Anomie.03

Characters/Origins/Spoilers: Kade, Seven (Year Zero/The Alters)

Local Network World: 0333

“Seven! Wait!” Kade stumbled out front of the apartment building, hopping on one foot, managing to keep her balance, before tripping and falling into Seven, pulling them both to the ground. Seven just lay there under her as Kade managed to prop herself up with her hands, looking down at her. Seven stared blankly up, eyes shining with the residue of old tears. Dry and wet at once, they glinting along her waterline like cheap glitter eyeliner.

“What do you want?” Seven murmured. Kade was silent. That particular kind of silent a person gets when they haven’t quite thought far enough ahead to compose a sentence. So for the better part of a minute, Seven watched Kade, hovering over her, prevaricating silently in the warm night air, silhouetted by street lights.

“Why did you come-then-go?” Kade finally managed.

“Doesn’t matter.” Seven shrugged from under Kade. Her forehead creased slightly inward. “How are you staying up?”

“What?”

“You’re basically…planking. I really didn’t figure you for having this kind of upper body strength.”

“I…work out - ”

“ - You fucking don’t - ”

“ - Who gives a shit, anyway? Can you just…be fucking real with me, for once?” Kade muttered, clearly exasperated. Which came very close to making Seven smile. Kade rolled her eyes, getting awkwardly to her feet. She held out a hand. Seven slapped it away, pulling herself up to her feet and brushing herself off.

“Yeah? Be real with you? Like the rest of you are with each other? With Bel? The hardest of fucking passes, thanks.” Seven sighed.

“You’re such a fucking pain in my ass, you know that?”

“Well yeah,” Seven shrugged. “That’s our whole dynamic. You piss me off, I piss you off…and so the cycle goes.”

“It doesn’t have to.”

“I agree. Stop being a self-righteous, self-loathing little twat and maybe we’ll get along better.” Seven held out her arms, challenging Kade to respond. For a moment it looked like Kade might, her mouth opening slightly, dimpling at the edge in a frustrated little sneer, but…she clearly thought better of it, shaking her head and folding her arms over her chest, laughing quietly to herself. She smiled sadly, forcing the focus back onto Seven with a pointed little nod.

“What did this to you?” She asked, eyes going to Seven’s split lip, then to her bruised face.

“Doesn’t matter.” Seven shook her head, avoiding Kade’s eyes.

“You went after It didn’t you? The thing that made everyone go away? That Bel told us to stay away from?”

“Fuck Bel.” Seven muttered, mirroring Kade’s arms-folded seriousness.

“What…was it?”

“I don’t know. I can’t describe it. All I know is that, whatever you think it is, it’s not…that. We can’t fight it. Even if I wasn’t the only only willing to actually try. So why don’t you just go back to your actual friends - ”

“ - I love them, but they’re idiots. And they don’t need me. You need me. So let’s talk. Okay?” Kade implored, reaching out towards Seven. Seven took a step back, head cocking to the side, lips forming up a tight little scowl as her eyebrows furrowed.

“The entire world vanished. Everyone in it. And it makes no sense. Have you gone online, since it happened? Things are still being uploaded. I did a test, as a grocery store; I took some apples, left, came back, and they were restocked. Electricity is still on, the world is still moving, there’s just no fucking people. It’s like they’re here, but we can’t see them. We can’t see anybody, except us.”

“If that’s true, that’s better right? We can…we can work that problem, maybe?”

“No, little idiot. It’s worse. You remember before we ended up on Bel’s world, all the power we had? We could tear worlds apart. We could create pocket dimensions. We could travel the Multiverse. But we couldn’t do anything like this. That puts it in a whole other category. Also, it’s not weather. It’s by design. It’s surgical. It’s targeted. And we’re the fucking target. The fake versions of us Bel dreamed into being - ”

“ - Seven, we don’t know that.”

“Of course we fucking do. Powers? Nerfed. Memories? Surgically amended. Moving between worlds? Hard blocked. We’re imaginary. And none of you will talk about it, or confront her - ”

“ - Yeah, and neither will you! - ”

“ - I don’t want to die, Kade. Not thrilled about being alive, but there’s a big difference between that and basically asking God to erase me for narrative convenience reasons. I can’t say the things to her that you can. We all know I’m here ‘cause I’m part of the cast, not because any of you actually like me. She doesn’t care about me the way she cares about the rest of you.”

“Seven, I - ” Kade tried to interrupt; failed:

“ - Fucking spare me, this isn’t a Regina George realisation monologue, I genuinely don’t care. It’s just…important context. All of you could say something. About the…state of ‘us’? About what happened today? But you don’t. Don’t get me wrong, if we exist to perform for her ego; if that’s what it takes to keep me alive, like…hand me my fucking tap shoes, I’m all in. But you? Them? This is so fucked, and so wrong, and instead of trying to talk her into doing something, you all went and got fucking wasted. That’s not self-preservation, that’s nihilism.”

“Right, cause you’re one to talk about nihilism.”

“A swing and a miss, Kadence.” Seven chuckled bitterly. “Even the other me, the real me, out there in the Multiverse, she never lacked a reason. She always cared. Maybe about the wrong things and for the wrong reasons, but she gave a shit. As do I. And you don’t. None of you seem to. So don’t tell me what I need. Cause whatever it is, it’s not you.” Seven finished the sentence with a pointed little growl. It tripped memories for Kade. Memories of standing in sundered, barren cities across from her nemesis, each of them daring the other to be the one to initiate the downward spiral. But that wasn’t this. Kade sighed, shaking her head, staring at the sky and falling back against a power pole, laughing quietly to herself. She smiled as she watched Seven’s arms fall to her side in a plaintive little shrug. She held up her hands, also laughing now.

“You’re right.” Kade finally acknowledged. She sucked in a deep breath. Held it. Exhaled powerfully before meeting Seven’s eyes. “Yeah. You’re right.”

“Huh?” Seven gave Kade a look like she couldn’t quite believe she’d just heard what she’d heard.

“You’re absolutely right. We suck. And it’s…actually insane, how much we suck. You know she hasn’t even spoken about Dawn, yet?”

“Yeah, that’s…not a good sign.”

“No. If this had happened on my world and that wasn’t my first fucking thought? I don’t know what to make of it, Seven.”

“Neither me.” Seven admitted.

“And look, the rest of us, we’re divorced from our old lives - the lives we remember, whether or not that was…us, living them - but…something might be wrong. Beyond the like…” Kade gestured broadly. “End of the world of it all. Because we should care. We always used to. And I don’t want to not care. Fake or not, we exist. So let me help you find something that we can use to convince her to get in the game. Something that’d make it…I dunno, the right narrative decision.”

“You think I’m…right?” Seven asked, clearly still adjusting to that specific revelation.

“Really? Is that so unlikely?”

“Yes?”

“Okay, my thought process goes like this: we all…sort of know what’s happening here. And if I’m not really Kade, and you’re not really Seven, I figure…why don’t we just…do something different? Less diametrically opposed? I don’t want to spend my life re-litigating the vendetta of the template I was sketched off of, do you? Let’s make a different choice, here. Use me.”

“Weird phrasing.”

“Don’t care.” Kade took a step towards Seven, reaching out slowly towards her face to brush a couple of curls away from the bruising beside her eye. Seven flinched away, but then let her, avoiding her eyes. “You’re me. I’m you. Everything else is yet to be defined, in this place. Okay?”

“Okay.” Seven conceded with a small, reluctant nod.

So where do you wanna start?” Kade asked. Seven’s lips tightened as she considered that.

“I think I should…show you the ‘X’’s.” Seven murmured.

Kade and Seven made their way through South Bank. The sky was dark and starless; the city glow polluting the night…the hemispheric radiance of it bleeding up into the atmosphere, and laterally out in all directions, casting haze and shadow at strange, contradictory angles. Kade wondered if Seven was actually right; if they were just…out of sync with a world continuing to turn normally without them. That was the problem with the ‘genre’ in which they found themselves, this…confused miasma of science fiction and fantasy. The logic was forever askew, full of random bullshit held together with technical duct-tape, and it…annoyed Kade more than she liked to admit. Reality was bent to the point of broken around them. Nothing seemed to make sense except in retrospect, and even then, it all seemed a bit fucking convenient. It had seemed…less like that, in her memories of the time before Bel’s world. She supposed, based on Seven’s theory - the thing they’d occasionally talked about and around but never comprehensively through since getting stuck on this world - that was some other girl. She remembered trying to bring it up with Olivia, back in the early days. In retrospect, maybe that was the thing that had driven a wedge into their connection? She remembered, from before they’d ended up on Bel’s world, they’d been…well, realistically, hard to define. But whatever they’d been, it’d been…big. Important. And with Anna here - back from the dead, ostensibly - it made sense that Olivia’s focus had gone where it had, but still. Kade couldn’t help but feel there was more to it than that.

But…anyway, according to Seven’s framework, Bel’s world was a mess because Bel was a fucking mess; and they - Kade and Seven; all of them but Bel herself - were ghosts of Bel’s power. The power to see and interpret the broader Multiverse as if it were her own imagination - and manifest will onto her surroundings. Kade hoped Seven was wrong, but she suspected she probably wasn’t. It didn’t just feel bad and wrong. It felt…true.

“God, real fucking…theatre energy…” Seven griped, slowing to a halt as the ‘X’’s came into view. Kade nodded slowly, eyeing the flood-lit backdrop silhouetting the diffuse forest of posts and ropes. They continued to walk, slower now, towards where the field of crosses sat.

“It might be her.” Kade mused.

“Huh?”

“Bel, I mean. She might’ve…made it. We’re all this one dumb bitch, y’know? We’re all prone to this kind of…overly dramatic, uneven bullshit. Maybe she just imagined the whole apocalypse into being. Created this…whatever ‘It’ is.”

“Plausible.” Seven shrugged.

“‘Plausible’?” Kade raised an eyebrow.

“What do you want from me?” Seven sighed. “Can you prove it? Could we do anything about it if you could? You don’t…fight God, Kade. You just…fight the obstacles she throws up to test you.”

“Never figured you for - ”

“ - Yeah, but I’m probably not me, so…” Seven bit back. “Let’s just…do the Veronica Mars thing, okay?” She finished as they reached one of the crosses. About nine feet tall, it glared down at them from above, all…dark, dirty wood and thick knotted rope.

“What, make me actually ship a straight couple for once? Hardly seems like the time, honestly.” Kade muttered. The cross was…monstrous in a way she couldn’t actually quantify. Something about the thickness and ugliness of the posts, the haphazardness of how the ropes hung from them…the way the light from the floods behind them seems to curve around them more than it was actually physically blocked by them. She shivered in spite of the warm, still night air.

“You know, you’re not as funny as you think you are.” Seven observed drily. Kade glanced over at her to see her staring up at the posts and ropes.

“Oh, I dunno. That Otherwhere thing was pretty funny.” Kade smirked.

“Yeah, anticlimaxes are hilarious.” Seven deadpanned. “Anyway, what do you think? The obvious read is like…pseudo-christian, but - ”

“ - The ‘X’ shape thing is weird.”

“Right. And so is the blood-and-absence part. It’s like…” Seven raised a hand, fingers tracing cords of rope and dragging their way down onto the rough wood. Kade watched as errant splinters bent elastically against Seven’s skin as she dragged it past them. The wood seemed…almost restless, somehow?

“It put you up there, didn’t it?” Kade asked. Seven shook her head slowly.

“I did that myself. I was walking through them, and…one of them, it…” She trailed off, looking back at Kade. She pursed her lips, brows furrowing, before looking past her into the middle distance. “It felt like…mine.”

“Yours?”

“I couldn’t really help it. I wasn’t thinking, I just…” She kicked against a small protrusion, low on one of the beams. Like a little step. “Got up against it. Raised my arms. I remember the ropes, when I slid my wrists into the loops, they moved by themselves. Tight. Quick. It hurt. Rough, scraping my skin, it was painful…but I remember feeling…safe? Almost like I was finally where I was meant to be.”

“Like sacrifice? Punishment?” Kade murmured, moving forward to stand beside Seven. Seven shook her head again.

“No, it wasn’t like that. It was this feeling that there was something missing in me that I hadn’t been aware of. That, getting up on that thing, I was…closer to whole. As the ropes tightened and I felt myself go limp, I ended up just sort of…hanging against it. The world went out of focus and I went somewhere else. Memories that were mine, but weren’t mine. Floating in a sensory deprivation tank, like…there was nothing to the world but me, and the cross, and those memories. Things that happened for me - for her, maybe, for…for Seven - in the time between where my memories end, and when I found ourselves in Bel’s world.”

“There has to be an easier way to talk about this us-but-maybe-not-us thing.”

“Do you feel it, Kade?” Seven murmured. Kade watched her, stroking the wood…almost lovingly, now. There was a tenderness, a softness to the motions that confused her. “Do any of them feel like ‘yours’?”

“As much as I don’t want to buy into this…Junji Ito bullshit…yeah. I feel something. Not about this one, but I feel drawn to something here.” Kade paused, slowly letting her eyes pan over and into the distance, searching for ‘her’ cross. She could feel it…out there, somewhere, amidst the forest of them. Without really thinking about why, she reached out, placing her hand on the top of Seven’s back, slowly stroking her. Seven flinched, then acquiesced, not commenting on it. “What did you see?”

“I saw you, and me. In my memories, there was the confrontation with Helios, and…you did what you did, with the Otherwhere, and then nothing. When I was up there, I saw you save me. Or…bring me back, I guess? Then I saw you trap me. And it was to punish me.” Seven laughed, a bitter undercurrent drifting, languid, beneath the bland simplicity of her words and tone. “Not for what I’d done, but because I disagreed with you about how we should feel about our damage. You took my memories and my powers, and you left me in an Otherwhere. To learn a lesson.”

“I would never - ” Kade started, but Seven held up a hand, shaking her head.

“ - I know you wouldn’t. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? If you wouldn’t, but she did, then what does that make us?”

“‘Us’ individually, or ‘us’ as a unit?”

“Either? Both?”

“How do we know it was even - ”

“ - It was real.” Seven nodded to herself. Kade could hear the certainty, there. The lack of any room for questioning. “It was realer than…this.”

“Well…” Kade started teasing the thought out, slowly at first: “Like I said. I’m you and you’re me. Everything else is up for discussion.” Seven glanced up to briefly met Kade’s eyes with a small, quiet smile, before looking down at the ground.“Where did it go from there?” Kade asked.

“It didn’t. That was when It showed up. Tore me down from the cross, and threw me away from it. Hence…” Seven turned to look at Kade again, briefly flourishing her hand around the right side of her face, highlighting the split lip…the bruised eye.

“Like It didn’t want you to see what you were seeing?”

“I don’t think it was that specific. It didn’t really…engage. It threw me off, started walking towards me…and I ran. I couldn’t not. Like I said before, I don’t think It’s something we can…fight, Kade. Even if we had our actual powers, from before, I don’t think it’s operating on the same level. It wasn’t coming at me like I was an opponent, it was coming at me like I was a fucking crow picking at some crops.”

“Bel said it made her…scared. Like from that nightmare we’ve all had, the Supermarket one?”

“Oh, right, with the…” Seven inhaled sharply.

“Yeah. We really do have a thing for nightmares that make us feel like - ”

“ - There’s a hole in the world inside of us? Yeah. Wonder where that comes from.” Seven rolled her eyes, words marinated with; basted in and veritably dripping sarcasm.

“Yeah, well…” Kade laughed quietly to herself.

“Funny that it tracked that cleanly for her, as a definitive point of reference. Doesn’t seem at all like she authored it or anything. I’m sure that’s just totally random, multiversal fucking coincidence.”

“Yeah…” Kade sighed. “Valid point. Did you - ”

“ - No, just generic ‘oh shit am I about to die’ fear. And given I have memories of dying like…a hundred times, only like two-thirds deliberate - ”

“ - Fear of death is diminishing returns for you?”

“Yeah, kinda.” Seven admitted with a small smile and a shrug.

“Huh. Weird.” Kade nodded.

“Yeah. Trauma responses are fucking wild. Speaking of, do you want to find your ‘X’?”

“Oh yeah? You think I should go find my hole? The one that was ‘made for me’?” Kade chuckled, raising an eyebrow. “Yeah, nah, I think I’m good. My brain’s not that Amigara faulty.”

“That’s cool. Try to ignore it and just let it slowly infect your psyche until it’s all you think about, see if I care.” Seven shrugged.

“Where is It, do you think? The thing that hurt you? When Bel saw it - and when you did - it was here. So where is it?” Kade looked around. The hundreds of crosses, back-lit by flood-lights with the vista of Brisbane City lurking ominously behind them, sat silently in the warm night air. Kade glanced at the Helios Foundation building; the huge, ominous pyramid that held most of her recent memories, prior to Bel’s world, in a black-hole-to-orbiting-body kind of chokehold. It was approximately lightless from the inside out; defined by negative space, by glinting reflections from the lights of the surrounding buildings.

“Kadence.” She turned at her name. It stood there, not twenty feet away. Kade’s eyes narrowed. It looked like…Kieran. Her own pre-transition self, right down to the bullshit, overly-baggy-to-hide-physical-specificity dysphoria-fashion…boot-cut jeans and long-sleeved grey and black Tee…the stubble-ridden jaw…the short, shaggy head of dark, curly hair. Kade…took a moment to fight back the urge to physically lash out at It. “Speak of the devil, etcetera?”

“Were you waiting for a good moment?” Kade sneered.

“As a former villain - ” Seven started.

“ - Former?” Kade raised an eyebrow. Seven held a hand up, rocking it from side to side.

“Yeah, I mean…unclear, but probably leaning antihero, relatively speaking? Anyway…that ‘speak of the devil’ shit is so fucking on-the-nose, moustache-twirler-y.” Seven observed.

“Agreed. Makes me embarrassed for It.” Kade shrugged and nodded.

“I’m not taking fucking notes from the photocopy squad, thank you.” It snarled. “Why are you here? This place isn’t for you.”

“Who are you seeing, right now?” Kade muttered to Seven. “Bel said she saw me. I’m seeing pre-transition us.”

“I just see us as a kid. Like…ten? Twelve, maybe?” Seven admitted quietly.

“Wonder what that means. Probably something right?”

“Wonder if it’s It’s choice, or our subconscious?”

“Probably the latter, seems a bit too targeted to not be internal shittiness.” Kade decided. “The whole ‘you can break yourself down better than anyone else can’ type thing?”

“I asked…a question.” It hissed at the two of them.

“Oh, I know.” Kade acknowledged. “Sorry, it’s just hard to take you seriously. Seven and I, we’re two sides of a world-destroying coin. And so far you’re just…opaque allegory and parlour tricks. It doesn’t really…hit, y’know?” Kade glanced at Seven. “Does it hit for you?”

“I mean I don’t want to get thrown around like a rag-doll again, but beyond that? No. Kinda uninspired. Hey, why don’t you try putting on a Scream mask and chasing us with a knife?” Seven suggested. “It’s a classic for a reason.”

“Yeah,” Kade hummed approvingly. “Sort of a difficult ask to psychologically traumatise girls whose entire baseline is hyper-vigilant self-abuse. Blunt force via sharp knife’d probably be a better call.”

“Wonder why it hit Bel so hard?”

“I think you’re probably right, that it’s cause she subconsciously designed it to. And for us it’s just like…horror genre pastiche? Scary cruciforms, empty streets, bloody ropes. It lacks…”

“Subtlety?”

“I was gonna say creativity but like…sure, that too? You remember when you threw Olivia and the gang into that homage of I Saw The TV Glow? Now that was good horror. Targeted, specific, cruel…”

“Oh, thank you! Y’know, I do try. It’s nice to - ”

“ - Okay, that’s plenty.” It rolled its eyes, folding Its arms across its chest, hip slightly cocked. “Let’s clear a few things up, here, shall we? First, this whole…critique session? Boring. Misdirected. The lesson isn’t for you. Second, I have no interest in…” it paused, vaguely gesturing between Kade and Seven, and itself: “This. You’re partial. Not worth the effort. But, third and most importantly, if either of you have somehow gotten it into your missing-puzzle-piece brains that any element of your Multiversal Self isn’t susceptible? That it can’t break? That’s something we do actually need to correct.” It provided a single, shallow nod. Kade looked to Seven; saw her own startled expression reflected back at her as the world around them began to blur…unfix…come apart. Together, they dissolved into an Otherwhere.

Hmm. Let’s see, now.

Kade heard Its voice…still cosplaying Kieran’s old voice…echoing in her mind as her eyes slowly flickered open. She was in the bedroom of her old apartment; cloud-obscured sun peering tentatively through the windows.

I know how the most destructive version of this scenario plays out, but…you don’t use a hydrogen bomb to neutralise an ant-hill, right? So…time-looping the worst thing that’s ever happened to you? Well…how about you keep that back-of-mind as something I could make happen for you. Okay? Neither of us want that. Both of us know what that would do. And I’m not a fan of body horror, so…giving you amnesia and dumping you in a psych ward to deal with your transition slowly, forcibly reversing under medical duress? Hardly a lesson, is it? Cruelty for cruelties’ sake, where’s the ‘craft’ in that? Oh, I know. Kadence, I’ve got just the thing. Goldilocks’ perfect porridge, as it were. I know you wanted - deep down - to see what you’d have seen, up on that cross, so…how about we go with a nice, classic ‘be careful what you wish for’? Yeah? Yeah, I think that sounds like a good jumping off point. Have fun: hope it measures up to your failed-Lit-Masters-student standards.

“Where’s Seven?” Kade murmured, staring at the ceiling. The voice said nothing. It was absent from Kade’s mind. She couldn’t feel Seven, or the other Alters. She was…all alone.