Land Locked Blues

[Kermit]

((Michael sang to himself, for himself. Voice quiet throughout.))


"If you walk away, I'll walk away.
First tell me which road you will take.
I don't want to risk our paths crossing someday,
so you walk that way, I'll walk this way."


He leant back, lounging in some whack-ass hippie beach chair. It was uncomfortable, but it was worth it since it was one of the few chairs that were still sheltered under umbrellas. He burned easily; like a vampire, he sometimes said.


"And the future hangs over our heads,
and it moves with each current event,
until it falls all around,
like a cold steady rain.
Just stay in when it's looking this way."


The future didn't exist now.


"And the moon's laying low in the sky,
forcing everything metal to shine;
and the sidewalk holds diamonds,
like a jewelry store case.
They argue walk this way, no, walk this way."


In his hand, he held Jonah Heartgrave's Desert Eagle, positioned slightly out of the shade. The gold of the gun shone brilliantly in the sun.

It felt like... four times heavier than Adam Dodd's gun, and he wasn't sure if he could fire it without breaking his wrists. Didn't matter. He'd always preferred aesthetic over function. He was shallow and vain and maybe a narcissist and his hair still looked good. He was okay with it now.


"And someone's asleep in their bed.
As I'm leaving they wake up and say
'I dreamed you were carried away on the crest of a wave.
Baby don't go away, come here'"


It was funny, wasn't it? He'd managed to walk from one beach to the other, completely by chance.


"And there's kids playing guns in the street;
and one's pointing their tree branch at me.
So I put my hands up.
I say 'Enough is enough.
If you walk away, I'll walk away'
And they shot me dead."


He'd said that to Justin, on the very first day. 'If you walk away, we walk away'. He and Justin were the only people from then who were around now.

A compromise. Michael made compromises as a matter of habit; tried, at least. It was possible, he believed, for everyone to win to some extent.

He and Erika had let each other walk away. Same with him and Claude, and him and Violet, and him and Quinn (technically), and him and Aurelien, and him and Blaise.

He'd tried to let Jonathan walk away. Instead, Justin showed up. He'd tried to let Catherine walk away. He'd failed. He'd fired a warning shot that hit her in the leg.

Nia had let him walk away from the commissary, literally, but not in the way conveyed by the song. In not shooting him dead, she'd shot him dead. Then, on the beach, she'd tried to shoot him dead, and he'd tried to shoot her dead. They both walked away, somehow. He'd asked Morgan to let him walk away twice, and both times Morgan had shot him with that old metaphorical gun. The second time, Morgan'd also shot someone with a literal gun.

He'd never given Roxie the chance to walk away. He'd never given Darlene the chance. Darlene had walked away anyways, he supposed.

Camila'd gotten a chance.

Jonah'd walked in the direction opposite of away.


"I found a liquid cure
from my landlocked blues.
It'll pass away like a slow parade.
It's leaving but I don't know how soon."


It was contradictory to the very essence of existence to expect the universe to remain constant.

As a general rule, shit happened.


"And the world's got me dizzy again.
I'd think after nine goddamned days I'd be used to the spin;
and it only feels worse when I stay in one place,
so I'm always pacing around or walking away."


He didn't want stability. He didn't want safety. Not anymore.


"I keep drinking the ink from my pen,
and I'm balancing history books up on my head;
but it all boils down to one quotable phrase:
'If you love something, let it go free.'"


Like Lori. And Beryl's cadaver. And then mentally, Beryl again, a few times.

Like Morgan.

Like Camila. And Catherine. And Roxie and Jonah.


"A good person will pick you apart.
A box full of suggestions for your possible heart,
but you may be offended and you may be afraid;
But don't walk away, don't walk away."


It was too late for him not to walk away.


"They made love on the living room floor,
with the noise in the background from our televised war.
And in the deafening pleasure,
they'll think they heard someone say,
'If we walk away, they'll walk away'"


Them. The people watching.


"But greed is a bottomless pit,
and our freedom's a joke;
we're just taking the piss.
And the whole world must watch this sad comic display.
If you're still free start running away,
because we're coming for you."


He'd said that to Morgan.


"I've grown tired of holding some pose.
I feel more like a stranger each time I come home.
So it's too bad I made a deal with the devils of fame,
saying, 'Let me walk away, please.'"


Erika.


"You'll be free, child, once you have died;
from the shackles of language and measurable time.
And then we can trade places, play musical graves.
Till then walk away, walk away."


He'd be free too, someday soon.

He craved that freedom with all his being.

He needed it.


"So I'm up at dawn,
putting on my shoes.
I just want to make a clean escape.
I'm leaving but I don't know where to.
I know I'm leaving but I don't know where to."


Crossing his legs, he stared blankly at the shoes covering the shoreline. He wondered if any still had feet in them, though not enough to feel like checking.

His life was just a movie about a movie too old to die.

[MethodicalSlacker]

Walking was painful.

[Violet Schmidt continued from Tooth and Hair]

After stumbling her way out of the old manse, Violet walked for some time into the woods before picking a tree to set her stuff down by. Every step ached. Every footfall sent a new wave of pain through her body. Yet she knew it was important that she got as far as she was willing to go away from the house. It would have been too easy—more than that, it would have been a walk in the park—for someone to pick her off in this state. Leaned against the tree, she finally pulled the bolt from her body, and tried her best to dress the wound, over her own back. She wasted quite a few supplies trying to get a bandage on that fit right. Cleaning the wound was excessively difficult. Painful, too. She used some of the last of her water to chug some Aspirin. It took a few hours to get a dressing on there that stayed put, even when she bent her leg.

In her sleep, she knocked it loose, and had to spend much of the morning putting it on again.

Now, she was taking long, big steps down a gradual slope towards a beach. Part of the reason she'd come this far was to distance herself from Paloma. Her energy. Her flesh. Her wrathful spirit. Violet was surprised to hear that she'd not died of her wounds overnight. That almost confirmed her suspicions, from earlier. Demonic forces were infesting the island. Her mounting karmic debt was too big to balance, now. The collectors had arrived. They could be anyone. Anyone she'd not already met, that was. Violet had a read on the pattern of anyone she had met, and it hadn't changed in any case. Minor disturbances here and there. Then again, she hadn't been able to check in the morning. It was hard to meditate when sitting down actively was a source of pain.

This wasn't the same beach where she started, Violet realized soon enough. That area was off limits now. Sealed away. It reminded her of the game in Mario Party with the hexagons that sunk below the lava, and everyone had to run to the one that didn't or else they'd get burned. She remembered the animation. They bounced off of the lava like a springboard, slightly on fire, clutching their backside. She winced; that one was an empathy pain. Poor Luigi, bouncing off a pit of fire, each consecutive hop launching him less and less distance, consigned to his fate toiling underneath miles of magma, screaming in agony, hands firmly planted on his butt. She'd been Luigi too many times before. In some sense, she was Luigi right now.

It had been a while since she thought about video games. It had been a while since she thought about Homestuck, too, or any of the other webcomics she read. Sometimes she'd think about a song to keep her mind from wandering too far, but it had still been a while since she'd thought about music, about playing the violin, the subtle tug of resistance of her bow on strings, and though she'd been thoroughly enmeshed in an occult understanding of what was happening to her, Violet hadn't spared a moment to think about things through the lens of a conspiracy. It was refreshing to have a spare moment to think about things that she liked. It made her feel almost good.

She raised her left hand and lightly tapped her forehead with the side of her crossbow to knock the thought out of her head.

Before her were several wooden chairs, arranged in something of a line, blown about by the storms that plagued the beginning of last week. Violet had taken time during those storms to fill her empty bottles with rainwater, but even with those, and the extras she'd taken from Kyle, she was down to her last today. Food was less of an issue, but she was still almost out. The heat was terrible. Violet's jeans clung to her legs by a thin layer of sweat and dirt. Her hair frizzed out into wiry strands like lightning bolts. Under her black robe, girdled with slightly faded red accent patterns, she wore naught but her bra. Overheating was a serious concern, she rationalized, and a flannel shirt wasn't going to stop a bullet anyway. The robe couldn't go, though. She needed that much at least. It was thin enough, and if she was going to constantly be a conduit of energy for the duration of her remaining existence here, it was absolutely a necessary component.

Violet took a harder look at the chairs before she walked any further. It looked like someone was sitting in one of them. His energy was familiar, though he looked a little different.

He also had a gun.

The last time she walked in on somebody like this was Paloma. Paloma was obviously somewhat gone. Michael might be, too. He was singing a little bit. That could mean nothing, or it could mean that he had lost it. She felt like she'd heard his name on the announcements fairly recently. It might have even been this morning. If she limped away now, she might make a sound and alert him and look like she was trying to sneak away from him. If she walked towards him, she might frighten him, and he might shoot. Either way, it was going to be hard for Violet to move from where she was without alerting Michael to her presence.

She let him go before. Back then, she had a gun. Now, the tables had turned, just a little.

What trial was this, then?

Violet gulped.

"That's a nice song," she said softly, against the sound of the waves lapping against the shore.

[Kermit]

The sight of out-of-place disembodied shoes had always been something that gave Michael a dark, heavy feeling; the same kind of foreboding atmosphere brought on by, say, the sight of broken glass and bullet holes.

When people jumped off bridges, they'd often leave their shoes behind. When people got hit by cars, the sudden wrenching, jerking motion of their bodies would fling the shoes off of their feet. He remembered shoes flying through the air in the photos of the Charlottesville attack. Often, when a plane crashed into the ocean, the water's surface would be covered in floating shoes, he thought he'd read once.

A vaguely familiar voice sounded out, interrupting that train of thought. He lazily tilted his head, glancing sideways at the new arrival. Ah. He recognized the silhouette. Violet.

He gave a little thumbs-up of recognition with his non-gun-holding hand, a humourless but nonetheless genuine smirk on his face. "That's funny. This is funny. I mentioned the song by name last time, when I was leaving, remember?" he said quietly, before whistling out through his front two teeth.

He looked back out at the shoes.


On 9/11, after the planes had hit, the streets had been strewn with shoes, he'd read. Most still contained feet. Some were attached to legs. The legs weren't attached to anything. The legs had been people with names and lives and families and hopes and dreams, but now they were just legs. 'We were, uh, up on the roof of the Marriott, there were legs, feet, arms, just everywhere,' he thought he remembered hearing a firefighter say in a documentary.

On September 11th, 2001, Jules and Gédéon Naudet had been filming a documentary intended to follow the story of a rookie firefighter in the FDNY. They were with the only FDNY firehouse that didn't lose any members that day; Engine 7, Ladder 1, Battalion 1. Jules, by accident, had filmed the only known clear footage of the first plane hitting. He'd accompanied the firefighters into the North Tower, still filming. He'd stayed at the FDNY command center in the lobby. His footage was punctuated by loud, heavy thuds. The jumpers. He'd still been in the lobby when the South Tower fell. He'd filmed, stumbling through the dust alongside the chiefs who'd been in the command center, who were now trying to carry the corpse of FDNY Chaplain Mychal Judge out of the building. The only reason they made it out was Jules helping to illuminate the path with his camera. He'd barely escaped when the North Tower fell.

Jules Naudet's camera had been on exhibit at the National Museum of American History. A little under two weeks ago, on the same day he'd been to the SOTF memorial, Michael had spent about half-an-hour just staring at the camera, allowing himself to cry only when he was alone. He'd been ashamed; worried what people would think if they saw him crying at the sight of a stupid goddamn camera.

But it wasn't just a stupid goddamn camera.

Like how Adam Dodd's gun was more than just a gun.

Like how the sole survivor — no, the endling — wouldn't be just a person.

Like how a pair of shoes on the beach was never only just a pair of shoes.


He blinked. A few seconds had passed since he'd looked away from Violet and towards the shoreline. He glanced back at her, golden deagle still held idly in his hand.

"D'you believe in fate? Because, like, this kind of coincidence bullshit keeps happening, to me, at least, and like..." he trailed off. "...I dunno. Shit got weird for a little while. I think what I'm trying to say is," he paused and pursed his lips, thinking, "...uh, yeah, I dunno what. Hi Violet, I guess. All those shoes," he gestured his head towards the water, "whose were they, do you think?"

[MethodicalSlacker]

Violet should have said something else.

You have a nice singing voice would have been a good compliment to pay, for instance. If she'd been of the mind to remember what the song was, she could have interjected with just the title, nodding in affirmation. Instead, she blanked, and it sounded like she thought Michael had mangled the song so badly that it was barely recognizable. His response sounded like he was chastising her for forgetting. She didn't know shame was still possible after all she'd done, but she felt a twinge of it here, especially as he turned back out to watch the sea without much of a follow up. A pause followed, swollen and pregnant, as a light breeze rolled through and caused the torn up fringes of Violet's robe to flare out just slightly.

And then Michael asked Violet a pretty rough question.

Well, two. The first one was the difficult one to answer. Violet most certainly believed in fate. Fate dumped Kyle's body on top of her and caused her to drop the gun that his death brought. Fate lead her to kill Layla, one of her roommates on the trip, because Layla made the mistake of picking Violet to mug. Fate brought her everywhere she went. Fate was the only thing left to follow now. Nothing else was left. Yet, without describing the larger sense of what Violet believed to Michael, there was no way that he'd understand what she believed about fate. And if she told him that, then he'd know everything about her that there was to know.

But Violet was offered an escape. In the form of the second question.

Whose shoes?

It was a familiar question. For all their height difference, Violet and Dana had an oddly similar shoe size. Dana felt like her feet were too big. Violet felt like they were too small. Often they'd make the mistake of wearing each other's shoes. It was a problem that she imagined not many other people had, but the two of them, up until Dana went to college, had a pretty similar taste in shoes. Violet had asked herself many times if the shoes she was wearing were actually hers. She wasn't even sure that the ones she'd worn to the island were hers to begin with. Her eyes scanned the shore, looking for things Dana might have worn before she started dressing punk. There were a few pairs of Vans hi-tops in various shades strewn about. A pair of faded blue Chuck Taylor low tops were mixed in, too, riddled with holes.

"It's hard to say," Violet said. She tried to imagine the lives that each of these pairs of shoes had lead. Focusing intently, she tried to pick out scraps of energy that had survived the ocean journey. Violet looked for what lingering in the laces, what souls were stuck in the soles.

"I can't imagine they were all that different from us."

[Kermit]

"Mmm," he paused. "I dunno."

He gazed over the shoes again.

"Nobody was waiting for them when they washed up. 'Means whatever happened, happened all at once," he shrugged. "And they're still here, which means nobody noticed they were gone. Anybody who woulda noticed probably died with them. They existed in a vacuum. No legacies."

A beach covered in unidentified decedents.

He looked down at the ground and exhaled sharply. A lung spasm.

He wondered what Darlene had meant when she'd said 'I asked Beryl what to do and she told me to pull the trigger'; whether it was like what had happened with Camila, or instead what had happened with Catherine.

Darlene'd been lucky that she'd had someone to catch her when she fell. He hoped Arizona had been there to catch her after Jonah.

"I fuckin' wish we got to be forgotten," he muttered.

Suddenly, it felt like he had something stuck in his trachea. A few wracking coughs later, and it still wasn't gone.

"I'm okay," he managed to choke out through the stabbing pain in his throat. It was like his lungs were on fire. "It's okay, I'm okay," he crossed his arms tight, wincing as he turned his body to face away from Violet. "I'm alright!"

[MethodicalSlacker]

"Maybe this is where the shoes on the shoe tree come from," Violet offered.

She'd not been there for long. It was a few hours before she killed her first squirrel; she was wandering through the woods, looking for a good place to make camp, and then suddenly found herself in a clearing with a tree with an impressive footwear collection. She did a circle around it, taking note of the different kinds of shoes stuck to its bark, and then went on her way. Clearings were a good way to leave oneself open. She'd found enough bodies in them to know that.

"When whoever lived here, um, lived here, they collected shoes from the beach and put them on the tree, and, er, now that they're not here, they can't do that, so they just keep washing up."

She felt a shiver run through her body. Michael started hacking up a lung, and Violet instinctively took a step backwards.

He seemed like he was in pain, on the inside. Both in an emotional sort of sense, and physically, too. She wouldn't be surprised if he raised a hand to his mouth to catch a cough and it came back flecked with red. If he was in pain, he was vulnerable. Violet had taken the time in the morning before setting out again to reload her crossbow. If he was coughing, he wasn't shooting. He'd be distracted. Michael was dangerous. He'd killed twice as much as she had. Who knows how many attempts he'd made besides the ones that succeeded? Violet was putting herself in danger by not killing him. It was necessary to—

"If it's any consolation, they'll forget us eventually. Just like they stopped putting shoes on the tree."

Violet had fashioned a holster for the crossbow from some extra medical supplies too, just like she'd done with the knife. Hooked through a belt loop, too. For now, that was where it stayed.

[Kermit]

Sometimes, Michael's lungs didn't work. It first started happening around the time Lizzie'd been shot, and had only increased in frequency since then. Same with the weird muscle twitches.

Violet's hypothesis seemed vaguely plausible, maybe. It left questions open; deeply unsettling ones like why shoes would wash up on one specific beach over a sustained period of time. Michael thought his own hypothesis seemed more likely, though he didn't vocalize this belief, since talking felt like rusty nails in his throat.

A sudden relief. Fresh air flooded into his lungs.

He stayed still, laying sideways on the chair, back turned to Violet.

"They've already forgotten. By the time anyone sees this, we'll just be names carved into a stone. We're posthumous; they don't give a flying fuck," he mumbled, voice scratchy.

He cleared his throat, and inhaled softly through his nose. Closed his eyes.

"Your robe - is it from home?"

[MethodicalSlacker]

Michael went from wishing that he would be forgotten to knowing that it had already come to pass. What Violet didn't have the heart to tell him was that the live-streams were being recorded. As long as that was still taking place, they couldn't be forgotten. As long as there were still people watching them, they'd live forever, as they were now. It wouldn't be enough, of course. They wouldn't be truly alive because they lacked a will. Love is the law, love under will, as it were. But a piece of their soul was being fed to each and every camera, every second of every day. And it was in that sense that they would continue to live.

Only one will could prevail.

"Yeah," Violet said, "I brought it to, um, D.C., because I was going to hex the President.

"I went around when we had free time and I put some crystals in a sort of pentagram shape around the white house, at, uh, the vertices, and then I meditated and focused my will, sort of. There was a spell, but I forgot it. On purpose, though! If I remembered it, that would muddle the intent. It needed to be, um, timeless, sort of, distinct.

"The robe was for that, and also because it's soft and I slept in it a few times, which, uh, um, is bad practice. Don't do that."

Oh, so that was it. That's what had seemed off about Michael. He was missing the robe he had when they last met. He was wearing a sweatshirt that didn't really seem like it fit how he was now, coughing and fatalistic and all scrambled in the tongue.

"Where'd your, uh, white robe, come from?" she asked, "Where'd it go, too?"

[Kermit]

Violet sounded passionate about her whack magic stuff. Maybe it wasn't whack. Calling it whack was rude. Talking about it seemed to make her happy. Michael smiled to himself. It made him happy when he made other people happy.

Part of him had always been envious of people who knew how to believe in things. They always seemed a little bit less sad than everybody else. He'd tried to believe in Beryl for a while, though he'd since resolved to stop.

Violet asked him about his robe. He wanted to lie about it; to say he'd brought it from home, and that he'd lost it.

He was so fucking tired of lying, though.

"It wasn't mine," he stated quietly. "I dunno whose it was. Probably one of the people whose feet washed up."

He shifted to his previous position, leaning back in the chair.

"I gave it to Lizzie Lebowski, after she died."

He fidgeted, using a blood testing strip to clean grains of sand from underneath his fingernails.

"That's pretty cool, though, the chaos magic stuff — sorry if that isn't the right term," he paused to glance in her direction. "Is that, uh, why you're wearing yours here?"

[MethodicalSlacker]

"Sort of."

She couldn't say. Violet absolutely could not say. She was being pushed to say, but she could not. Absolutely not. Maybe that was the trial, knowing just where the limits of what she could disclose or reveal were. Finding the hidden, windswept lines in the sand that she could not cross. It was like what she had done to Canon—she declared intent, meditated on it, and then discarded it. If she spoke aloud what she had brought into herself, then it would cease to function. It had bought her nine days of time, each day bringing her under further attack. Violet could not afford to separate from it now.

"Maybe it's just sort of comforting to wear," she said.

Devoid was a word that came to mind. Violet wasn't exactly sure why, but it sounded good. She wanted to say it, but she didn't want to be asked about it. It sat on her tongue and dissolved, running down her throat as a fine powder, disappearing into the smallest bits of its being.

She crossed her arms and looked off again into the waves, brow furrowed, eyes crested with worry.

"You ever go fishing, Michael?"

[Kermit]

Michael had gone fishing — the literal kind, with fish — only once in his life. He'd gotten the hook stuck in his finger and decided that he never wanted to go fishing again.

Figurative fishing, though...

"Lots," he smiled accidentally. Sitting and waiting for something to metaphorically bite was what he did best. "Never for fish, though. Other stuff. Sympathy, validation, compliments, encouragement, meaning; that kind of stuff. I dunno, I'm usually also the bait."

Like an anglerfish (or a cydippid ctenophore!).

He shrugged.

He looked back at the ocean.

Sometimes, he went fishing for people. Usually not on purpose; though, like, Jonathan and Sierra and probably some other people Michael was forgetting — they'd totally been on purpose. Teresa, maybe? Had he yelled something as bait before Teresa showed up? He didn't remember.

Mm. That wasn't a good sign. He usually remembered things like that.

Violet seemed kind of... nervous? Sus. Shady as fuck kinda. He'd picked up on her trying to change the topic, though he wouldn't press her on it if she wasn't comfortable with it. He didn't like making people do things they didn't want to do.

"Why?"

[MethodicalSlacker]

With that question, the worry melted from Violet's face and was replaced with a wild grin. She stepped briskly forwards, bringing her feet in line with Michael's chair, and pivoted to face him with her body. She raised her right arm and pointed towards the shoes lining the water line.

"Ever catch a boot?" she asked.

[Kermit]

Michael kind of flinched sideways a little at the girl's sudden movement. He looked at her face, then into her eyes, then at her hand, and then followed to where it was pointing.

The water? He wasn't quite sure wh-

She asked if he'd ever caught a boot. Okay. So, she was pointing at the shoes, probably.

He'd forgotten about Violet's dubious mental state, up until now; remembered how she'd introduced herself on the fourth day. 'Owls eat rats'.

...shit, they were both murderers, weren't they? Between the two of them, they had like... six kills. Six people. Not kills. People. It was important for them to be people.

In less than a week they'd both be dead.

He blinked. Pursed his lips, furrowed his eyebrows. Thought about if he'd ever caught a boot, even though he already knew he'd never caught a boot (or a fish).

"None that I can, uh, think of, no," he scratched the back of his neck. "Sorry. Unless that's a good thing, I guess."

[MethodicalSlacker]

"I'd wager it's a very good thing," Violet said, lowering her arm, "it feels like, uh, something of a classic sign of bad luck, misfortune, to catch a boot while fishing. Or a tin can, or some garbage, or anything that isn't actually, y'know, a fish. I never fished outside of video games, but I even then I didn't really enjoy it. It felt like a waste of time."

In truth, she'd been trying to tell a joke. Jokes weren't really her thing. Pranks, more so, but that was more like being a weirdo on purpose to get her friends to laugh in the middle of an exam. Pranks were, of course, an abbreviation for "practical joke," which meant one very specific thing but Violet felt that "practical" might as well refer to "whatever is most practical at the moment," and in this sort of itchy trigger finger scenario, the most practical kind of joke to make was a pun. A really bad one. One that might not even count as a pun. Michael barely seemed to notice. Violet hadn't thought about it too hard in the first place. The impulse came, and she followed it. It didn't make Violet happy. She was trying to get Michael to lower his guard a little. It seemed like she'd just done the opposite.

Though, as a side-effect, it made a good pivot point into, potentially, sharing what she couldn't otherwise share.

"It looks like this island has caught many a boot," she observed, "and, as such, has had an incredibly bad time of, uh, things."

Violet moved herself to face the sea once more. Her smile faded away, and was replaced by the grim expression she'd worn at almost every moment for the last few days.

"It's cursed, basically. You could also say 'haunted' if you wanted to, too. What I can tell you is that some really nasty energy, um, runs through this place, on account of the previous inhabitants' deeds, I believe. They had robes, and they had temples; they probably didn't believe things all that different from what I do. They probably also did rituals, and they probably also believed in, uh, some form of magick. They kept animals, which could have all sort of ritual uses, and they made those art things in the woods, which, uh, might well also be dedicated to deities.

"Which is, uh, to say, that this place is cursed. If we were here on vacation, not kidnapped, for some reason, then things might have turned bloody, I think. Just due to all of—like, if most of the world is made of a fabric, a metaphysical material, then this one was a fuse, and whatever took out the previous people who lived here sort of just tied a knot in the fuse. It's still attached to a bomb. And it's still burning. I guess."

Violet turned to look at Michael, but this time only with her head.

"Think of it this way," she said, "it's been a good few times since the first person to die in one of these was killed. Usually they commit, uh, suicide. Out of despair. Or, at least, I'd read that. I don't know if it's actually true."

But she did.

[Kermit]

"It's true. I read it too," Michael said.

He'd read it late one night, in an incognito Chrome window, during a particularly morbid episode of emotional self-harm. There was this website he'd found in the External Links section of a Wikipedia article; kind of an analytical statistic-heavy SOTF wiki kind of thing. There was a disclaimer he remembered, on the front page, where it absolved itself of any relation to the SOTF 'fandom', which meant he could browse it relatively guilt-free.

Still, he'd resolved not to visit the site again. It felt too close to crossing the line.

Michael shifted forward on the chair, uncrossing his legs, hunching over with his elbows resting on his knees, Jonah's gun pointed to the sea. He remembered the Ballester-Molina in his pocket. He looked down at his shoes.

Fate. Whack ghost shit. Occulty things. Locations inheriting bad vibes. Omens. Things having meanings outside of the ones people gave them. The universe having intentions.

Ten days ago, Michael thought it was all bullshit. Just another way to soften the blow that was being alive. Now, though? He'd seen way too much crazy shit not to think something was up.

It felt like, at a certain point, reality had kinda just stopped.

"It makes, uh, sense, though. The curse stuff. Sort of," he muttered. It didn't really make much sense, but he wanted it to make sense, so now it made sense. He wanted to learn how to believe.

He was quiet for a second. Kept looking at the ground.

"What about, uh, people? Or objects — would, like, hypothetically, say, something like Adam Dodd's gun," he knew she knew who he was, "would it have a lot of, like, 'boots'?"