(9) Sinless Days: Pasts Good, Bad, And Mystic

--- Bell ---

She stayed up with Scarlet, waiting for Mercer to come home from whatever he was doing Julie having already gone to bed after warning them “That Mercer keeps ‘odd hours’ and I may be married to him but trying to keep up with his broken sleep schedule is just asking for a miserable day. He can only put up with it because he cheats via toxic levels of caffeine and Deviant healers.”

Regardless though, she was still hoping to talk with him.

Though Scarlet and her were currently watching some show that her sister vaguely remembered watching as a little kid. (Something about talking ponies, dragons, and friendship or something?)

She honestly wasn’t paying as much attention as her sister, the TV for once not enough to distract her as her mind instead focused on everything her other-selves had told her about ‘the Way’ as they explored their new home in the daylight.

All of the shadows of the dead, the general scent of blood and violence in the air that no one seemed to shy away from, even as everyone around them offered an odd sort of friendliness so long as they kept a comfortable difference. (No wonder Scarlet likes this place, it's so… her.)

More specifically it was the parts of her sister that she kind of wished she had as well.

It was as she was pondering this that Mercer finally limped in through the front door, looking like he was in a fair amount of pain.

(He’s had worse… Far, far worse… He still endures…) Her other-selves assured her.

“Mercer’s here.” She told her sister as she moved to stand.

“Yeah, you go ahead and talk to him, I’m waiting to see how Dash got her mark.” Scarlet waved her off, eyes never leaving the screen. “It’s got something to do with that rainbow everyone’s seen, I know it.”

“Okay…” She nodded, before chasing after Mercer as he started up the stairs.

“You… need something?” He asked, easily noticing her.

“Um, yeah…” She swallowed not sure how to word this.

(Be blunt… Be honest… He only judges the wicked…) Her other-selves encouraged, something that in itself brought her up short.

“Are you alright?” Mercer frowned, the action tugging at the scars on his face as he took a step closer. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing! Er, no, wait…” She took a deep breath before letting it out. “I want to help people.”

“Okay?” Mercer asked as much as he said. “When you say you want to help people, what do you mean exactly?”

“I mean that…” She ran a hand down her face. “When me and Scarlet were exploring earlier, we, uh, my other-selves showed me a bunch of stuff… bad stuff…”

Mercer’s eyes locked onto her with an intensity. “What kind of bad stuff?”

(He’ll take on the world… If it saves a single soul…)

“The people who… died around the Way… I saw them, heard them? I-I don’t know, I just… I want to help them.” She tried to elaborate.

“You sensed dead people… In the Way?” Mercer repeated, looking confused.

“It’s, it’s one of my other-selves’ powers… I know it sounds… crazy, but…” She trailed off, not sure how to explain something that she knew only she could see. Even Scarlet had thought her crazy when she first mentioned seeing shadows that weren’t a part of her, (and that was nothing compared to the men in white’s reaction…)

“No, no. I’m not doubting you about that, not with my mom’s necromancy shit, it’s just…” Mercer’s face twisted awkwardly. “There’s only one Deadman walking in the Way.”

“I… don’t know what that means…” She admitted.

“Don’t, don’t worry about it.” Mercer grimaced. “Just, uh, you want to help these… shadows, right?”

“R-right.” She nodded, because she wanted to help people. To stop the pain she could sense from all of them, to help them (the way Mercer helped us…)

“Alright, then… I need to see someone about that jar of mist anyway so… I’ll see if they’ve got any ideas about your… shadows tomorrow?” Her savior offered, sounding unsure in a way she wasn’t used to seeing from him.

“That’s…” (Not quite what I wanted…) But she didn’t really know how to say that, not with how poorly she’d explained everything else.

Mercer apparently saw some of this however as he rested a hand on her shoulder. “Hey, we’ll figure this out. I know it might be a bit scary right now, but me and Julie will help you figure this out. Helping out Death Echoes -if this is what I think it is- is never a bad thing, kid. Hell, they’re more harmful to themselves than anyone else.”

She gave Mercer an awkward smile, because even if he wasn’t quite getting what she was trying to say, (he’s still doing more than those doctors ever did.)

--- Julie ---

“Can you believe the shit those assholes put these girls through?!” She yelled into her phone as she walked through the halls of the storage facility she was renting from. One in a far nicer neighborhood than the Way she and Mercer lived out of, and far less likely to be blown up like their previous apartment.

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“Unfortunately, yeah.” Mercer admitted, having seen far worse from humanity than her. “This is honestly par for the course from what I’m guessing was an Asylum remnant facility. Trust me when I say the shit in V’s old files was ten times worse than the stuff we’re hearing here.”

She knew Asylum was bad, what Deviant didn’t, but, “Were the facilities that bad? Because I’ve heard you talk about ex-Asylum prisoners joining Sanctuary before.”

“Yeah, those are the ones ready to burn the place down if they cross the line, but like with Sanctuary the scale of bad was dependent on the branch, even if on the whole they were worse.” Mercer explained as she finally found her unit. “Malcontent facilities though, those were universally bad.”

“How bad?” She asked as she undid her lock, because while she knew she wouldn’t like the answer -especially not given what she now knew about the girls- (it isn’t fair to leave that weight on him alone.)

Mercer may’ve been the hero between them, but she’d still support him however she could.

“You know how the girls have to eat other people?” Her husband checked as she opened her unit.

“Uh-huh, vampire-Deadmen rules.” She doubted she could help them ‘hunt’ like Mercer, but her teenage love of the supernatural had desensitized her enough to be okay with the idea of ‘heroic monsters’ eating ‘villainous monsters’. (Just so long as I don’t have to watch them.)

She switched Mercer to speaker, so that she could use the light to look around the storage unit’s many boxes even as he grimly pointed out that, “Well, it was a good way to dispose of bodies, be they prisoners, failed experiments or… witnesses…”

“Oh… you think they…?” She couldn’t really bring herself to finish that thought.

“Probably not. The girls are both first Generation Malcontent, meaning even if they triggered early, their hunger wouldn’t have gone into overdrive until puberty really hit them.” Her husband assured her.

“Well, small mercies I guess…” She -and most people really- didn’t know too much about Malcontent, the Deviancy being insanely rare in spite of its infamy.

A heavy thud sounded out from Mercers end followed by a string of cursing, “Fucking bitch ass- Wait, no get back you little!”

“Everything alright?” She frowned, knowing her husband had a bad habit of leaving her on the phone even when he was ‘working’.

“Yeah, fine. Just… alright, I’m good.” Mercer assured her with a slightly strained voice. “Footing wasn’t as good as I thought, is all.”

“Right…” (Meaning whatever he did was twice as funny as he’ll admit over the phone.) “Anyway, any word on how the hunt for those assholes is going?”

“Since I threw it all at Vigilance? No.” Mercer admitted with one final heave before losing the tension in his speech. “Though some of my informants were talking about how active he was in the area without actually stepping into the Way.”

“Good, I know you beat that fake him but I’d rather you not fight the real him if you can.” She told him, unable to help but remember how badly their last fight had messed her husband up, even if the damage was more mental than physical. “Though, since we’re talking about things that should stay out of the Way, I’m looking around the storage unit and it doesn’t look like anything’s been stolen.”

“You’re going to bring that up every time you have to check the place out aren’t you?” Mercer sighed.

“Nope.” She nodded to herself as she disabled one of the traps Mercer had taught her to set up. “After having everything stolen out of the Way, I’m always going to be paranoid about it because in this city-”

“It’s not paranoia if they are in fact out to get you.” Mercer finished the saying that he’d repeated to the point of her memorizing it.

“Your family’s motto.” She chuckled dryly, as she began opening boxes looking for the things she couldn’t just order from Vincent or pick up from a corner store.

“No, my family’s motto is ‘messing with people is fun’.” Mercer corrected her.

“It is.” She agreed, picking up a couple of their photo albums alongside the cook book she’d gotten from her grandmother, and a couple of other things that while not quite irreplaceable did require her to make new copies whenever her vigilante husband got their house firebombed. “Which reminds me, how are you planning on messing with Triss this time?”

--- Mercer ---

“What makes you think I’m going to-Pfft,” He broke into a fit of laughter. “Sorry, I couldn’t say that with a straight face…”

“Figured as much.” His lovable wife admitted, her smile audible through the phone even over the sounds of the Way around him.

“Yeah, no, no.” He shook his head before actually answering Julie’s question. “I’ll figure something out, she’s not like the Vigils who I can get a rise out of any day of the week. She’s more like Crawk or Rojo, I’ve got to see what I’m working with today to figure out what I’m going to do.”

“Fine, just make sure she doesn’t hex your ass too hard. That’s my property and I’ll be pissed if someone else breaks it.” His wife warned him.

“Noted.” He smirked, as he glanced at a nearby gargoyle that he knew could come to life if he pissed off its mistress badly enough. “Though right now I’m kind of just waiting on her to deal with whatever light show I’m seeing through this window.”

As if to accentuate this point a spray of blood blotted out some of the rainbow colors he’d been watching refract through the opaque window. “And we’ve got blood!”

“Isn’t that the point you usually just break through the window?” Julie checked.

“Well yeah, but uh, I don’t want to accidentally lose the mist jar.” He explained, without mentioning that he had almost lost it because when he tried to smash through the window he instead bounced off an enchantment Triss had apparently set up to stop him.

The eyes in the mist blinked at him.

“Uh-huh.” Julie answered in a way that told him she wasn’t buying it.

(Quick switch topic.) “Anyway, I should warn you when you get back the girls were going out to ‘hunt’ when I got up.” He was finding talking about the girls was the easiest way to distract his wife, barring certain methods that would not work over the phone.

“Isn’t it a bit early for that?” Julie wondered.

“A bit, but I think Scarlet is honestly just trying to get Bell out of the house more than anything.” He admitted. “From what I’ve seen she’s not really in a hurry to leave without one of us with her, and they’ve got a decent amount stored up in the girl’s freezer.”

“You mean the murder fridge?” Julie dryly asked.

“Yeah, the murder fridge.” He nodded, before hearing an ear splitting roar from the otherside of the glass.

Figuring that this was something he was going to have to deal with, he hooked a grapple line to the gargoyle before repelling to the main door of the library.

“Actually there’s an idea, since I’m at Triss’s library you think I should grab some books for Bell? She seems like she’s a reader.”

“Aw~ She takes after you!” Julie cooed.

“Fuck you.” He shot back.

“We’ll see how I’m feeling tonight.” She chuckled.

He rolled his eyes knowing how that was going to go before retracting his line, and opening the door just as a massive monster twirled down the staircase.

“Well, Triss’s monster has gotten loose, might have to call you back.” He warned his wife as he drew his gun and aimed it at the beast slowly picking itself off the ground.

Before he could hang up Julie yelled, “Wait!”

He waited.

“Is it a sex demon?” His wife innocently asked.

He looked at the monster as his face scrunched up in thought and he considered the creature in a new light before finally deciding, “Even if it’s not I’m going to tell everyone it is.”

“Pics?”