before had she seen it executed in such an orderly, elegant manner. Human effort was often futile, but as she looked at the massive structure above her, it felt enduring and permanent.
“I think they can do it,” Powder said, her voice tinged with unwavering hope. “I really do.”
Looking back, that was the first red flag that she should have recognised–the Tower of Babel was doomed to fall. If it could trick an immortal Horseman, one that had been alive for a century and had personal experience with the fragility and weakness of mankind, into believing that humans could rise to the heights of Them, then it might not be a trick at all. It might be plausible. If humans could play God, then who would They be?
Powder and Vi weaved their way through the streets, the Tower looming increasingly menacingly above them. Just before they reached the base of the Tower, a sudden scream startled them.
“Get out of the way!” Vi turned just in time to see a large boulder roll down the sloped road towards them, escaping from its confines where it was strapped to a trolley. Pushing Powder behind her urgently, Vi thrust her hand in front of her without thinking and felt the weight of the stone slam into her palm, sharp ridges cutting into her skin.
A man ran up towards her, leaving the overturned trolley in the middle of the road. “I am so sorry, miss…how are you doing that?” His large brown eyes looked about to pop out of his face as he gazed at where Vi had single handedly stopped the boulder in its tracks. Around him, bystanders looked on with similarly awed expressions.
Vi grunted. “Questions later, pretty boy. Where do you need to get this?”
The man opened and closed his mouth, then gestured lamely to the base of the Tower where a line of large rocks were being rolled along the ground to be attached to ropes and hoisted upwards.
‘Hey!” Powder shouted, waving her arms. “Clear the road!” The onlooking crowd dispersed, retreating to the opposite sides of the road. Turning to Vi, Powder instructed, “Make your way around to the other side of the rock, then let go.” Vi nodded, and gingerly made her way round the circumference of the boulder until her arms strained from holding it in place at the back.
Powder caught her eye and nodded, and Vi promptly released the rock with a grunt. They watched it tumble down the road, stopping just before it could crash into the wall.
“That was amazing,” the man said, wiping his brow. “We could really use people like you on the construction efforts. Would you mind giving me your name so I can recommend you to Grayson over there?”
“Vi,” she answered. “Just Vi.”
The man’s head bobbed up and down jauntily. “Right. Pleased to meet you. I’m Jayce. Jayce Talis.”
Powder shot Vi a look, and Vi put her arm around her shoulder. “This is my sister,” she said. It wasn’t really a lie. For all she knew, they were the only two of their kind on Earth, and that had to mean something when The Man Upstairs created them.
“Powder,” she piped up, extending a hand that seemed very scrawny in Jayce’s large, tanned one. Jayce looked Powder up and down, a faint blush tinting his ears.
“The pleasure is all mine, Miss Powder,” he said.
“Absolutely not,” Vi hissed, fixing Jayce with such an intense glare that if looks could kill, he would be halfway down to Hell right now. Jayce dropped Powder’s hand as if it were a burning coal.
Leaving Powder to mingle with the locals, Jayce brought Vi to meet the aforementioned Grayson. She was a burly woman with wide hips and striking eyes, evidently as strong as she looked, from how she swung the large chisel in her hand, separating rough slabs of rock in tiny sparks. As Jayce introduced the two women, she fixed Vi with a scrutinising gaze and gave her a careful once-over.
“She’ll do. Leave her with me,” she declared at last.
Grayson set her to work on baking some of the blocks. Vi obeyed dutifully, and took her place by the fire, scorching the rusty dirt in the flames, surveying the workshop around her as she did so. It was a dark room with several working benches bunched closely to one another, the only source of light coming through the cracks of wood and from the burning furnace in the centre. On the table next to her was a huge stone hammer with a handle at least as long as Vi, and shiny metallic lines ran down the sides. It was amateur work, but Vi had never seen such a design before. Stone and metal were an unlikely combination. She crossed over to the bench and wrapped her hands around the handle.
“Don’t touch that,” Grayson said, not looking up from her work. “Jayce will give you an earful.”
“He can try,” Vi said, lifting the hammer gingerly off the workbench. “Who is he, by the way? What does he do around here?”
The thumping sounds of rock against rock stopped, and Grayson turned to look at her. “You don’t know?” she asked incredulously.
“I only just arrived today with my sister.”
“I see,” Grayson said. “Jayce is the architect.”
Vi dropped the hammer in surprise. “You mean–the architect for this Tower?”
“Indeed,” Grayson nodded. “He designed everything. Occasionally he helps out at the workshop, or at the quarries, but most of the time he’s holed up in his room coming up with more ideas.” There was a hint of begrudging admiration in her eyes. “Being able to organise so many different teams of different people to work towards a common goal isn’t easy. The man is a genius. I have to give him that. Or Our Creator’s been slipping him ideas.”
Vi hummed in acknowledgement and returned to her work station.
She didn’t consider that maybe They didn’t like it when a human creation could surpass Their Creations.
Vi teleports herself out of the toilet and onto Fournier Street. The last time she had been here, a landscape of desolation and rubble was waiting for her. Humans could spend a lot of time on making bricks, but when the bombs fell, the bricks were reduced back to powder and uneven stones. For a moment she thought that she would find Caitlyn there, body twisted and broken among what was left of their apartment.
The bricks had been replaced and the buildings rebuilt, the colours a few shades more vibrant and new than they had been in the 1940s. There were new restaurants and stores at street level, twinkling with fairy lights. New faces wearing new clothes and holding new drinks. She lifts her face to stare at the sky. As dark and dreary as it would always be at 5 pm in January. It gave her some reassurance of familiarity.
“Page Grounds” was located at the very end of the street. The word “Page” was designed so it looked like it was popping out of a book, and “Grounds” was made up of several plastic brown coffee beans. From the inside, it was lit with warm yellow-orange lights, resembling the welcoming flames of a fireplace on a cold day. As the door opens to allow some customers out, Vi catches the unmistakable scent of roasted coffee beans, tinged with the faint muskiness of book pages. She pressed her nose up against the window, pretending to check out the desserts at the counter (which really did look delicious) and inhaled the scent of coffee. She doesn’t see Caitlyn through the window of the coffee shop, unlike in several of her conjured fantasies. And thank Them for that, because if she had, Vi would have booked the next plane back to Manhattan.
A waitress with an orange bob caught her eye through the window and waved at her cheerfully. Vi returns it awkwardly, and then steps inside the shop at their insistent beckoning.
“Welcome to Page Grounds!” the waitress says cheerily. As she draws closer, Vi can see the splattering of freckles across her cheeks. The name tag on her lapel reads “Maddie”. “Can I get anything for ya?”
“I’ll just have a look around first,” Vi replies politely, plastering a smile on her face. Maddie smiles brightly and directs her to a velvet chair next to a small desk and a wall of shelves with books on them.
There are a few other customers in the shop, two on the second floor, sipping coffee on a long countertop that made up the flat bit of the stairs’ bannister, which roped around to meet the white wall on the left, and the rest on the ground floor. There are shelves embedded in the walls, packed with books, with designated sections labelled according to different genres. The shelf closest to her holds historical novels.
Maddie returns as Vi is idly running her finger along the spine of the books with a menu. Why does she smile so much? Behind the waitress are two baristas, one working the coffee machine and the other arranging cakes in round glass containers. They’re not Caitlyn.
“Excuse me,” Vi says, deciding she might as well rip the bandaid off before she chickens out and leaves for good. She could always disappoint Mel, but Mel was fucking scary when she was disappointed. “I happen to know the owner of this lovely little place, but we’ve lost contact since we last met a few years ago. I thought since I was in London for…a business trip, I’d come drop by and see how she’s doing. Is she here today?”
“Ah!” Maddie clasps her hands together as her cheeks flushed a light shade of pink. Vi unconsciously narrows her eyes. “Um,” Maddie shoots a quick glance at the door behind the coffee station, “would you mind giving me your name?”
She almost says Vi. “Matilda,” she says instead. That name had been a running inside joke between her and Caitlyn since the days it came into existence.
Maddie excuses herself and disappears behind the door behind the coffee counter. Vi worries her front teeth on her bottom lip, curling and uncurling the corner of the menu in front of her. She imagines Caitlyn pushing open the door, perhaps wearing an apron spattered with faint coffee stains, her hair up in a high ponytail, swinging as she looks around the cafe until her piercing blue eyes land on her. She imagines Caitlyn walking up to her; turning away and slamming the door; telling Maddie that she didn’t know who the fuck she was and to ask her to leave; sprinting towards her and kissing her.
None of that happens. Instead, Maddie reappears with a slip of paper.
“Cait–Miss Kiramman’s busy right now, so I’m afraid she won’t be able to come out right now. But she asked me to give you this.”
Vi takes the slip of paper and unfolds it. Seeing the familiar, rounded cursive is like a punch to the gut.
We close in half an hour. If you choose to wait, order yourself a cup of coffee and a slice of cake on the house. I suggest you try the sakura latte and the matcha and strawberry cake while you’re at it. When you hear the bell ring, leave the shop. If you manage to follow me, then I’ll see you at my apartment. Don’t be obvious about it.
Powder had already set up camp by the time Vi returned, shoulders aching and palms sore. “I suppose you got a job now?” she asks, stoking the fire with a long tree branch.
“I guess,” Vi says, rolling her shoulders. “What did you do when I was gone?”
Powder brightened, her blue eyes deepening into magenta. “Jayce showed me his different inventions and designs. They really are remarkable, Vi. Being able to come up with such unique ideas and making them a physical reality…” she gestured at the Tower above them, “can’t get more exciting than this.” Her tone became more wistful towards the end, and Vi could see her remembering her numerous failed efforts at eccentric tool designs that constructed themselves perfectly in her head but fell apart in her hands. Powder had always enjoyed tinkering, trying to make gadgets that would make their lives easier. A particularly interesting one was a cylindrical container that held water, with multiple holes punched through the lid, so Vi could invert it over the more delicate crops when she was working in the fields in some of the human settlements.
Vi reached over and grabbed Powder’s hand. “Your designs are special too, Powder. You’ll get there.”
Powder pouted, but Vi knew she felt better about them. She stood and started vigorously stirring the stew above the fire with her stick. “Do you think we can stay this time?” she asked.
“We always stay.”
“But we always leave.”
Vi folded her arms over her knees. “If the Tower works out, maybe this time we won’t have to.”
Powder frowned. “You keep saying maybe.”
“Nothing’s ever for certain, Pow,” Vi sighed. “You of all people should know that.”
She knew it wasn’t the answer Powder wanted to hear, judging from how she rammed the stick so forcefully there was now a visible indent on the bottom of the pot. “I’m just trying to be realistic here, Pow–”
“--A Tower that reaches the fucking heavens isn’t unrealistic enough for you?” Powder spat, “and yet here we are. How can you say that nothing’s ever for certain, when you’re so hell bent on insisting that nothing can ever change and everything just turns to rot anyway, no matter how much they’ve progressed? Does that mean we shouldn’t at least try? Or are you saying that even trying is futile now?”
Vi sat at a loss for words as she stared at her sister’s retreating figure as she angrily stomped away.
The stew inside the pot began to froth and shriek. Hurriedly, Vi lifted it off the fire, accidentally burning herself on the hot metal, and spilled half of the broth onto the ground, where the soil eagerly drank it up. Great. Powder was going to be even more angry when she came back.
She ruminated over the stew, angry and confused thoughts swirling in her mind, Powder’s words echoing in her ears.
Powder was right, a small voice whispered from the deepest part of her heart. Vi was afraid. Too afraid to accept that peace and human life and promises could be permanent. Having spent most of her life bouncing from human settlement to settlement, Vi had seen too many withering bodies to ignore the fleeting nature of time. She had never truly become apathetic to death, no matter how much she pretended she was. That had been the way of her world for so long–humans died and left her alone. There was no point in connecting with people other than Powder, no point in letting someone else love her and know her like Powder did. That was enough and she was content with that. To be wanting more was to be human.
Did she have that little faith in humanity? In their resilience and endurance? Did she truly believe she was any different from them?
Vi wished the Big Guy hadn’t just deserted them down here. What was the point of making them toil and wander around Earth until the day came to destroy it?
A voice snapped her out of her thoughts with a light tap on her shoulder. “That looks good. Could I have some of that?”
It was soft, velvety, barely more than a polite whisper. Not enough to mask the steeled edge underneath their tone. Something in Vi’s heart clenched and coiled.
She turned around and was met with vivid, cerulean blue eyes. It almost felt like falling in a bottomless pit, drowning in the dark blue depths of their irises, the flames and the bubbling pot fading behind her, getting farther and farther away until she was sucked into a limitless room where no one else existed but the dark haired woman in front of her.
She heard Their voice again, for the first time in centuries.
“Death.”
The matcha and strawberry cake might be the best thing she’s ever tasted. She makes a mental note-to-self to mention that to Caitlyn. Maddie’s shift ends and she disappears behind the elusive “staff only” door, apron draped around her elbow. Through the frosted glass, Vi can see her speaking to someone. She wonders if it’s Caitlyn.
Caitlyn’s secrecy was…odd, to say the least. She had always been a private person, but never dramatic. And to Vi, this entire, secret message scribbled on the back of a folded receipt and asking Vi to trail her after she closed up, affair was awfully James Bond. Caitlyn was definitely hiding something. Not from her, but from other watching eyes.
She finishes her cake, and then leafs through Wuthering Heights absentmindedly, keeping an eye on the door behind the coffee counter, leering furtively over the cover of her book. As her coffee cooled next to her, the few customers around her got up and left, pushing their chairs in, one by one, until she was the only person left in the cafe.
The silence in those few charged moments is deafening. She keeps her eyes fixed on the door, trying to discern if the moving shadow she was seeing was a figment of her imagination or if it was an actual person. If Vi was lucky, then that wouldn’t belong to a person. She taps her finger against the wooden tabletop, as if the vibrations through the air would thread its way through the door and set off what she so desperately wanted to hear, wherever the bell was. Standing, Vi considerately picks up the forgotten menu on her table and crosses to where the counter is, slipping the menu into one of the plastic dividers.
Something behind the frosted glass visibly moves, a dark, pixelated silhouette. Vi snaps to attention. She wills the shadow to come closer, to place a hand on the doorknob and turn it so they came into the light, but instead she’s greeted with its retreating, the colours fading from solid black to light gray as they moved farther away until it disappeared from her view. Vi curses under her breath, considering.
Do I or do I not leap over this countertop?
As if the cosmos was responding with a resounding no , just before she could place both her palms flat on the marble surface and get ready to jump, she heard the clanging of a bell cut through the silence.
“Fucking finally,” she mutters to herself under her breath, and then sprints for the door.
With Fournier Street being a relatively popular tourist spot and 6 pm being the after-work rush hour, Vi is met with a stream of people cruising up and down the street as she pulls open the door. Frantically, she whips her head around, searching for a familiar shadow among the throes of people.
Above her head, the bell rings again. The suspended clapper clangs against the cover of the bell, chiming three times to the left.
Vi tears her eyes away from the bell and lets the door slam shut behind her. She lets the crowd swallow her and elbows her way through like a salmon swimming against the current, earning her many viciously British glares, as well as the occasional rage-filled “fuck you” aimed at her back. Vi feels herself smirk. British accents and swearing just went together like bread and butter.
And all of a sudden she sees her, a black cap over her dark blue hair, and once she does Vi can’t tear her eyes away. Just for a moment, Caitlyn turns ever so slightly to the left, revealing her aquiline nose, and she can almost feel Caitlyn’s watchful gaze on her, silently checking if she’s following. Vi looks at the floor hurriedly, cheeks burning. When she looks up again, Caitlyn has already been swallowed up by new passerbys. Vi picks up the pace, falling into a brisk step.
A few times, Vi thinks she sees her again. But the face would turn, brown eyes on a round face, or the hair would be dyed a terrible shade of dark green. She keeps walking blindly, however, with nothing to follow and no end destination in sight. As the main road wound into thinner pavements and quieter streets, the crowd dispersed, leaving the scant few trudging towards their houses, looking as dead inside as one could look after slaving away at a desk after a 9-5 job. She thought it would be easier to find Caitlyn this way, but she was nowhere to be found. Fuck. She’d lost her again.
She runs her hand through the spiky bangs, scraping them back in exasperation and letting them fall in front of her eyes, as if that would clear her vision and Caitlyn would magically reappear on the street, leaning next to a lamppost she had missed. Vi had imagined Caitlyn popping up on the sidewalk, on the other side of her door, at the bar in The Last Drop, countless times during the last few decades. Maybe this whole cat-and-mouse game was another one of her stupid delusions. How could she have been so stupid? After things had ended, how could she possibly believe Caitlyn wanted to see her again? She certainly didn’t, at least for the majority of the fifties. She should never have come to London. Why the fuck did she listen to Mel? Damn her, damn the end of the world, damn her stupid duty and her stupid existence.
Sinking to sit on the curb, Vi thinks about her friends at The Last Drop, of Mylo’s terrible pick up lines and Claggor’s stoic demeanor that did an entire 180 when he DJed in the bar. She thinks of Vander, the father she never had, who left the bar to her when he passed. She thinks of faces, fading in and out of time, human faces that she had loved and cared for involuntarily even though she had warned herself repeatedly against it. She thinks of the Tower of Babel and the Roman empire and Koch’s discovery of bacteria. Human progress. And how it didn’t stand a chance against Their word.
Across the street, the lamp on the corner pulsed, burned, and then exploded with a spark. She lifts her head just in time to hear the falling of glass.
Vi gets to her feet. This wasn’t over. Not yet, at least.
The appearance of the woman shook Vi up for the rest of the night. Powder returned, brows still locked tightly together, but she had evidently cooled off a bit already, judging from how she didn’t kill Vi for spilling the soup she had spent the past hour making. Vi hoped that the reason for Powder’s sudden calm had nothing to do with a certain Jayce Talis.
They exchanged a few words before Powder went to bed, disappearing into the tent they’d set up. Vi would have liked to join her, but she was having the irrational thought that Powder could hear the nonstop questions in her head if she got too close. Instead she sat by the fire, thinking.
She had never entertained the possibility that there could be other people like her. The woman was evidently someone , since The Boss thought that she was important enough to introduce her to Vi. What did They mean by Death? Was she the literal embodiment of the concept? If so, then she had to have been on Earth for a lot longer than Vi had. More powerful, too, since she had disappeared as swiftly as she had appeared. Vi couldn’t do anything like that yet. And–the most chilling thought–if she really was Death, what was she doing here? Who was next? And why did she introduce herself to Vi now?
Even when she closed her eyes, the image of the woman was seared into her eyelids. Her fine, delicate features contrasted with the sharp angles of her cheekbones and nose, the perfectly arched brows and cupid’s bow. And those eyes. Pale ice on the outer ring, darkening into cerulean and then spilling into pitch black irises that made her drown.
Soft footsteps approached her, and Vi opened her eyes. Most of the people around them had already turned in for the night, and there was nothing else but the crackling of fire and the occasional twittering of owls. Through the flames, she could make out two blurry silhouettes warped by the smoke. They seemed to be embracing, and as they pulled apart, Vi recognised one of the women. Grayson, in her dark robes that was stained red at the hem. The other woman was dark skinned, hair pulled up in an elegant updo, threaded with a branch of blooming white flowers. She was dressed entirely in white and almost seemed to glow under the moonlight, a pearl among rust red sands. Vi shook her head to herself and made a mental note to ask Grayson about her the next morning.
As the two women went their separate ways, Grayson caught her eye and waved, calling out something indiscernible.
“What?” Vi said.
Grayson repeated it, a squished jumble of words. Vi frowned, but then nodded absentmindedly. They were quite far away from each other, and she was sure that anything could wait till the morning. Yawning, Vi climbed into the tent and curled up next to Powder, who took up most of the space inside with her sprawled limbs. Sleep overtook her in minutes.
The next morning, Vi awoke to pandemonium. Powder’s spot was cold beside her, which indicated she’d probably risen well before her. Outside the tent, she could hear loud voices overlapping with each other, so much so Vi couldn’t make out a single word. Blearily, Vi stumbled out of the tent and then promptly stopped in her tracks. People were all around her, gesticulating madly and making harsh, unfamiliar noises at each other. Everywhere she looked, there was angry confusion and panic painted on people’s faces. The noise was deafening, so loud it felt as if the ground was shaking.
Something was wrong. No, not something. Everything was fucking wrong.
“Powder!” Vi shouted, and began jostling through the sea of people. “Powder!” It was like being caught in a storm, the voices a cacophony of thunder rippling through the crowd as she fought through the multitude of flinging arms and accusatory fingers. As she squeezed through a tight blockade of men who looked about to wrestle each other, Vi met the tearful eyes of a child clinging to their mother’s legs, swinging to and fro in the current. A short distance away, someone shoved another person. In such close proximity, bodies pressed against each other and a line of screaming men and women toppled, like trees falling sideways from the epicentre of an earthquake, and a sudden shock coursed through Vi’s body, lighting her blood on fire.
It felt as if she had tunnel vision, and the world around her bled red and flaming. Around her, fleshy shadows danced, pummeling and mutilating each other, sending waves and waves of power diffusing into her skin. She wanted to laugh and shriek and fall apart, but she clung to her last shred of sanity and screamed Powder’s name over and over, wishing her voice would break but it only got louder as more and more screams joined the cacophony, and the shadows whirled faster and faster beside her, their dark limbs twisting and joining with each others’ bodies, causing ruby droplets to fly and paint her world an even brighter shade of red.
“VI!” Someone was screaming her name over and over. For how long she didn’t know, but she suddenly became aware of a heavy weight around her shoulders and back, dragging her back down to the earth. She fell to her knees and dragged her fingernails down her face, ignoring the sharp streams of pain and blood rolling down her cheeks. A guttural roar escaped, as if she was spilling poison from the deepest depths of her being, and she thrashed, trying to shake off the stubborn weight.
Then she heard the loudest boom of thunder, resonating and crashing like a tsunami wave onto the ground. This time the ground really did shake, with vibrations that sank into her bones and pulled her downwards, lying flat on the ground. In her feverish state, she briefly wondered if she was the one who caused it, and now she was reaping the consequences.
“Oh, God,” she gasped. It may have been the only time she used the Big Man’s actual government name. “Please, just make it stop.”
It thundered on for what seemed to be a millennium. Behind her closed eyelids, she felt red flood her mind and leak out her ears, as if by removing her own blood she could see the world normally again. After a while, the red did fade, but when she opened her eyes all she saw was orange-red sands alight in the air, blocking out the Sun.
When it was finally over, Vi opened her eyes again, praying vehemently that she would see something other than red. Three heads obscured the sky above her–Powder’s worried, sand spattered face, an unfamiliar woman with gleaming gold markings on her face, and the blue-eyed woman from the night before.
That was when Their voice echoed in her ears, agonisingly slow and didactic. “Conquest, War, Pestilence and Death. The first ride for the beginning of the end.”
All four of them stilled, exchanging wary glances.
“Humanity’s failed conquest of ascension, the wars that will result because of their division, the diseases of evil and unchecked ambition that will follow, and finally the death of everything we know and love,” the dark skinned woman, no, Conquest, mused lightly. Her expression remained as stoic as ever as she extended a hand to help Vi up amidst the corpses and rubble, stained red by the sand. “My name is Mel. It’s nice to finally meet you all, my fellow Horsemen.”
After getting terribly lost in a park, Vi finally found herself, quite literally, on Death’s doorstep. There was the doorbell inches away from her, the mahogany door smooth beneath her fingertips. She tries not to think about the woman inside, and instead focuses her thoughts on whether she should announce her re-entry into her ex’s life with a tinny rendition of “London Bridge is Falling Down” or if she should just knock for nostalgia’s sake. In the olden days, there had been no doorbells. Utter shocker.
The fates had evidently decided for her, because just as Vi raised her fist to knock, the door swung open from the inside.
Her dark hair hung loose around her shoulders, framing her face. She was wearing yellow flip flops, wrinkly Gudetama-patterned pajama bottoms and a matching top. Judging from the half full glass of wine in her hand and the dark trails of mascara along her lower lash line, she had evidently been in the middle of a heavy drinking session, which was quite impressive, seeing as she’d only had a time frame of 10 minutes to down an entire bottle of wine, from Vi’s suspicions. She looked far from how Vi saw her last, dressed in a high waisted top and straightly ironed skirt, hair wound into a tight bun underneath a white beret, looking as put together as a person could while reducing Vi’s world to dust.
And even when she was dressed in wrinkly cartoon patterned sleepwear, Vi felt her heart come to a stop as her surroundings warped around her into a tight space that enveloped where Caitlyn stood, one hand on the door jamb and the other clutching a glass of wine. That was the power Caitlyn had over her. She feared it and loved it.
“You–” Caitlyn began to say, but then toppled over, spilling the wine all over her white shirt as she fell face first towards Vi. She caught her before she could face plant onto the floor. Caitlyn was burning up, the heat radiating from Vi’s arms to her face, which indicated that she was very drunk indeed.
Immediately, she heard someone come thundering out of the living room. “Cait–” an all too familiar voice called until they came into view and went silent upon seeing her face.
Suddenly it all made sense why Caitlyn had been so secretive about her whereabouts, why she couldn’t speak to Vi directly in public, and why there were an entire grimoire’s worth of Shielding spells and protective spells cast around the house.
Vi sat on the doorstep, Death passed out in her arms, fucking Jayce Talis ogling the pair of them like a confused child, and contemplated her life choices.