Permanent Marker
Rikka started writing in permanent marker a while ago.
David didn’t like it, but she didn’t care, because she wanted something to stay. Nothing ever stayed.
She sat in her purple poofy chair on the S.S. Andromeda for the nth time, bored out of her skull. She had become a very good actor. Every day was the same. The same smell from her designer perfume, so strong she only needed two squirts on each wrist.
The same faces and places, sounds, songs on the radio, always repeating, and she remembered it all. She accepted her fate a very long time ago because the few people she told never remembered when it all rewound again.
She laid out a piece of paper on her vanity mirror, pulled off the marker’s cap with her teeth, and guessed what would happen next. Sometimes the ending would be a little different than most, but often the changes were minuscule at best.
Rikka recalled the first rewind.
It was Halloween, and she was with Levi, at the Hallow’s Eve fair. She had done a charity concert and raised money towards the foundation for orphaned children left behind whenever their parents died, leaving on missions and never returning.
They sat on a painted orange and black bench, next to bat-shaped balloons tethered to the ground by rocks. Rikka was dressed like a vampire, and Santos told her he was appropriating her culture. Levi was an invisible man, but like all his other costumes, they fell flat, and he looked silly, painted white all over.
Rikka giggled remembering his horrible costume, the common denominator that all of his costumes in each rendition were atrocious.
She was eating a candied apple as quickly as she could because her manager wasn’t around and didn’t want to get caught eating something that wasn’t on her meal plan. She had met up with him at the bench because he had something important he wanted to tell her, and he sounded very frantic on the phone.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” Rikka said between munches.
Levi had mentally prepared himself for this confession.
He needed to come clean.
It was the only solution.
“I killed someone. His name is Fenton.”
“I-I’m sorry? ”
“I was jealous of him and Ace, but it turns out they were only friends,” he whispered.
Rikka held her breath because this wasn’t a confession she was prepared for. She sat on the bench, wondering who Fenton was, racking her brain. She had met him before, yes? Somewhere?
She never forgot anything, so she had to trudge through the files upon files stored in her software to remember who he was until the name matched a face, and then shuddered in disgust once it did.
“Say something,” Levi commanded.
She said nothing, as the world around her faded. It all slipped away, the colors, the people, the sounds. The smells died away, and Rikka dropped her candied apple, into an empty abyss.
She looked down, fell over, tripped, and smacked her head.
Her first instinct was to cry, and then she wet herself. She rolled over, but it was difficult, and a warm embrace from behind picked her up. A familiar voice was heard, and someone turned her around.
Rikka cried even harder because it was her mother, so much younger.
She was a year old again, crying, inconsolable because she remembered it all. She would cry all day, all night, until her voice gave out, until she passed out. She would wake and cry again in terror, the only form of communication she had.
Her parents took her to doctors, they said she had suffered some trauma, but they couldn’t determine what it was.
The baby went quiet one day, because Rikka accepted her fate, and said nothing.
She said nothing until she was able to speak coherently.
Her memories were there, but her mind wasn’t developed enough to express her thoughts fully. The puzzle pieces were there to make a complete picture, but they never stuck together, even when the pieces fit.
The pieces finally fit together when she noticed everything was repeating, exactly as she remembered, but some events were a little different. At daycare, instead of cereal, they had oatmeal on Monday, on Friday they went to the planetarium instead of the museum.
Feeling safe to speak, she told her teacher one day.
Tomorrow Jason will call out sick.
And he did.
The next day she told them that it would rain the entire day, and it did.
Every day she said what would happen and it did, and she stopped going to school. She didn’t go to school ever again, and instead would be locked inside her teacher’s home, forced to tell her what would happen the next day.
She had never been so happy to fall on her face and wet herself again, having the cycle repeat.
This time she chose to tell someone else.
She told her father.
It was “bring-your-child to workday”, and she was ten years old, wearing a green dress with frills, little shoes to match. Her hair was trimmed close to her head because she had stuck gum in her hair, and by the time they found out how to get it out without cutting it, it was too late.
She was embarrassed, feeling much older inside her small body, ashamed as to how such an incident occurred, but no one thought anything of it, because to them she was still ten.
She was still ten, sitting inside her father’s brown office, with his brown chair and bookcases.
Rikka closed her eyes and pretended she would blend into the monochrome furniture. She opened her eyes again, glared at her father, and he looked up from his desk. The look of an adult woman coming from a small child was unsettling.
Rico feared his daughter.
He was afraid of her. She was not a normal child. She would sometimes say things that no child should say, as if she was there before, she was older , wiser than some of them. She didn’t want to play with any of the other children, saying that they were immature.
“Daddy?”
“Yes,” Rico bleated.
“All of this has happened before. It’s going to repeat again and I’m scared.”
She ran up to her father to hug him, and he pushed her away, refusing to get close. His fears were true, she was not a normal child, and he had to get rid of her. A demon had possessed his child.
“What have you done with my daughter,” he screamed.
“I’m here!”
He didn’t believe her.
Immediately he left the office, taking her with him, and she fought as hard as possible, but she was too small to win. He threw her into the backseat of his car, locked the doors, and drove her to a church.
Rikka said nothing ever again. She learned her lesson to never break a promise because every time she tried the universe would fight back.
The universe fought back as they poured hot water on her, screamed at her, prayed, trying to push the devil out of her soul. She fought back harder, screaming back at the world, inside a small barren room, and wouldn’t be released until she admitted she had spoken with the Devil himself.
The rewinds continued, and continued, her acting perfected.
One day, she was pleasantly surprised to find out that she has only rewound two months instead of her entire adult life, and new hope was born inside of her, that something would change.
She decided to try and do things differently, not by telling people, but by trying to influence events in little ways. There was no other way to stop it from happening, and she decided, why not have some fun?
She robbed a bank.
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Joined a fishing boat.
Got married to David, once, and then divorced, within a week. Their affair was tumultuous, she was only nineteen, and no one approved of their love.
She was in body, but in mind, she was fifty-four at that point. She didn’t care, it would all repeat, but this one she was especially fond of but worried what would happen if it didn’t repeat that time.
Thankfully it did.
Each time she decided to go to the Hallow’s Eve fair, she noticed the endings had a theme of violence to them, so she tried to steer it in a different direction.
It didn’t work.
There was a shooting, a stabbing, a kidnapping. The more the events repeated, the worse the endings became, and she avoided the fair entirely, convinced that it was the center of it all.
It all led to her last few rewinds where she had run out of ideas of what to do, and went back to her original goals of singing and acting, so many lifetimes ago. She had been cognizant of the equivalency of almost six hundred years, and she started writing in permanent marker only, around two hundred years ago, because nothing ever stayed.
This time would be different.
A red-haired man, wearing jeans with a red and black hoodie, with his work partner, who had brown hair, dressed more professionally, walked into her dressing room with David. The moment she saw him, she knew. She knew that all of this might have something to do with the red-haired man because all around him she saw her father’s work.
Everything started to repeat when her father asked her to keep a promise, and she kept it, dutifully, for almost six hundred years. She didn’t have to keep this secret though. This young man, she didn’t know him, but something about him was familiar.
Then she remembered that this was Ace.
She saw him in passing when she visited Slater Academy various times, and she paid him no mind. Another face, blending into a crowd. Levi had mentioned him numerous times, and she guessed that in several loops they were friends, or lovers, or enemies, she never was sure.
Her heart raced because she was going to put on the best performance of her life.
David complained about the overstaffing on the S.S Andromeda, and Rikka made a dramatic face, repeating old lines, but changing them to a new scene.
"Rikka, this is overkill,” David complained.
"No, it's not! They're those pervert stalkers who want my BODY!"
Shivers went down her spine and she dramatically clutched her body, making the worst face she could muster. Keeping the same pose she looked David dead in the eye, with authority only the rich could have.
"Could you get me some food, please? I'm hungry."
"Sure. Nothing is going on anyway.”
"Wait,” said Gabriel. "Let me come too, I'm hungry.”
Once they left, Ace was nervous alone with Rikka.
"Finally, they're gone,” Rikka sighed. "I wanted to get the two of us alone."
Ace's face flushed, his mind replaying the different intros to the many porn videos he watched online. All that was missing was the bad music, the strong lighting, and the strange house with minimum furniture.
"W-what do you mean,” he asked.
"Oh, don't pretend like you don't know, silly."
Rikka leaned back in her puffy purple chair, with bedazzled legs on the bottom. She pointed a finger straight at him and grinned wildly.
"You're just like me. How did you get one?" She pointed at his small cloth bracelet around his wrist, and she could feel the intense energy coming off of it.
" I have no idea what you're talking about,” Ace replied. "You're—"
Rikka got up from her chair and grabbed his wrist. Hard.
She held out her necklace for Ace to feel its own power, but he didn't feel a thing. He was terrified but she didn’t care. She was so close to escaping Hell, and she wouldn’t let one person get in the way of it.
"You have a celestial object. Just like me! That's why I wanted so many bodyguards," Rikka explained. "The celestials can't fall into the wrong hands. I can usually take care of myself, but I can’t use its power on the ship, or else it would explode!"
"What's a celestial?”
"You seriously don't know, do you?”
“No. Let go of me!”
She gripped harder, and she started to doubt her own powers. How a young man who was so easily frightened had something so strong and never knew it.
"This bracelet was made from the blanket my dad found me in. You got me confused for someone else," Ace explained.
Rikka was still gripping onto him fiercely and she scanned him up and down, trying to see if he was lying or simply being dumb. She inspected him and started to see that there was something worse going on, but no, this was the work of her father .
She could see that someone had rearranged his mind, and whatever they did to fill in the blanks somehow made it all worse. She held his hand and shivered, wondering what had happened to him, nervous to see what was inside. Rikka had seen many horrible memories, but these seemed worse than everything she had ever seen.
"They blocked you from seeing the truth. To help you maybe, or just to hurt you," Rikka mumbled.
"I will show you the truth," she pleaded. "Come here."
Ace snatched his hand away and Rikka was angry with him. She couldn’t tell him what she knew, it would ruin it all. He would leave, he would tell everyone she was insane. She couldn’t handle being locked away again or exorcised or whatever thing they put her through before and tried not to cry from the resentment of the prison that was her mind.
"Don't you want to know the truth," Rikka screamed. "They hid you from yourself!"
Like scars, they lined his arms and legs, his chest and face, and it terrified her. Rico had not only hidden bad memories and replaced them with good ones, but he had replaced good memories with bad ones, scrambling his brain like eggs.
"You're so confused. It's okay," she told him. "Let me help you."
"Don't touch me," Ace growled.
His eyes turned an intense black and Rikka shot up from her chair in surprise. He was an Ionadian, and she found it such a cruel and disgusting irony that someone that was the key to unlock her prison cell was from the race of people that had enslaved her own.
She swallowed her pride, but anger was still inside her and tried to have a softer tone.
"I won't hurt you," she said. "I promise. I just want you to hear his voice."
"Is this some kind of religious thing," Ace shouted. "You wear the same dumb thing Gabriel does!"
"Don't be rude! I'm offering you the power of the gods, and you dare to reject me?"
Before Ace could argue with her, she grabbed his right hand and put it over his eyes. He was afraid of her, she could taste it, and used it to her advantage, pushing her hand hard onto him.
"Close your eyes,” she commanded.
Ace closed his eyes and his heart raced as Rikka moved his hands away from his shut eyes and placed hers instead.
"True sight is my power. You will see through the lies.”
Her lungs filled with air, she pushed back, and Ace gasped, the cycle complete. The air vibrated, it buzzed, and she stopped halfway through.
She didn’t want to hurt him.
Six hundred years taught her that not knowing everything is sometimes for the best.
"Open your eyes.”
She pushed her hand hard, into his face, as if she were pushing something out of him and Ace shuddered, feeling gross all over.
"Nothing has changed,” he lied.
"Look at your wrist.”
Ace looked at his wrist, but instead of a cloth bracelet, what he saw was a metallic bracelet. It was silver and had a golden band that went through the middle.
"You changed my bracelet to metal,” he exclaimed.
"No! I've never met someone with so much power to be so stupid! Dad has clearly done something horrible to you!"
“You need help,” Ace replied.
"Be quiet! Listen! You have been blinded for so long you can't hear him!"
Suddenly the door opened. Gabriel and David were back, and with food.
"Is everything okay,” asked David. "You look upset.”
"Oh, I'm fine," Rikka grinned. " We were just arguing about the best movie."
Rikka turned back into her bubbly self, ready for the next scene, her acting skills impeccable.
The smell of BBQ filled the room, wrapping the room in a warm embrace.
Rikka took a little bit of one sandwich, nibbled on it, and glanced at David a few times, remembering the week she was married to him, and David noticed.
She told herself she needed to move on.
Or she could marry him the next time it repeated.
"Thanks, David, I love this stuff,” Ace said.
"Yeah me too,” said a voice next to him.
Rikka looked in Ace’s direction and saw Invictus for the first time, and wondered, which one is he? He was softer than the others, everything about him kinder. Even his voice was sweeter, and she was so sad that no one had heard him for so long.
"It's a shame I can't eat this stuff,” he continued. "I just love the smell of meat.”
Ace abruptly left and said he had to leave the bathroom, and Rikka sighed.
Invictus was no different than the others.
One day he would get a taste of meat, and become a blood-drinker like the others. At least this one, she hoped, would disappear into obscurity once everything repeated. She didn’t have much hope that everything would continue.
But it did.
The first time everything continued, David died, thousands of children died, and now she worried about the day Invictus would no longer be a vegetarian.