He feels her hand on top of his. A flash of ribbons of every color passes before his eyes, but he cannot look at anything but her face. A broad, beaming smile splits her expression, erasing sorrow lines that have begun forming far too soon.
He, a young man of 22, radiating joy from somewhere beneath the folds of excess cloth in his rental tuxedo. She, a young woman resplendent in her repurposed silver prom dress, reflecting the light in her eyes, beaming off her like the moon come to earth.
They stand, together, hands joined in the binding ceremony, squeezing them at regular intervals as though to reaffirm that the other is real. In a room full of crushed velvet furniture, glass beadwork trim, and plastic decorations, they, at the very least, are genuine.
They are alone, save for the portly gentleman with the stark white hair and wide-brimmed hat looping the ribbon around their hands and speaking words that are, to them, inconsequential. Their expressions say all that needs saying. It is a day neither of them expected to reach.
There is no one seated on either side of the aisle in the gimmicky French Quarter wedding chapel, the southern cousin of its more well-known Vegas counterparts. He has only her. She wants only him. Her smile only fades, briefly, when the wedding official must pause for a moment to move her hospital bracelet out of the way.
He offers a sheepish grin and graciously continues as though he has not noticed.
Padraig tenses, waiting for the self-consciousness to trigger the neurosis, to trigger the dark places in her mind. Waiting for the cascade failure.
Her face twists up, wrestling with a thought. She tenses, staring at her patient information scrawled across the plastic band. Her brow furrows, and darkens, until she seems to reach a realization. Slowly, ever so slowly, the lines fade again, returning to happier climes.
"It's symbolic, really," she says, nodding decisively, reassuringly.
Padraig relaxes, awash in relief. Maybe it really will be different this time.
"That's the spirit."
Hands now firmly bound in symbolic streamers, every shade of the rainbow and beyond, the official asks for their affirmations to one another, to make the ceremony real. To make the binding real. Their marriage license lays neatly in the stack of their earthly possessions, which consist of a worn duffel bag and a folder full of release papers. They both felt they needed something more than that though, more than a cold courthouse and a public servant's quiet judgment.
Morgan fidgets nervously, opening and closing her mouth several times before launching in, a mile a minute, driving the train of thought as one does when they are used to regular derailments within their mind.
"You know you don't have to do this, Pad. I know how it's been these last several years, what we’ve put each other through. And I love the hell out of you for…for even just STANDING there right now, all things considered, but please don't let there be a sense of obligation. If you want to run, I wouldn't blame you. Just let the man untie us first because otherwise this would get awkward quickly, me bouncing down the street behind you."
She looks down now, waits to feel binds being quickly undone, waits to hear receding footsteps, tries not to go to her negative place, tries to focus on the positive, tries to bury herself in the soft haze of the medication, tries to wrap herself in this new blanket that lets her complete sentences and know that her voice is her own.
Instead, there is a soft pressure, a nose, nuzzling her forehead, pushing her face back level with his own. And then those big green eyes.
"Morgan…have you paid any attention to me the last seven years?" His voice is playful, his smile steadfast. "You saw me in high school. And my first three jobs. Obligation alone would have sent me running years ago. I'll be the first to admit that.
"I am here because I choose to be. Because I love you, and because we have come too far, and seen too much. No one on the planet is ever going to be able to understand me the way that you do."
"So…obligation and convenience, then?" Her turn to be playful. He moves to tousle her hair as he always has when she's been a smart ass, but the ties on their hands cause her to smack herself on the forehead instead.
She laughs, and it floats through the air sweeter than any of the novelty wind chimes that adorn the place. Jumping out of order, they kiss, long enough to threaten the next appointment's start time, before offering rushed vows and taking a handful of mall photographer quality "professional" photos.
Hands unbound but souls tethered, the newly married couple dances and sways into the night, into the press of bodies and sounds and noises that characterize any street that feeds into Bourbon at this time of year. Twelfth Night behind, Fat Tuesday ahead, Carnival season is in full swing.
Careening through the masses, they find an unlocked alley gate with a reachable fire escape ladder. Clambering up to the balcony overlooking the festivities, Padraig retrieves a worn, familiar blanket from his bag and drapes it around them before offering her a pack of crackers. Memories of darker times, better days ahead. They lean into one another and watch the night parades go by.
A parade of mourners went by. The doctors could offer no timeline for events once the machines were turned off, so respects were to be paid by anyone the family authorized before that occurred. Once the switches had been flipped, Catherine and Evelyn's final vigil would begin.
Padraig sat in silence, Evelyn's arm still through his own, watching the grim processional from their spots in the waiting room. Catherine remained in the room with her daughter during each person's visit. Padraig could not help but notice that the large orderly from their previous altercation was hovering near the nurse's station, keeping a wary eye on him.
Also hovering was the man in the brown trench coat, who had been talking intensely with Catherine when he arrived. Tired brown eyes peered out from beneath a permanently creased forehead, progressing upwards to black stubble, hair shaved down in a failed bid to conceal his receding hairline.
He kept a respectful distance from the proceedings, sipping terrible hospital coffee out of a Styrofoam cup and failing to look nonchalant, eyes too focused on each person that passed by, lingering for a second too long. On the faces of the civilians. On the posteriors of the female nurses. Padraig had him pegged as a cop. Or a pervert. More likely both.
Either way, he had little use for him. But his lack of uniform and his age -- mid-40s or a high-mileage late-30s -- spoke to the likelihood of him being more investigator than beat cop. Thus, in Padraig's experience, potentially far more troublesome.
Detectives asked questions he had no good answers to. No believable answers, at any rate, even if he was certain any polygraph in the world would bear him out. And after Catherine's display earlier, he was all too aware that, when the man thought he wasn't looking, his eyes remained fixed on them, this unlikely pair last in line to say farewell.
After a small eternity, the final aunt emerged, damp-eyed and shuddering, sobbing more loudly whenever someone passed nearby, nodding meekly and feebly at their comforting hands on her shoulders. Feeding on the sympathy, and the attentions of strangers. Your standard grief thief, a lamprey attached to the grim reaper’s side.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
A flash of anger welled up within Padraig. He knew that this shambling wreck before him had wanted little to do with Morgan in better days. And nothing to do with her in the worse ones.
In fact, by his accounting, almost no one in the waiting room, putting on this grand display for public consumption, even deserved to be there.
Burden. Lunatic. Ingrate. Heathen. All labels they had placed on her.
Before she was diagnosable, she was a nuisance. Too much of a dreamer. Lazy. Stupid. She needed to stop reading those fantasy books. She needed to stop playing those games. She needed to stop listening to that devil music. She needed to hang out with better people. And most of all, she needed to stop seeing that boy.
After she was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, they’d seen her as nothing but a potential danger to herself and others. The early days that should have seen sympathy, empathy, and compassion, were filled instead with gloating. An entire clan so self-congratulatory for having known she was never quite right that they had done everything but throw a mental disorder reveal party.
Only her maternal grandmother, the stoic matron to his right, had given her care a legitimate try. When Morgan's father died under mysterious circumstances – thankfully while Morgan was in treatment, lest suspicion land on her doorstep – Catherine had quickly decided that she could not handle the girl.
She was shipped off to her grandparents' little pink house in the swampy hinterlands past the suburbs of Metairie, lush woodlands trailing off into a stinking marsh, a safe distance away from everything. The center of the spiral, around which all else rotated and to which she always returned, after each traumatic venture, a little worse for wear each time, until the forces pulling on her mind had grown too much even for Evelyn. One final departure for the psych ward downtown had been arranged, and there she had remained.
Until, apparently, this afternoon.
A gentle shake brought him back to the present. Evelyn looked at him, concerned. Morgan's aunt glared balefully as she stormed past, Padraig only now realizing he had been staring holes in the woman, for exactly how long he did not know. Evelyn turned after her and, when she was a safe distance away, leaned in close to Padraig under the guise of beginning to stand.
"She probably wants to see a will to figure out how upset she should act."
Padraig, despite himself, laughed. Quietly, so as not to give anyone the wrong idea, but sincerely just the same. His tired mind was reeling from his restless night and abrupt start to his day. Once so certain that this whole trip would be another wild goose chase, he was now terrified of the connection between Benny's dark warning and the girl in the other room. A moment of unexpected mirth was a welcome one.
He had spent years building walls around this eventuality, this inevitability. Even people with a passing knowledge of her from school who had tried to keep in touch had known this day was coming. Had intimated as much to him years ago, when he would pass through the area and run into someone he knew, despite his best efforts.
But it was different when you could hear the respirator. The machines. The beeping. And you knew it was all that remained.
Evelyn stood now, and reached out a hand to him, all pretense of needing his assistance gone. Together they walked, through the door, into the sparse room, past the watchful eyes of Catherine.
"He is not allowed in here," she spat. "Leave. Now. I will call an attendant, so help me--"
"Shut up," Evelyn interrupted, coldly, never taking her eyes off Morgan as she wove her way through the maze of cables and tubes. "You don't get to dictate terms. Not now. Not to me. And not to him."
Catherine's normally sallow face turned a livid pink.
"But Morgan said that he--"
"I know what Morgan said, dear. Morgan said a lot of things. And very few of them made sense. It was the product of a troubled mind, and you've got to let it go."
Padraig watched in uncomfortable silence as Evelyn and her daughter made eye contact for the first time over the broken body between them.
"Let the boy say goodbye to his wife. Please."
Catherine, still visibly distraught but in no condition to fight any longer, rose to leave, pausing only long enough to shove a finger into Padraig's chest, jaw quivering in rage.
"She told me, Padraig. She told me how you did this to her. Told me in her own voice, the voice of the girl I knew before you took her from me and brought back this…thing. Told me all about you."
Catherine got closer with each word, standing on her toes to draw level with his eyes, her hot breath laced with traces of brandy and cigarettes washing over him.
"Catherine…" came Evelyn's voice, heavy with warning.
"And you know what?" she pressed on in a harsh whisper, face less than an inch from his own.
"I believe her."
"Catherine! Leave us be, for god's sake!"
Glaring and sneering for a few moments longer, Catherine tossed one last hateful glance at her mother, which melted away into sorrow once again at the sight of the girl in the bed. Then, at last, after the door had slammed and the privacy blinds settled back into place, they were alone. Padraig, Evelyn, and Morgan.
It was here, finally, that Evelyn's resolve broke. The tears came, all at once, torrential, merciless, wracking her body in spasmodic anguish until she could no longer stand, sinking to her knees at Morgan’s bedside. They were the only real tears he had seen all day. Padraig, no better or more adept at cold comforts than he had been as a young man, wandered to the corner to stare out the window, over the darkened cityscape, wishing he was anywhere but in this room, at this moment.
Minutes passed. Cars and pedestrians moved below, unaware of the tragedy playing out above them. A barge worked its way upriver in the distance. Padraig took it all in, relaxing and letting his mind expand to fill the room, as he had done so many times before.
He could feel it now, his sigil, the beacon that alerted the Others and led him to this moment. It was the faintest of whispers from the right side of her bed, a shiver of cold air in a musty room. A light blue flame, ethereal, barely more visible than a will-o-wisp. Fading. Quickly. What life force it had drawn on was all but expended.
The strangled sobs slowly returned to labored breathing.
"Padraig," Evelyn called, voice hoarse from the intensity of the grief that had escaped her. "I'm sorry Padraig, come and have your turn."
Padraig dutifully complied, moving to stand by Evelyn's kneeling form, and placing a hand on her shoulder. He hated to do anything disingenuous at a time like this, but he knew he was running out of time.
"Evelyn, do you mind if I have a moment alone with her? I need…I need to get closure and say some things while there's a chance she can…maybe still hear me."
Evelyn patted his hand and stood to hug him, unexpectedly, forcefully.
"Of course not, Padraig. Of course not. I will keep Catherine occupied."
She moved to the door, opened it, began to step through, then paused, a thought seeming to occur to her.
"And Padraig," she volunteered from the doorway. "Morgan told me things, too. But I didn't believe her. Don't believe her. She is…was…sick, and that sickness took her to some very dark places where no one could help. You are a sweet man, and I know you only ever cared for her."
With a wan smile, she was gone, leaving Padraig to slump under the weight of Evelyn's words. Her poor, misguided words.
He turned and faced his wife for the first time in four years. She was practically mummified, with no end to the gauze, nothing visible but her face. Her barely recognizable face.
Expecting to vacillate between the preparations he had made for this moment and an uncontrollable sadness that did not care how often he had visualized her lifeless body, what he was left with instead was a regression to the mean, feeling almost nothing, and being disgusted by it. A cold matter-of-factness. A disquieting emptiness. And, in the darker places of his mind he would never and could never articulate, a hesitant sense of relief.
A decade of trying to delay the inevitable, then ignore it, then embrace it. And it was finally here. Lying in front of him. Rationalizing that he was probably in shock, he moved to the job at hand.
Relaxing his focus once more, he reached out through the ether, hesitantly at first, before realizing that his trepidation was nothing but old instincts kicking in. He was trying not to wake her.
He made contact and felt the sigil burning beneath the bandages of her right hand. Carved into her skin. His name in the old language, as only she would know how to write it. But why would--
Screaming filled Padraig's mind. Screaming, pain, desperation, panic. Torment. Torture, primeval and ruthless. Dark things with red eyes circling him.
And the woman in the tempest grey dress, staring at him, through him, and into him, all at once.
He wrenched his hand away, and though the visions faded, they were replaced by flaring, red, hateful symbols. Not in his mind but radiating out from beneath the bandages on Morgan's arms, torso, and legs, with the smoldering intensity of magma seething through a volcanic crevice.
Some of the symbols had hesitation marks, halting and shaken from pain or uncertainty or unfamiliarity. They were imperfectly done, yet effective, nonetheless. Among them was his name, in Morgan's handwriting, so to speak.
Others, however, were precise. Surgical and nuanced. Almost artful. She would have had no part in putting those there.
Morgan was covered in the script of the Enemy. Branded and carved and imprinted, booby-trapped with deliberate care and glee, for reasons he could not even begin to imagine.
They had found her. They had worked on her.
And She had seen him.