He'd been here; for two-millennium he'd been here blind fine, but in one day of consciousness without any doubt in him he was close to fallen.

It wasn't the increasingly less terrible looking worlds, or their decreasingly less non-hostile acting peoples, but that together what the sum meant. That sum was what was horrid. People killed over anything in the 'best' of these 'highest' divided worlds, and they killed for nothing in the 'worst' of the 'lowest' ones.

The middle two-hundred-thirteenth division where he brought the moon shared by these worlds down, what would have naturally occurred in another two-millenium, that world and the original earths moon meeting were a symbol of the destruction of the only thing left holding this all together. The one good thing alive and living was gone now.

Once he'd taken things too seriously, now he was taking everything lightly, a certain someone could only wonder how he flipped so far and fast. It didn't seem to fit reality, his or theirs, even in games it wasn't his style. The nice guy, half slouch and diplomat, athletic enough to fit what crowds his witt didn't work on; that guy wasn't the killer type.

Type or not he was killing.

The guy who loved one woman enough to forget most everything about her, but still try to burn the world she died in as if to make it her pyre, that type of guy was sure to be a jealous and zealous lover. Those types of romantics, they didn't really exist, or at least she had thought not once. Now, she knew they existed, he was that type.

It wasn't that he wanted to take others down with him, they were all inconsequential before the moon had gone down, but after he made some change he wasn't just killing right after. It hadn't been long and he was lusting, he'd had a woman already and had plans on another, the one was more or less acceptable whilst the second was chaos incarnate.

Better he picked the princess, since if he choosed the chaos, he wouldn't stop at burning broken worlds. When there were no more he would turn on himself and take to fighting fire no person could defeat, and though it was said hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, she was now sure a man could wear that same hat. Where his devolution went was direct to death.

When a lone individual decided to take on the world, the world chewed them up and it spit them out the long way, digestively.

Unraveling of subconscious memory would have reminded him of all that he'd needed to remember, that part of the mind was over the world or worldly interferences.

Detaching of superconscious memory would have altered him of all that he'd needed to alter, the more obviously aware mind was under the world and worldly influences.

Subconscious, knowledge and sense, neither could be altered. Knowledge and sense might have be percieved differently, people could use them variously, and while you might sharpen the usefulness of knowing and sensing they were neutral things that were even for everyone.

Superconscious that was aware and could percieve, neither could be memorized. Either might be remembered in degrees and pieces, yet people would never truly ever remember either because the older they were the more they dulled, memories of these things to the conscious mind naturally only grew more distant as they fed subconscious while being consumed into it.

Superconscious wasn't even at all, didn't even begin neutral because each persons life was unique to them in overt and covert ways, yet to say it was more or less of personality or uniqueness scratched at a deeper surface that was the subconscious. As blind as we seemed to be to sub, we actually were to super, and as deep as sub seemed - super was meant to be deeper.

Deeper awareness and perception over the world that the superconsciousness began under. Overwhelming the light of consciousness was to see it for the dark it was, to learn the conscious was egotistical and not the other way around. Want to make the world our way subtracted from all. It was not instinctive, distinctive fit it like a glove though, for overwhelmed conscious.

You overwhelmed it or it overwhelmed you instead.

Shallower knowledges and sensation under the world the subconsciousness began over. Underwhelming the dark of unconsciousness was to see what light it was, not just accepting truth but learning to reason with it part of you after. Humility let it accept egotistic values because they too led to better, the worse you got off course the more it would try to correct it.

If you truly knew something identifying anything with a similar facet should be immediate.

Yet; there were always medical mysteries that even all the best doctors would be split over but a humbler shaman understood, legal offenses apex legal officials couldn't make simple justice from when kids could tell them how, psychological states that reknown mentalists had easier times dealing with than world reknown psychiatrists.

Conscious people were the fraud that egotistically asserted theirself as superior, and while the subconscious folk were those who could have their cancer cured by a shaman or their injustices solved by their children or their demons banished by mentalists, conscious folk just had no way of doing any of these things as easily.

Conscious people died the way they lived, with 'Medical, Legal, and Psychological troubles' they reasoned out as logical things you could only afford logical conclusions to. Subconsious folk lived the way they were birthed, cancer and injustices were simply demons and all was one, not just logical but empathetical connections beyond just physical to include spiritual elements.

The conscious looked out and could not see a thing. Consciously, these people looked out at others curing cancer or ignoring heinous crimes as if unbothered, and conscious people would ignore any rational reason and attempt to still belittle a miracle by declaring it as a 'False-Positive' at least and at most 'Mind-Over-Matter'.

To such minds because these people were so surreptitiously stupid, there was some inherent connection, since they were dumb enough to think their cancer could be cured it would. No, they'd never publish such terms to be considered aloud by a conscious mind, placebo effects were well known but logic only went so far.

All could agree logic alone only went so far, the same things that caused cancer could be used to kill it in higher concentrations somehow, but would all agree that the only reason you could get a higher chance of surviving cancer by paying more was because of the increased empathic drives between both sides? No, it was stupid to the logical mind to oversimplify, the logical mind complicated to understand.

It extrapolated, to measure knowns you needed variables and constants, how else could you quantify reality?

You and your treatment specialists higher incomes so less strenuous lives and more sanitary and spacious environments? Oh logic could be found there, but by no means were those things causality to the cure, the cure was the treatments themselves. Not the actual treatment and state of doctor and patient, any effects there had to be minimal, unless you were a nutcase.

The empathic mind knew better, it reasoned feeling things out another way, that faculty was what led you to look for the best you could afford in the first place and though logically it was true, reflection of what you would do in your shoes or anothers was always empathically done. Personal or impersonal, logic or empathic natures, but each was a reasoning faculty in and of itself.

Feeling bad and knowing the best way to feel good, that was empathic, just as hoping to find the best always was. Figuring out where to go, the one you could afford, the doctors name and all else was logic. Make no mistake, identifying what was what could be difficult with logic and empathic reasoning, the two were side by side in the brain but their connection remained outside of it too.

Empathy made you care to learn his name, it was why you cared to see if you could afford them rather than do whatever it took to afford the best even if you had to kill or cut off your family, and it was why you cared to cure anything rather than simply accept a new logic you knew made you meant you were sick.

Victoria had learned these things but not what to make of them for awhile, she'd been dying not long after the day she was born, but whatever had caused her young body to start rejecting the world so young hadn't stopped from any of her conscious efforts at all. That subconscious effort had come much later, long after most of her body was succumbing, cancer spread to most organs besides her bones and blood.

A death sentence, one her parents had thrown incredible amounts of money and time and effort and crime to earn no healing towards, all until the day she'd graduated, and by then the oldest tumors were wreaking havoc she couldn't fight against by moving on as if it wasn't happening to her anymore. She'd had inklings it was the rejection keeping her going.

Only, hearing everyone around her reference her state and condition all the time knowing it was worsening, her acceptance and theirs had been killing her. Theirs! They hadn't wished to kill her, nor wished for her to die, nobody around her could have if they'd wanted though they were influencing her reality all the same. They were all that was holding that state upon her, by force, if not a willing force they were able to have hope for her against.

Her lifelong dejection had saved her, but the pain by then was too much to reject and she'd learned to accept her fate by that point graduating both from high-school and to truly dying on the same day, but her parents dejection had unwittingly saved her after because it was the day they lost hope in her even surviving much longer. They'd long lost it she'd live normally, basically they'd only hoped it until she was three.

Before her conscious mind had ever even really brightened and bloomed, all of the peoples and things she was around had so little hope already, and the conditions and states her parents were in with the life they propgated and the emotions and energy they had were killing her faster than them only because of all lack of any positivity. Victoria had been born to special, very loving, achieving of their dreaming type parents.

To say she should have had an amazing life was understating all she should have had to the eye. They'd never committed any crime that wasn't a minor offense at worst, their own lives had been bright besides them, only there was very little depth to any person in Victoria's family. They were not shallow folks either, but the difference between wasn't subtle.

They never stressed or strained, were never exposed to even mild environmental toxins, her parents hadn't known hardships that almost every other person on the planet would've had the way even the most wealthy or least needing neccessity would by all means have found in abundance every day of their life. They'd had above average grades in school, perfect attendances and records aside from involving with many groups and events.

None of the many people they'd met had anything bad to say about them, newest or oldest, even many who'd jealously sought to get between them could've only complained at a time come and gone back when they'd been naive enough to think being with either was all they could have wanted. Most who'd thought that way saw them later in life, on television and their computer or phone, and wonder what they'd saw.

By then they'd see the same person with different eyes, all the wiser for seeing they'd been foolish, because perfect seeming or not for them then there was only a much too normal person who they'd see later to have attraction for. No, they were boring in some subtle way, too minor to look down on yet too major to look up at. Perfect was 'TOO' perfect, if you knew how to spot it, and nobody could like those who it came natural to.

The perfect, themselves, them alone.

By eighteen they were anything but. By that time, most who'd known them and once known all about them directly and indirectly, parts of their family and most of their friends no longer saw this as the case. Perfect had flipped on its head quick somehow, and there was only one explanation, the girl the perfect couple had been cursed with too young.

Their third child by their mid-twenties.

It wasn't that Victoria went out on her ass quickly either, even when they had no hope, her parents struggles had gone on so long that they took this change from being seen as the worst from the best humbly. Even though they had no more hope for it, all the old hope they strove for was too deep in them and instinctive as parents, people, lovers, romantics and dreamers to give up on.

Modern medicine failed, but, there were others.

A year of two self made millionaires funds was reduced to all they could afford to spend and remain afloat, but their desparation for her curing and the worlds desperstion for financing met in all the wrong ways, and the ugliness of desparations nature had them dipping into funding they could not afford besides all they'd made since by the third month.

By the sixth month they were literally hitch-hiking through Africa as the last resort when South-America and Asia failed them, there were two return tickets that weren't second-class any longer instead of three second-class ones, and most of the time her Dad had already been pushing her around but her wheelchair had been stolen at some point when it couldn't go up the stairs of the place they'd stayed.

He carried her then and kept on after their car broke down, but, between the two living out of backpacks and having learned a lot of the wrong things besides the right ones to live her time with them soured. It had been sour the whole half of that last year, yet they'd had unshakable resolve without hope somehow. It disappeared over night, but remembering the devolutions she could after that was too much.

That was when they hadn't been content to speak comforting words about her or to each other anymore, even though there had been trials all that time at night everytime they rested they'd spoken of all gently, but all at once the guilt they all felt had taken form when the hinting at her involvement started that night. Every night after she had been less aware.

That was about the time she started losing control of her body functions, and in their desperation and their frustration to keep her and themselves clean, instead of stealing food and supplies that wouldn't be noticed or missed they'd begun stealing things like clothes and towels or blankets. Washing them wasn't always possible, and besides needing water more often for that purpose, it led to trouble.

Just before the end of that year most of the things they said and their actions, you wouldn't tell people what type of things your parents said about you in your barely conscious and dying states, enemy or friend you protected yourself from sharing that because those people wishing death on you when they noticed you seeming more conscious was too alarming.

Most of the second later half of the year she'd walked, as even though she was too pained and exhausted, being touched by either of them was more so and all she could accept was when they helped her wash, eat, get up or lay down. They'd been waiting for her to die in a decent place they'd wound up finding, one where both of us could be together yet apart, a village small enough for privacy but near a city.

Their eldest had arranged funds and sent three new tickets for them all to return then, they'd promised that they would, but the same thing they got Barry to send money for with me close to death became the same reason they told him she shouldn't be moved any more. She couldn't handle it a long time ago, they'd pushed her too far, she was in a bad state. Except, she should have liked to die at home surrounded by the ones she loved.

She could not, it was not possible anymore, the people her parents became were hard to accept for anyone. Victoria was hated by her siblings as much after the latter half if the year started, her own families wishes she should die and her own new experiences were hardening her more towards suffering, and all that seemed to happen was wrong.

'It's like she grows more resistant every day, staying ahead of death a hair, but the bitch can resist cancer so why can't she let it go into remission? I don't think it's that she doesn't want to heal at all, I just think she wants to prolong our suffering as long as she can, why else won't the spiteful little slut die?' Victorias sweeter and more caring mother had said talking to Barry over speakerphone.

Her Dad had sighed, shrugged, then nodded agreeing it seemed like it. All her other siblings had urged them to just leave her where she was, at least one at a time, but by then neither trusted the other to do so.

Her father didn't trust her mother since they'd agreed to earn substantial amounts of money a few times by her mother selling sex, the volume of money only seemed to go down though, the only thing he distrusted more than her after that was wealthy black men around her. The racism didn't stop there, it got worse, even though he'd agree to let her go cheaper to less safe men and places as time went on.

Her mother didn't trust her father alone now either though, while she'd been doing what she had to get them by he'd been nurturing a hell of a grudge, and though they'd been treated fairly and respectfully her husband had dropped all sense of those qualities. In his plentiful spare time but more broke than ever, he'd made it his mission to wreak vengeance as equal as he could, and he'd been quite a forgiving man.

Forgiving men did not actively seek the daughters and wives of the men who they agreed to sell their wife to out, not to lie about all that they'd had being what they have, but they surely did not take advantage of a different culture and go around getting every mother and teenager they could pregnant with a child that would too obviously be born different and reveal an ugly truth. Especially not knowing they would not be around for their births.

Her mother might have been with a few dozen men, more of them decent and of means than not, but her father had been with over a hundred daughters, wives, girlfriends, favorite whores, relatives, mothers, and desired ones. He didn't target grandmothers, but age was only a factor in his mind for fertility, and younger ages became less important as time went on rather than revenge.

Seventeen, sixteen, fourteen, eleven. Some of these girls had amounted to a list of debts father promised men when he returned, others had cost him more than Victoria ever had as whole sections of a large business became just a single restitution not long after he started this. But as things go, he would not be the one to pay the final price, Victoria paid that after he left.

Eleven months and days in a man interested more than others in helping me most of that latter time, who'd been offering to use 'Timed-and-Tried-Technique' he had proffered many times came again over the hundredth time and asked to help once more, and by then even her fathers growing racism and vengeance had cowed. He trusted religious nowhere, anymore.

The last few months they'd only denied him for their reasons, her father since he thought he knew exactly what the man wanted from his attractive yet vulerable daughter, and her mother for those reasons and because she did not know the stranger or want to know someone so clearly of little means. Both conversed many times of the faults they were concerned with.

They used each others sentiments against it too.

Yet they relented that day, her mother just to be home with her other kids and control of means again as they'd had them, her father just to be home again with his family and control of his wife once more. Of course their relationship was doomed long before then, even then they knew but didn't say it aloud as Victoria was protected from at least that, but mostly they still were protecting each other more.

She knew, how couldn't she have known what they didn't, if they both knew and accepted the reality by sharing it to get over that they'd never have been the types to come this far. The sacrifices they'd made came to fruition mere days after they'd left, though they'd stayed two weeks after exactly, by that last days visit they were blind to what they could've seen once and had sought to such extreme.

Babu was his pet-name, what he gave me, surely for Baboucarr.

That first day he just let her rest, he asked the next day if she was getting up to which she tried and couldn't, he'd fed and helped her get to the latrine area nearby his small home for her, even his own used area was nothing more than the wide grove of trees not far from his house. That wide patch of trees was where many younger and older folks also went, or were sent, sickness taking many healthy at times.

A patch of short trees with just enough foliage nearby, plant materials to type with you buried with scat after wiping under dry leaves and soil, although another nearby such section where the ground was lower he advised as a site for me when the first was used up it was further in the woods if only by an equal measure. He helped her get there, left, helped her eat and drink. Mostly was gone, always there about the time a need arised, then he'd be gone hours at a time often.

The next day he asked, and she did get up in bed, but she couldn't get out still. He sat and talked with her awhile and asked, mostly repeated his former actions and then that night repeated his efforts of talking with her awhile. The third day she barely could get up and stand, the rest and peace were doing her good in her final days, at least that was how she'd flirted with the idea.

Her truth then; she knew her parents fears were realized, this man had nothing and was only an interesting and kind man too simple to help more than with what she needed, yet he'd undoubtedly make a move soon she'd spend some hideous last days dying with as the sexual pressure or rape started.

But when she hadn't got up the third day after hoping to truly get up and find someplace alone to die for the third time, the mere question asked a second time if she was 'getting up today' or not took her patience a bit, and she admitted only she wished she could but she couldn't. "You're too weak, still? The food is good isn't it?"

She had to admit it was, she had eaten quite a bit that wasn't and many fluids rather than solids, so thin but flavorful soups and broths and many fresh teas no matter how weak and lacking any real sweet or savory flavor was better than liquids her mouth couldn't enjoy. After all, where would he produce IV-fluids or meal-supplements, as a poor villager in Africa?

"Your body then?" She'd nodded, but, since she had cancer that should have been pretty obvious. Hadn't he been visiting her for more than five months and change? Yeah, but, what he knew of cancer was no doubt little. How he'd see it would be like how a blind man saw color, since he'd learned mostly secondhand and never gone to school, this very middle aged man had barely seen scientific representations of it.

But he was basically agreeing to watch and bury her if she died, what her parents wanted, what Victoria was hoping to happen before anything else did while she was alive. At best she might end up a scientific or sexual expirement dead, but things could get worse, and her final days should've never come to this. There was a special place in hell for her parents.

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Terrified and proved right at once, he'd sternly massaged her carressingly not long after the morning routine that they'd established, and though she immediately feared the worst as he suddenly started after she lay down he never made any inappropriate move. He just seemed to be tensing her muscles, relaxing them as if to get soft, then contracting her limbs.

Arms, forearms, wrists and fingers, legs, calves, ankles and toes. He told her do the same with her belly and back, then joked not to do the same too much with her front and rear but to move the muscles the same way, telling her she'd be too sore the next day again but the one after she would get up. That became her routine after the day she did get up on the fifth day, when she also began using the cleaner spot, since she'd barely covered her mess and couldn't remember where she'd gone at the other.

He'd done nothing any different but she walked around his home that day a few times, getting tinted water from the dusty jar he put it in for her a few times a day by the well somewhere nearby, and every time she'd sat down to drink he seemed to show up. Then he'd smiled big, as if her getting up could be a sign cancer was going away, like he had achieved a miracle. Victoria wished it was so for him.

"Good." He'd said before taking a drink for himself from the jar, finishing it and going for more, but only after giving a sound of satisfaction as if the water was delicious. It wasn't bad, but Victoria had expected all the stomach problems she'd been having by drinking local water, and they'd gotten worse each day, until sometime by the second weeks start.

By then she'd been getting her water from the well, the man lost more interest in her every day, only seeming to show a little pity the days she was unable to fully achieve a task. The first time he found her lost and dehydrated after the weeks end a warmer day, one where she'd drank the jar dry before he normally came back, and he'd vowed to keep up with her better.

It repeated itself days after and he had come sooner, but when she'd pointed out he was leaving her too long on the hot days, he'd promised her that he was only leaving her on the cool days. It was an odd lie she caught him in, one she knew he was trying to trick her with for some reason, and she'd made no further arguement with a simple fellow. It was beneath either of them.

"Then can you come sooner on the cool days, and later on the hot ones?" He'd agreed, smiling, as if that was the solution he'd been considering. "Yes. It seems you get around more when it's cool, I'll do that." He declared it pulling at a silvery beard. "I'd appreciate it." She added with the faintest touch of sarcasm. The third time was on a cool day the second week, he'd come with her parents, all three showed up just as she thought herself lost.

It was all too symbolic to go over her empathic reasoning, and too realistic to go under her logic reasoning, yet by then everything around her was taking perspective. Life was slow enough she could catch up to it, death was fast enough to wait around whether her body died now or later, but then she was merely equalizing between her inner world and outer one.

Almost as if they were the cause, she grew weak upon the sight of them, yet it was her reasonings merged distaste raging at them that seemed to make her weak to her mind. Then, at least, but not for much longer. "She's getting her own water? That's a pleasant surprise." Her mother had said with a hint of distaste and scorn. "Necessity." Her father pressed in a sharp whisper none around could miss, while looking around beaming malcontent.

"He hasn't messed with you, has he baby girl? We're leaving today but I'll get you to the city again, at least, if anything has happened." This he did whisper quieter to her. "No he hasn't, and don't, just don't let me be treated like I might make it by people again. I'm tired of hoses and noises and machines, it's not exactly good rest. I'd rather give up air-conditioning for the quiet."

If she'd use peace instead of quiet, die instead of be, or elaborated the air-conditioning had been minimal then she could see he would cave. Neither planned on bringing her home, when she wasn't going to live, some part of them simply decided here she was going to have to die. Taking her home, he'd have entertained it from the pained look on their faces hidden, but she'd have never gone back to that.

How they could stand so tall and true when she couldn't around them if she wanted, Victoria had no idea. "We love you." Her mother said, both were quiet and still, then Babu left with the two a short ways studing them as if puzzling out a different species. He didn't go far with them, Victoria had already nearly begun to see him as on their level of low to leave her there, but when he came back a moment later she knew.

He was apologizing for them with his eyes, not pitying her, but them instead.

"They weren't like that at all before. My sickness made them that way." He nodded, on the sentiment he paused, but then he grew agitated. "You did do that to them. It is your fault foolish girl, you never would have let yourself act like they do, you let them treat you badly and they became bad people. Do you blame them for doing it?" I was too shocked to reply, but there was one comfort, he was a lesser evil.

I'd have swallowed that as a lie right then, sure he was right, my cancer wasn't their fault but it had sure helped me feel sorry enough for myself to let them become ashes of the fire that they'd been once together a whole of.

"Don't just accept this, fool. If you do not fix them now you'll never heal, and there is still worse to come. Go give them all the lashes they can take with your tongue until they are the ones who are beneath you. Otherwise, you must leave here, I won't tolerate a liar in my home. Truth unspoken is a greater lie than any, and if you take another great lie, you will only die."

We'd argued about it for minutes, time in which she said they'd be gone far by then, except he'd been right that they were not. He denied arranging any way to keep them around, she hadn't believed it, but she'd regretfully done what he said. Immediately after she had felt horrid, but in those moments she didn't, she'd felt verified.

"Mom and Dad, wait! Wait you fuckers." The last garnered all the immediate attention the hurt sound of a dying childs voice hadn't, but the saddest parts were yet to come.

"I just want you to know all the horrible shit you've done the last six months aren't all I'll remember you for, but I'll never forget the sick shit you both said or did. I'd rather you two conspired to kill me together than learn to hate and distrust each other trying to save me. I'd rather have died at home once back when there were people I called my family who made it a home.

"Most of all I'd rather live a full life, like this, rather than let you walk away never knowing I resent everything you succeeding in. Your failures weren't even failures, then you two went and turned into monsters that poison everything around them, I can forgive and forget your failures but I can't forget your successes." Neither looked moved, just angry, and I knew my last days of peace were at stake in this.

"I'd rather be a poor man's whore than be your daughter right now, Mom. Dad, I'd-." I very nearly made a comment as racist as he had become quickly and once had hated, that I'd have had sex with a consenting age black villager to have him catch me coupling with if I could've if only to hurt his now not so recently hateful heart, but I neither wanted to offend anyone else or lower myself before him.

Anger nearly made me stupid then, but pain and fear kept me too clear.

"I'd have gone anywhere with you once Dad, you made every place good and happy and safe, even the edges of the world I went with you both in your madness. You both make me wonder if my life before was even good at all, if you really were good or just good at acting such, because you made this last year of dying a god-damned hell.

"I wouldn't wish the last year you stole from me on anyone, but if I did, it'd be a person worth the whole world hating instead of my own dying kid." They still seemed half unresponsive but it had been too much not to comfort each other, especially when I wouldn't let them touch me, and the dusty jar I brandished was all it took to keep them at bay along with my words and backing away from them fearfully.

"I can't understand how you can even act like you want to hold each other now, you haven't touched Mom since you started selling her like the animal feed you used to own a business selling, and she hasn't touched you since you started cheating with kids and mothers like you used to care for in your own family. You used to teach kids the age Dad slept with Mom.

"You volunteered to help people women in womens shelters from people like Dad has become. Dad you used to hold a family together, how dare you break them now. Mom you knew Dad could never handle you selling yourself, you knew it before you started, neither of you wanted to. Why did you let everything get so fucked?

"How could you ever think you could just walk away from here and abandon me, so shameless, and think that all the other shit besides that wouldn't haunt you both the rest of your days?"

After that she walked back to the well and her bed, what had once been Babu's own bed that she had taken, but the man was nowhere to be found that day though there was a small pot full of soup. Two days worth of food went down her in one day, not even a day of food for most stomachs, but when you weren't moving much and had little appetite you ate little if at all.

That next day she'd gone swimming after she bathed, before a month she was crossing the narrow branch of river outlet and gathering some of her own food, climbing to get some and digging to get others. People were eager to help someone Baboucarr would, they helped her when she was weak, and she learned every touch to be like a burst of energy she was starving for.

But she'd had to forgive herself even more than her parents, whatever had caused her cancer wasn't through with her yet, she'd only discovered some near sensible method of prolonging inevitability. It was forestalled, not stopped, and it couldn't be cured. She knew that, but Babu and the others didn't, some even exaggerated that they'd had hideous tumors where there wasn't even a scar left by his healing.

Bullshit, but beautiful bullshit, belittling a dying young woman wasn't nice but giving her hope was.

Three months after while she barely felt pains or discomforts, her own oldest tumor made itself physically detectable to her hands touch besides her innate sense of her insides, and Babu never put pressure on it but often massaged her around that area of her belly, playful and comforting for a few minutes each day, claiming when she let out the bad and let the good in the tumor would be gone in less than a day.

He couldn't have been more silly, Victoria thought then, no longer annoyed by such thoughts or antics. Couldn't have been more wrong either, she was sick all the next month and losing what meager weight she'd put back on faster than ever, the tumor seemed to grow every night and every day more miserable than the last she eventually confronted him.

Favor for a favor, someone he'd helped a family member of promised to help, but instead of any treatment only lined up a screening. In a way she'd been hopeful, until that news came up there in the lobby where they met her, but Victoria had already known to expect no miracle. That this help would not help either, she understood, but she figured if someone showed Babu what he was up against he would lose hope in her. She'd fought. She'd been restrained, gently.

She made her will and want known.

"If you show him and tell him, he'll believe you, he's not fool enough to see it himself and hear people who he can accept the truth from say I'm going to die and let me die in his home. My own parents couldn't, please, please-please don't tell him."

'Bad gas and menstrual cramps both.' Their machines were simpler, so it stood to some odd reason in her she'd just gotten lucky, she'd passed no gas nor had ever felt any cramping that bad. She kept my mouth shut since Babu was sure she was cured, but she knew she was just lucky, cancer was never healed that saturated this deep. You only could slow it down as long as you handled harsh treatment and surgery.

But her time just seemed to keep half-stepping along.

The seventh month everything changed when her fathers crimes caught up to her, more than one baby the wrong complexion had people looking for the relative left behind, and people protected Babu but the man himself was too numb in the right and wrong ways to protect himself. When he'd died standing between her and them she'd known the hell she'd staved off was closing in.

But like everything else she was wrong about, that was another, she'd been learning the thing most wanted all the times about how to survive. The things he'd been telling her besides about how to live, she could only look back on and find what she needed, those deep secrets Babu had been spelling out for her all the times they spoke. He'd never found someone who took so long to heal that he could help.

He'd already known it would cost his life, just not why, but he'd known that an adulterers daughter would live or die by his works since he was a boy and taken to traditional healing instead of medical from the day he learned it.

Victoria could accept that poor villagers would call in plentiful favors to get her home though she didn't want to leave, she could even accept that all that cancer was gone and that he'd not just done the otherwise impossible, but knew it might be the healing that was going to kill him and put his whole life in the bargain wholehearted anyway.

What she couldn't accept was not knowing those things until after she learned them, Babu had always said that secrets are always seeking to be made known, but all the good secrets she'd discounted as soon as he'd try to tell her anything profound that always approached the nonsensical or silly sounding.

"I thought of you as my death sentence Babu, once, but some days I think you might be a life sentence." She'd joked a few times in the middle months of their time together. Her organs were a long time going for failing, and having known they were all shutting down nearly a year before, if nothing else she had accepted they were not anymore.

Constant dizziness and vision darkening sobered her thoughts she might be in any remission, but she'd learned what that was before leaving the states, and those symptoms were gone with an anti-parasitic that somewhere in all the places I'd gone infected me. It wasn't a local one.

"It's true for both, see, your own mouth tells me my own secret." He'd erupted with the most delightful and yet pushing well into mad laughter, already proving his point to himself meant nothing, but he'd added to that sentiment the first time I gave it that way. After his long, loud, lunatic laugh of course. "Remember that as a double lesson you gave yourself, fool. You may be a bit wiser, if you do."

She'd remembered it well if only as a happy moment before, another silly sleight and attempt to appear sorcerer like, something approaching wisdom that wasn't understandable for her. There was another secret he had kept far between them, one where she'd wanted to fall for the man, but Babu had treated other young teenage women the same way he would have her.

He'd have put her off his lap in a moment when she went to it, had she acted indecent. Every time she had even started to think that way he was dumping her off, or moving away where she got too close. "Too young! Ah, girl, a man needs a woman that fills up his mind! Hands are fickle, but hearts are forever!" Victoria had sighed the same as younger girls than she. Rarely had she felt such moods, they were few, but they'd been strong and hurt by rejection she never plied.

He'd called her out for them anyway to get it off her heart. "You like Babu? Babu likes you only as daughter, fool. Girls must find boys, they raise each other to grow up, only after they leave their parents house. Leave Babu and grow up, then come back and find him." He'd said, jeering and repeating. "Hah! Babu is too proud and too manly, for little women who aren't grown yet."

Victoria had learned to see black skinned people closer, physically, she could see their freckles, fine moles, bruises, scrapes, old and fine healed scars, things she'd been blind to merely by being limited to proximity of mostly other white people her whole life. Thinking they had any other differences physically was to entertain thoughts she couldn't after, and hadn't much before.

There was some depth to those she might meet in America reminiscent of those in Africa, a trace of the same fearlessness of dying the way you did your living, the boldness of being what you were most of all when pressure and pain tried to change your ways. It was one of those differences that stood out, you couldn't apply it to every African or Ghanaian even, but there it was and it was a truth that was racist. Racist, but positive, if generalizing.

"Fear is the wisest teacher, always wise, but the student may not always learn clear the first time. Know what you are afraid of, and find the courage it is trying to teach you." He'd exclaimed.

She she'd learned spiders were not mindless and voracious killers, just patient and clever hunters and trappers, they didn't put webs where people walked daily and they didn't eat every bug that wound up in their web. They'd let loose what they could handle safely, small safe bugs, and they'd pull strands free to set loose the bugs that might harm them. Most were larger, many would fall or fly the loose strand free, others bite it or drag it off.

They'd only take what they needed and could use, nothing about a spider was greedy or savage, instead they were thoughtful and careful in all they did. They cleaned themselves well, shook their webs to make their presence and web obvious, yet they'd admit you to study them and not shake if they learned you just stopped by to visit. That meant you knew where they were.

They'd shake at someone they didn't know who appeared beside a person they did, showing they could identify you somehow, and that they were much more than a little evil bug. Little evil bugs didn't wave at people, or differentiate them, and they surely didn't let trapped smaller bugs go free.

Snakes got a bad rep unjustly, some could kill you, but they applied a lot of effort trying to avoid things larger than them they didn't interact with naturally. They listened well all the time, moving long before you neared when possible, like spiders they tended to bite when their space was too invaded whether it was an accidental trespass of territory or incidental step or press on them.

They didn't eat often, and though an egg or two went missing with a young chick here and there, many rodents would have made off with feed, eggs, chicks, and chickens if not for them. They preferred lounging in a cool silo or granary, awaiting foolish rodents and avoiding smarting brooms or angered hens, where there was less trouble. Egg stealing was a night time thing for wise serpents.

It was hard to be mad at a working snakes swollen belly, but a strange snake with one became food, snake and egg made a decent meal. The friendly working snake and fellow villager would be set free to work still, out of the cage they could not exit so swollen, the others became easy meals whose crimes punished themself with instant karma.

Event plants and soils or stones had secrets, good or bad, all things had some and all had both. Nature was just that way. A young woman dying terrible and slow could find herself living exquisite and fast. She wouldn't need a complicated answer to make sense of a complicated thing that many more intelligent couldn't, and even all their work together hadn't. Still parts of her that had never moved were, parts that had moved but shouldn't were gone.

For all she knew, she'd expelled the cancer when she was sick that month, sweating it out in cold chills, excreting it out pores and orifices, all those infections her bladder and ears had been clamming up with hadn't only pestered her incessantly with more pain but been her body metabolizing the cancer everywhere somehow. It didn't matter what one thing or group of them did it, not to her, because if she had come back any could.

Others had found their cure easier, better hadn't with more effort, worse had with almost none. Those were not concerns, just sentiments, things that were true and just proved some place in it all will did meet want and the way wasn't as important as people thought. The way was just in the middle, but, things between you and goals were called barriers. Why journey when the destination only need be arrived at?

Go or stay, there was no way, just here and there. Physical travel wasn't like that, psychological travel was, and the destination was all you had to hold to get where you needed be. Victoria had learned to feel good, feeling good all the time had an effect beyond what logic could explain, but as to why she had felt bad as a child who could say? She had her opinion. When she'd started putting her fight out if herself instead of in that day with her parents.

As Babou had said, that day she saved herself, but she'd still only decide half a decade later it saved her parents too. Her father and mother had another child and had divorced not long after she returned home, she'd waited another half a year to be on her own feet when she saw them again, but her father had a much harder time seeing her at first or accepting her.

While her mother welcomed her with open arms, it didn't last long, though it had made her happy to learn somehow Victoria lived she simply couldn't accept the harder reality she had left herself to in that time. With another husband she'd married not long after finding Victoria in her life, avoiding her on the matter was her prerogative, and she'd always avoid it inside. Victoria couldn't help her face a problem she wouldn't look at as one.

Her father wasn't trying to offend, but he asked opinions and got them, and his only concern was whether or not she'd had sex or been raped by any black man. It was startling for her to see him hung up on that, doubting her when she told him no, and angering the time he asked and she admitted that she had indeed discovered that she was now attracted to all ethnicities more based on the person.

The stark physical differences she'd learned to see more as similarities, things he'd once explained to her as a child, she found herself trying to give more depth and credence to. He would have none of it, claimed she was putting words in his mouth before thinking better on it, then resorting to a mid-step approach after remembering himself.

"You tell your kids that so they'll act acceptable in school, they learn for themself it's not true the same way the easter bunny or santa aren't, it's a unspoken rule society and family follows. That'd make for nice reunions Vikki, a brown baby in everyones god-damn family album, we'd definitely be forgotten the next time invitations went out. Hell, we wouldn't get to host any, we'd be just like my niece.

"Scratched off the family tree in hearts and minds." Both had been speechless a minute, but after they started back discussing mere potential-postulation he brought up wanting to hear one thing and getting what she was needing to say instead, Victoria put her final words in on the matter without clarifying she wasn't attracted only to black men like he began suspecting.

Why should she? She wasn't going to coddle her own adult father over whether or not she should be attracted to someone based on ethnicity, wasn't going to give him a lie for eithers good, and she surely wasn't going to keep pointing out she'd tried to make a move on a man who'd rejected her for being young when her father kept suggesting he'd exploited her state.

Neither did she point out he had left her with said man, or encourage the idea she had only denied truthfully, her father jumped to some conclusion in his head the man who'd saved her and died because of his actions had somehow doomed her instead. After hearing him out, she'd left, glad she could go back and see him anyway. She had opened him up to other things.

He wasn't still doing the things he had been, and sick as they were, she loved him and he was hurting.

Late to see him years later, minutes away from the hours long drive, Victoria had turned around out of his drive after reading the messages he'd been sending while her phone was silent in her purse on the passenger seat. He'd come out looking torn while she'd torn through the grass in his yard.

Rather than be trapped by him getting in front of her car and make the three point turn, or hear him out about it, she'd barreled through shrubs and skirted the ditch at an angle, flipping him off as she had and stopping by the highway to settle her nerves with her car looking like she'd drove through the woods. Thin branches mostly still full of leaves mostly in the grill, lower outer front left and back right of the body with grassy dirt clods stuck to them, she had cried a few minutes.

She'd just washed the car a few days ago. Then she had laughed for close to ten minutes, off and on while drinking her tea and settling her nerves, laughing because her Dad always had loved his front yard. Accusing her of being what he had, which she wouldn't repeat for it's ignorant intolerance of a simple thing he wanted her to simply agree she would not do, Victoria reminded him something.

Who had more experience and interracial children than her father, that he or she knew? Likely few did, like one thing he had said, people who were attracted to a certain race not their own only were a different and ignorant kind of racist. He'd been guilty of that for the worst reasons, at least most like that had better ones, if only that it was instinct, inexplicable, or familiarity if nothing else but a habit.

Her last decade had been spent playing the waiting and dating game, she'd always found the good qualities deeper and the bad ones shallower, no longer a teenager anymore. Those days had been harder, because, then she'd had a secret. One she wasn't sharing with another her age, one she wouldn't let seriously effect a person, and one guy had been easier to do that with multiple times.

Jack had been hung up on an ex, so, he was easy to toy with without hurting. In a way, he was like her at that time, dating shallowly because he felt forever spurned by love. There was no real regret for either, they'd been friends before and after, others he'd hurt unwittingly had taken it more personal because he'd somehow had a habit of only picking the girls who really liked him or at least wanted him.

She'd have remembered him distantly, if they hadn't met again, for friends though they were a few years many had passed. Millenium of them had.

Victoria had been forewarned, by a person who reminded her of a Babu who had somehow lived only among his kind and grown mystically wise, and those millenium ago she'd thought of it as if John Kostya as if he was the manifestation of secrets revealing themself, the day he told her about Jack and knew she knew that Jack. He started with knowing she knew a guy.

So she had listened.

By the time she had come to be Julia to him, she was sure his role and hers were as foretold, he was going to become all that he was not. When he became Grub of quiet manners and means, Victoria contendedly became Julia, not so sure for two millenium how Jack being Grub instead was so terrible or destructive.

All of that time they had been one.

She'd been hesitant to get near him physically until necessity struck, for almost a decade she had kept men at bay awaiting a peaceful and gracious one that wasn't frightful and capricious as well, though after the first cold spell she pretty much wished he would make some kind of sign of desire. He didn't directly, but the indirect ones were plenty.

He might have remembered her hands on him, but somehow he hadn't realized the top of his spine was where her lips went, or that her nose went between his lower lip and chin where the warmth of his breath could warm her face before she'd kiss him on the lips goodnight. Grub suddenly changing had been alarming, scary, a wake up for her as well after so long.

She hadn't even got to tell him who she was, and he probably would never remember, but the things she knew about him personally or the world as it changed were both little. Whatever changes he and others experienced, the bulk of hers had come when Grub recieved his wishes, all she knew was she had another body afterwards. Julia, and she knew the character.

Jack and she had played a VR-MMORPG, her character had been a nine-tail-fox in that world and fire mage, his had been a typical build for men then. His primary character was an elf archer, he'd been very adept with it and positioning besides aiming, but made a new character when she had. The archetypal male human warrior.

Rather than typical tactics dictated, they built a truly broken system, using her characters fire magic defensively to isolate and seperate, his warhammer the cannon and her fire the tank. It could not be beaten, and the duo had won even the squad championship of that world of the game that year, the unofficial server of their school.

It may be why he chose the species she had, but, the djinn had remarked the body belonged to a disembodied evil spirit whose sleeping state would start to waken. They would not be able to indirectly get it back, but they'd come for it, and before they did the djinn would have to go first. With Grub it had been no concern, she was no slouch either.

Grub didn't even have eight espers use, he'd done something to heart and quantum that defied understanding, but Victoria learned that too late to do what she had been meant to. Prevent Grub becoming other than Jack again. Jack could return from memory loss, it would have come back, she knew but did not know what was in his that would. How long did total recovery take?

Grand-Goddess here or not, she was not God, but right and wrong weren't difficult to see in this case.

There'd been one thing left behind after the world, the moon, he destroyed that but it was forgivable. There'd been two things left behind after her heart, peace and love, he destroyed them and it was forgivable. His were gone before he had, he wasn't consigning her to a fate he hadn't seen himself in. What was unforgivable was him staying like that.

Either she broke him from this way and did Babu proud by healing him, saved Jack and the other worlds, this what John Kostya asked with an awful alternative. Him breaking her from her way, a person who took people for themself and knew true change, a woman who would accept him as he was. In the end she had inadvertently honored her Dads wishes.

He looked white, even though that was just mostly and she wasn't sure about the remainder. That truth didn't matter to her, just him.