something wicked: chapter two
Nov. 5th, 2023 12:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
angelapleasant posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
belladonnacove
Content warnings: death, grief, language.
II.
The afternoon sun beats hard down on the car as the canyon shrinks in the rearview mirror. One long road stretches into the empty desert before them. They could have—should have—stayed in the little motel next to the diner they’d stopped in on the other side of the canyon, but it was too late for that now. Hermia keeps driving. 
Another hour through the dusty, red dunes of Simnation’s largest desert—another hour of the heatwaves dancing across the asphalt, another hour of the air conditioner in Hermia’s car struggling to keep up—and finally, there are signs of life. 
Barely—Strangetown wasn’t very big, and certainly not very inviting. But it was something. Somewhere to rest. It was their only option for hours and hours unless they turned back, and well, that wasn’t an option at all. It was far enough afield that Hermia felt somewhat safe to stop and find her bearings.
And to sleep. Really sleep. 
It felt like Hermia hadn’t slept in months. 
So the dingy little motel on the outskirts of the dingy little town might as well have been a five star resort on Twikii Island to her. An almost empty parking lot had never looked more inviting.
Inside, the motel is clearly clean, just old and beaten down by the harsh circumstances of its environment. The man at the front desk is unexpectedly polite and well-spoken. It’s Hermia who stumbles over her words.
“And how long will you be staying with us?”
She doesn’t know how to answer that question.
The man at the desk doesn’t let her struggle for very long. “Not to worry, it’s not like we’re full up here. Just make sure to check out before eleven on the day you leave, or I’ll have to charge you for another night.”
Hermia swallows and nods gratefully, handing him her credit card. He enters her information into a computer more modern than anything else in the building by at least fifteen years and returns it to her, along with an old key. A large “3” is written neatly on the key’s tag in permanent marker. “If you need anything after hours, just ring the number in your room. Our night guy is right next door.”
“Thank you,” Hermia manages, before heading back out for her sister.
Juliette is waiting patiently in the car. 
Before heading to the passenger side door, Hermia opens the trunk to grab their bag. When she closes it, she turns to find Juliette standing just behind her.
With a shriek, Hermia drops the bag onto the pavement. “Don’t sneak up on me like that!”
Juliette stands still as a statue, expression unchanged.
“Sorry,” Hermia says, one hand on her chest and the other grabbing the duffel. “You just scared me.” Twenty-one years of Juliette never shutting the fuck up and now she was as silent as a church mouse. But a glimmer of hope strikes Hermia. Getting out of the car on her own was the most Juliette had done without help or instruction since before… everything.
Maybe she’s getting better.
The motel room is small, with only one queen bed, and very dated. But like the lobby, it’s cleaner than expected. 
Hermia closes the curtains, then helps Juliette get more comfortable, removing her shoes and the flannel shirt, before attending to herself. 
The next order of business had to be a shower. Juliette was in as good a condition as she could have been considering the state of her, since Hermia had cleaned her up to the best of her ability at the rest stop the night before. But Hermia was starting to smell, her feet were starting to melt into her boots, and her hair was getting greasier by the minute.
While the water heats up, Hermia unwraps the bandages around her hand and wrist, knowing she should have checked the wounds earlier and dreading what she might find. 
But when the last layer pulls away, there are no cuts, no infection, no evidence of her crime except for a pair of faint scars. Where had she gone wrong with Juliette?
Juliette is still in the armchair where Hermia left her when she comes out of the bathroom. “We should get some sleep,” Hermia says, more to herself—par for the course, now. “We can figure out what to do in the morning.”
Hermia pulls on a fresh t-shirt and some underwear from the duffel bag, and it’s all over when she lies down in bed, lumpy mattress and all, with the whir of the ceiling fan and the hum of the AC unit chugging along lulling her to sleep. When her sister silently climbs into bed beside her, Hermia is dead to the world.
——
Tank and Buck are eating dinner in the living room—something Buck had assured Tank was no longer a mortal sin in the Grunt house now that Ripp had moved out, since their father could actually trust him to clean up after himself—when Buzz returns home from the military base. 
Almost automatically, Tank stands up to greet him, as if he were in boot camp. Old habits die hard, and his shoulders sag slightly as he realizes the awkwardness of the action. Someone falls comically into a pool in the movie they have playing on the TV.
Buzz gives him a mildly quizzical look as he locks up, and thankfully ignores Tank’s anxious energy. “Welcome home, son,” he says, and that’s that.
“Hey, Dad,” Tank says, before sitting back down with Buck.
“Buck,” Buzz says, nodding at his other son. “I see you’ve already taken care of dinner.”
Tank had run down to the little convenience store for a quick pizza. Somehow, the cheap, freezer section pizzas tasted better when cooked in a greasy, industrial “oven” under fluorescent lighting. Of course, he hadn’t been prepared to see his high school crush working there, fiddling with a staticky radio behind the counter.
Erin Beaker had been two grades ahead of him in high school, and she was one of the only people who hadn’t either avoided him or gossiped behind his back throughout the years, and she’d moved in with roommates next door after she graduated, where she always had kind small talk or a friendly wave for him.
Looking back, Tank recognized that despite the fact that he was overly respectful, he had also been too serious to be any fun. He’d barely had any friends, and those few friendships he did have hadn’t extended past JROTC hours. He had let Ripp and his crew get the better of him—purposefully riling him for no good reason—too many times. So naturally, he had nursed a little unrequited love for the girl whose head was so far up in the clouds she seemed to have been above all of it. 
Of course, Tank had crashed back down to earth when she’d stepped out from behind the counter and looked like she was about to pop. So much for working up the courage to really talk to her. They’d exchanged generic pleasantries, and he’d paid for his pizza and left. 
“See you soon,” she’d said airily, and Tank had briefly wondered how many people, if any, in Strangetown knew what he’d really been doing while he was supposed to be at university. His father surely wouldn’t volunteer that information, but who knew what Ripp was off running his mouth about.
“Tank just got home with it like half an hour ago,” Buck says, gesturing to the pizza. “It’s still hot.”
Buzz wrinkles his nose. “No, thank you,” he says, leaning down to pet the cat, who was snoozing on the recliner. “Jeanie and I will have some real food for dinner. We have some good leftovers from the other night, and no sense wasting it.”
At the mention of food and her name, Jeanie perks up and leaps down to follow Buzz into the kitchen. 
“He’s sharing with the cat now?” Tank asks Buck, quietly.
“It’s her favorite… tuna casserole,” he whispers back.
——-
Hermia wakes up sometime after the sun has gone down, jolting back to life in the darkness of the motel room. She can feel her sister in the bed next to her, and for a moment that flash of overwhelming terror paralyzes her. Without looking, she can feel Juliette’s eyes boring into the back of her skull, and wonders if her sister knows she’s awake, if she can sense her fear.
It takes longer for the feeling to subside this time, but again, Hermia scolds herself. There was no reason to be scared. In the state she was in, Juliette could barely even function at all, let alone function on her own without Hermia’s support. A feeling of helplessness replaces the fear; they had to find someone who could tell them what was happening, and how to fix it.
A loud growl erupts from Hermia’s stomach, accompanied by a nasty hunger pang. There was no way she was going back to sleep now, not with her heart still racing slightly and now her stomach protesting loudly the neglect it had been suffering. “I’m getting us something from the vending machine,” Hermia whispers, just in case Juliette was actually sleeping, and pulls on some leggings, fresh socks, and the sneakers she’d had in her gym bag. She leaves the room as quietly as she can, all the while fervently avoiding having to look at her sister.
——-
“This is why I don’t let you drive,” a young man’s voice says, startling Hermia out of her fog at the vending machine, where she had been trying to decide between stale chips and stale cheese crackers for dinner for the past ten minutes. 
A young woman is with him. “I got turned around once, Dirk!” she exclaims, helping him unload their bags from their car. “And you wanted to stop and eat in the canyon!”
“Lilith, that took forty-five minutes,” he argues back, shutting the trunk. “You took us three hours off course through the woods around SSU.” 
Lilith huffs, but it’s clear the argument isn’t that serious. “Whatever, we’re here now. Let’s just get to the room so we can start researching.”
“You know, everyone says Strangetown has all kinds of weird shit going on,” Dirk says. Hermia freezes. “I bet we’ll find something good here, even if we don’t find her.”
Their voices fade as they enter one of the vacant rooms, leaving Hermia to buy her dry cookies and stale sandwich crackers, and a couple of candy bars to try and entice Juliette to eat something, and to wonder what exactly they could have meant by weird shit, and whether there might be some help for them there, after all.
When she returns to the motel room with their “dinner,” Juliette is missing from the bed. Hermia’s heart skips a beat, but settles when she sees her sister sitting in the armchair, unnaturally still, as usual. “I got your favorite,” she says, turning on the light. 
Juliette’s head snaps toward her.
Hermia freezes in shock at the sudden movement–the most energy she’s seen from Juliette since before the ruined wedding. Juliette’s mouth opens as if she wants to speak, and Hermia drops everything and rushes toward her.
“Juliette?” she asks frantically, kneeling in front of her sister. “What is it? What do you need?”
But Juliette says nothing, closes her mouth, cocks her head at Hermia, and Hermia’s shoulders sag in defeat.
It’s a start, she thinks dejectedly, gathering her snacks, setting the candy bars on the dresser next to her sister. She sits on the end of the bed and devours her crackers and cookies with fervor, suddenly ravenous, nearly choking before having to run to the bathroom and chug a glass of water.
Juliette observes silently from the armchair, but the ghost of a smile tugs at her lips. 
Once Hermia gets herself back together, the exhaustion of the past few days returns. She strips off her shoes and leggings and turns off the light, checking on her sister in the chair one last time before she crawls back into the bed, letting sleep take her again.
The pale moonlight pools on the floor of the icy motel room through a crack in the curtains, and Juliette moves silently to the window, pulling the curtains further apart, her eyes wide on the waxing gibbous in the sky.
——-
After watching another so-called comedy with Buck, Tank decides to turn in for the night. He had struggled to get much sleep the night before, tossing fitfully in the little single bed, unable to regulate his temperature in the dry desert air—covers on, covers off, and what was he going to say to his father when he came home from the base? And that was before the damn cat had decided to unleash hell upon the toys strewn around the house at 0300, thundering up and down the stairs and through the halls like an elephant stampede before finally stopping to scratch at Buck’s door until Tank had gotten up and let her in. How Buck had managed to sleep through its utter decimation of the catnip legion, Tank could hardly hazard a guess, but when the door opened it had sauntered daintily into Buck’s room, pleased as punch, and thankfully that was the end of it.
Buzz had gone up to Tank’s old room-turned-office after he and the cat had finished their dinner to finish some paperwork before he turned in. He had to be up early to head back up to the base in the morning; hopefully he was as used to the cat’s antics as Buck was. 
Tank hesitates before knocking. His father was supposed to be home again tomorrow night; they could talk then, when he’d had a little more time to psych himself up, to decide how he was going to frame the conversation. But that felt so dramatic, to be so anxious for no reason that he had to mentally prepare himself to tell his dad he’d gotten a promotion, even if it was in a different career than they’d hoped and planned for, that he knocked anyway.
“Come in,” Buzz says from the desk, where a few files sit open. He closes them—whether out of habit or because they really are classified, Tank can’t be sure—stacks them neatly in the tray, and turns to his son. “Need something?”
“Just wanted to check in,” Tank says gruffly. “It’s been a while.”
“It has,” Buzz agrees.
Oh Watcher. This was so painfully awkward. Buzz could be so direct.
“I did get promoted,” Tank spills out, wanting to share the news and get out of there before the conversation could get any more anxiety-inducing. “It’s only to desk sergeant, but I hope to make detective by—”
“I’ll stop you there, son,” Buzz interrupts. 
Tank stops, aghast, waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Buzz to tell him how disappointed he is in him that he never went back to school and got his life back on its original, right track.
Buzz continues. “There’s no such thing as ‘only’ when it comes to an achievement. You’ve put in the hard work, to better yourself and your community, and you have clear, attainable goals to continue to do so in increasingly more effective ways in the future. Not everyone can say that. In fact, most people can’t. Don’t discount yourself, or your effort.”
“I… yeah, I guess,” Tank replies, flustered, his hand on the back of his neck. “I mean, yes sir,” he corrects himself, making eye contact like he’d always been taught.
“I’m proud of you, son,” Buzz says, quite sincerely, before turning back to his paperwork. 
Tank stands in shock for a moment, a weight he hadn’t realized he’d been carrying suddenly lifted. So many times he’d heard those words and never believed them, and now here they were discussing something that had never been part of the plan, but it was something he had done entirely on his own, and something he was working toward, and maybe, just maybe, that was enough.
——-
The next morning—or afternoon, that is—Hermia wakes with a start. Her mouth is dry, her stomach nauseous from lack of proper food. Juliette is lying on the bed next to her, facing the opposite wall. 
Hermia quietly dresses herself in the leggings from the night before and runs her fingers through her hair before tossing it back into a bun. In the bathroom, she splashes water on her face and brushes her teeth. Titania’s strange coins clatter to the floor when Hermia gathers up the clothes she’d left in a pile upon their arrival at the motel, and she absentmindedly puts them in her pocket before shoving the dirty clothes into a dresser drawer and tending to Juliette, who has sat up on the bed.
She could probably use a shower, but Hermia wasn’t quite sure what good it would do, if any. Juliette’s skin seemed so delicate—it was already damaged, and it’s not like the ritual had done any healing for her. The idea strikes Hermia that Titania’s salve might help at least in that regard, and she makes a mental note to grab what’s left of it from the car and apply it to some of Juliette’s worst-looking patches later. In any case, Juliette could probably skip the shower—Hermia hadn’t seen her do anything that might make her dirty, and if she washed anymore of the morturary’s makeup off of her, Hermia probably wouldn’t be able to bring her out in public at all. They had to put her in dark sunglasses to hide her eyes already. And nothing was going to remove the faint chemical smell emanating from her, nor the sickly smell of rot poorly masked by sweet floral perfume hiding beneath it, so why even bother.
Instead, Hermia helps Juliette cover herself with the same flannel shirt, don her shoes and sunglasses, and they head down the road to the diner that the motel owner recommends to them on their way out for some real food.
——-
“You sure that’s what you wanted, darlin’?” the waitress asks Juliette, whose plate sits in front of her, untouched.
Hermia swallows the last bite of her burger, hard. “Sorry, she’s on a medication that makes her really nauseous,” she lies, a little shocked at how easily it comes to her. “For her, uh, skin condition. Could we take it to go?”
“Of course,” the waitress responds. She gives Juliette a sympathetic once-over. “Poor thing,” she says, before leaving to grab them a to-go box and the check.
With a full stomach and more hours of sleep than she’d gotten in the past several days combined, Hermia can finally think straight. She’d used the time waiting for their meals to pull up Strangetown on her phone. According to the internet, it wasn’t much of anything but a military base and a science center. The former was a definite no on the list of places Hermia might try to seek aid. The second was a maybe, but as a last resort. The little blurb she’d pulled up on the web also said that there were lots of odd goings-on associated with the area. They mostly had to do with aliens, and apparently some had even settled there, but Hermia was sure somebody could tell her something. Maybe even one of the aliens could help them, with all their advanced technology.
“Here you are,” the waitress says cheerily, placing a paper takeout box on the table before them. “Is there anything else I can get for you?”
“No, thank you,” Hermia says, scrolling through the comments on a random Simbook post about Deadtree. They were all either complaints about the nightclub’s theme being too dark and modern, or the saloon being too old and sad, or the people living in the dairy farm down the road being too weird… nothing helpful. In Veronaville, the fact that faeries lived among them was a well-known “secret.” Surely a place called Strangetown had something similar. She just had to figure out where to look.
“Well, come back and see me anytime. You can pay at the counter when you’re ready.” The door chimes, signaling that new customers have arrived. “Welcome in! If you wanna have a seat right here, I’ll be back to get your drink order as soon as I can.”
“Ugh, I’m starving,” the girl from the night before says, tossing her bag in the booth behind Hermia before sitting down.
“Same,” her friend says, sitting down across from her. “I’m getting two cheeseburgers.”
“Dirk, please,” she teases. “Chili fries and milkshake superiority.”
“You’re gonna be puking,” Dirk says. “I’m gonna have to go to the nightclub all by myself, return a hero all by myself… ‘poor Lilith,’ they’ll say, ‘she had too much dairy and Dirk found Bella Goth all on his own…’”
Hermia pauses to eavesdrop, her interest piqued slightly. The Bella Goth who had been on all the milk cartons several years back? Who had multiple billboards in Sim City with her face plastered on them, encouraging people to call with any information about her whereabouts? If she hadn’t currently been dealing with her own crisis, she would have been all over that.
“Please shut up,” Lilith laughs, tossing a crumpled up napkin at her best friend. “Maybe she’ll stop in for lunch. But do you really think its her?”
“It’s gotta be,” Dirk says. “She looks just like her. Maybe a little younger, but if it’s not her, it’s her clone.”
Lilith snorts. “Could you imagine? I guess we’ll find out when the club opens after dark… that deputy sure was suspicious of her.”
“I mean, he did say she just showed up out of nowhere with total amnesia. That’s pretty weird. I just wish he’d told us where to find her so we didn’t have to drive around for two hours asking random people.”
“Wishful thinking,” Lilith muses. “But the old lady at the service station gave us tons of leads”—Hermia stiffens, following along intently as she swipes Juliette’s untouched burger and fries into the takeout box—“If Bella’s really working at that club like she said, we’d better follow up on the rest. Even driving out to the cemetery today was productive for the business. The gravekeeper sure was creepy, though.”
“Oh, total serial killer vibes,” Dirk agrees. “That house reeked of Weird Shit. I was so happy to get out of there.”
“Getting scared on me, Dirk?”
“No,” Dirk says defensively. “I just don’t like being around someone who gives off those vibes and happily lives in a graveyard.”
“Well, she runs the cemetery,” Lilith muses. “It’d be a shit job if she wasn’t happy to be there. But you’re right. She’s probably way too into witchcraft or something.”
And that sounded like exactly who Juliette needed to see. 
The waitress returns and takes their order, and Hermia leads Juliette to the table behind them. “Excuse me,” she says, trying to look as pitiful as possible, which wasn’t very difficult given the state of things.
Lilith and Dirk look up at her. They look at Juliette, then they look at each other before looking back to Hermia.
“Sorry,” Hermia says. “We’re just passing through, but we have ancestry here. Could you tell us where the cemetery is so we can see if we can find any family plots?” It seemed lying came just as easily to her as it had to Romeo.
“Uhh,” Dirk says, clearly unsure what to make of them. “Sure, yeah, there’s a really long road called Dead End Lane. It’s at the, uh, dead end.”
“You’ll know it by the fact that there’s nothing else fucking on it,” Lilith chimes in.
“Thanks,” Hermia says breathlessly, and rushes off with Juliette.
“Well that was fucking weird,” Lilith says.
“It is called Strangetown,” Dirk replies, and takes a crumpled straw wrapper to the face.
———
Back in the motel room, with her sister staring blankly at the wall, Hermia snacks on the cold fries that Juliette clearly wasn’t going to eat, going over in her head how she would explain their situation to the graveyard keeper. What details she would share, which she would omit, how she would know if she was trustworthy in the first place. The last thing they needed was the wrong person finding out about Juliette’s… condition. Best case, she’d be forcibly hospitalized and Hermia would have no chance of helping her. Worst case… no, she wasn’t going to think about that.
Hopefully, the gravekeeper really was involved in witchcraft, or at the very least, could direct them to someone who was. And if she couldn't help, Hermia would track down an alien. If not that, the science center. She’d taken a paranormal elective class at Académie Le Tour just for the hell of it. There were plenty of strange and unexplained things out there, and plenty of people who studied them.
And if no one in Strangetown could help them, they’d move on—maybe stop at La Fiesta Tech and meet with their paranormal professor. There were rumors of a dark underground scene run by vampires in Sim City; maybe they’d turn back and go west instead of north. Maybe Juliette was some kind of vampire; it would explain a lot about the… process, and her lack of appetite.
Hermia shudders at the thought. How was she going to feed her if that were the case? She could try stealing some blood bags from the hospital, but she’d never stolen anything in her life, never even had to think about needing something she couldn’t get. The Capps were rolling in money. Their parents hadn’t let them get too spoiled, thanks to their grandfather’s stories of how he worked his way up before meeting Contessa, but they’d still never gone without.
And Juliette wasn’t going to go without now. Now Hermia had a clear head and a place to start, and she would find a damn cure for whatever her sister’s condition was if it killed her.
———
After stocking up on more soda and candy bars at the vending machines for Juliette to ignore, Hermia leaves her sister to rest in the motel room and sets off for the little cemetery at the end of Dead End Lane. The drive down the lonely road isn’t too long; she can still see the main highway behind her, the sun dying in the sky. 
There’s a chill in the air when Hermia pulls up in front of the large stone house next to the cemetery. The gate is unlocked, and she pulls her flannel tightly around her as she walks up the pathway. The house looms over her, dark and strangely alluring, as she raises a hand to knock on the heavy wooden door.
“And who might you be, come calling here, to interrupt an old woman’s tea?” a voice calls out from behind her.
Hermia jumps and spins around. Sitting in an armchair in the dead center of a smaller, but still quite “populated” graveyard is an elderly woman dressed in black. She’d been so focused on the house and her own thoughts that she hadn’t even noticed the graves, let alone someone having tea among them.
“Sorry,” she manages, as her heart rate normalizes. “I didn’t realize I was interrupting—”
“Nonsense,” the old lady interjects, and Hermia steps back. The gravekeeper smiles, her thin lips pulling back and disappearing over her teeth. “I’m pulling your leg. I don’t get many visitors out here anymore, and now three in one day? Come child, have some tea.”
Hermia hesitates. The words are kind, but the spirit behind them is… off.
“I said come here,” the old lady barks sharply, patting the little table next to her armchair that holds the tea set and a plate of cookies. “I don’t bite.” Her smile says otherwise.
Still, Hermia had come here to meet her, no matter the alarm bells in her head and the goosebumps on her skin. “My name is Hermia Capp,” she says, as she walks down the path to the little graveyard. “I thought maybe you might have some… advice for me, given what I’ve heard of you.” She chooses her words carefully, not wanting to insinuate too much if the two travelers had been wrong about her, not wanting to offend if they had been right.
“Ah,” the old woman says, pouring Hermia a cup of now-tepid tea. “So you’ve heard me?”
Hermia takes the cup, holds it close to her, but doesn’t raise it to her lips. She stares into the tea, its tiny brown flakes gathering at the bottom of the cup. “I heard that you ran the cemetery, and might have certain skills—”
The old woman lets out a frustrated sound. “Once, Olive Specter was on every guest list, at every event in Sim City. She was the party. Now I’m just the gravekeeper, decrepit and forgotten, tending to the poor, wayward souls of Strangetown, of all places,” She tsks and sets her cup down on the table, and surveys Hermia with the eyes of a predator. “You smell like death, girl.”
Hermia flinches. 
“Oh, yes, you’re in deep trouble,” Olive says, savoring every word, and Hermia knows in her bones that the old woman is involved in something just as dark. “Tell me, child, what steaming, acrid pile of metaphysical shit have you stepped in?”
With a shaky breath, Hermia sets her cup down on the table. And then she tells her everything.
———
“Ahh,” Olive sighs when Hermia wraps up her tale, her eyes closed and face peaceful. “Now that was certainly a story.”
Hermia frowns. “I was hoping you might be able to help me, given your special… interest in death,” she says, still dancing around her words. “I don’t know what went wrong, or most importantly, how to fix it.”
Olive’s eyes snap open. “Special interest indeed.”
“So can you help me?” Hermia asks hopefully.
Olive meets her eyes. “Oh, no, my dear, I don’t believe I can.” Her face contorts into a sinister grin. “I usually work in the other direction.”
———
Whatever Olive Specter had meant, Hermia didn’t want to think about, and she certainly wasn’t going to stick around to find out. She’d thanked her for the untouched tea and her time—“Come and see us again,” Olive had told her, sipping her cold tea—and Hermia had gotten the hell out of there.
So much for that, Hermia thinks miserably. Guess it’s aliens now.
The moon is rising behind the dunes when Hermia pulls back into the motel parking lot. Out of habit, she tries Puck before heading back to the room. The number is still disconnected.
And Juliette is gone.
———