James Hutchins (0roborus) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2020-09-18 19:42:00 |
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Entry tags: | celeste henry, james hutchins |
Rebirth
Who: James and Celeste
What: S.O.S. Call
When: 4:31 AM
Where: Searchlight, NV
Rating: PG (Language)
The trailer on Main Street sat quiet.
Then the webbing of shadow began anew. Four hungry vines of darkness crackled and branched towards the center of James’s floor, until they gathered in an aperture. It bulged outward as something -- or someone -- powerful nudged at the fabric between realms, one side of which was bolstered by wards and a bowl of sage still burning on the dresser.
The aperture widened around a pair of wet, human hands.
They grasped at metaphysical sides of a dimensional hole and forced it wider. Then the arms came through, all the way up to the elbows, which searched along the floor for leverage. James’s head and shoulders came next. He strained and hauled himself up to the surface, as slick as he’d been at birth, and crawled away before the doorway to Hell sealed behind him.
He gagged. A chest-full of liquid poured onto the floor between his hands. James coughed, his lungs and heart functioning for the first time in twenty-eight minutes. His body was heavy, trying to get accustomed to gravity. The trailer seemed claustrophobic, freezing, silent. He could hear his pulse in his ears. If he picked up his head, the whole of the room seemed to vibrate. Shift sideways. As if there was something else behind those walls, if he focused his eyes hard enough. He started to shake.
James reached up and groped along the edge of his nightstand. Fingers found and hooked into the charger cable. He pulled his cell phone onto the floor and picked up. For a solid minute, he stared at the screen. He couldn’t remember how to unlock it. Muscle memory kicked in and he dried off his thumb, put it on the button, and found his last contact.
The line started to ring.
Celeste had knocked out hard the moment her head had touched the flimsy motel-issued pillow. The spell had sapped her energy, taking the momentum from her limbs, making them heavy and dream-like. She wasn’t sure how long she had been asleep. Her hand groped blindly for the ringing phone on the nightstand. It swept across a plastic cup of water instead, which knocked to the carpeted floor in a wet splash.
She opened her eyes, and she could see James’s name through the thick fog of lingering fatigue. The brunette snapped fully awake, pressing the green icon and putting the phone to her ear. “Hello?” Celeste rubbed at her face with the back of her forearm.
“H--”
James’s throat wouldn’t work. It was hearing the normalcy of the sound, familiar and human vocal cords coming over data waves, that made it hard to speak. A word not half-whispered like poisoned silk against the shell of his ear, or screamed into the farthest reaches of his mind, in rapid, disorienting sequences. He swallowed past the thickness in his throat and tried again.
“Celeste.” He gripped the phone and tried to focus. Moisture beaded in his hair and ran into his eyes. “Do you still have the rock I gave you?” He was thinking of a black piece of shale with a trapiche emerald set in the middle. After she crashed her car, he put it in her palm and told her to keep it close, but he didn’t tell her it was to calm her mind.
“Yeah, of course.” Celeste reached out and switched on the table lamp, the warm circular glow filling the darkness of her room. She slid open the little nightstand drawer, the tracks sticking slightly, and she had to tuck the phone between ear and shoulder and use both hands to pull hard. The brunette palmed the cool rock.
“Are you okay, James?”
He squeezed his eyes shut. The ringing in his ears wasn’t pressure, but the memory of a sound. Somewhere far away from here. A white flash. A pop. The smell of things disintegrating in the heat. He sat up and leaned against the side of his mattress.
“No.”
Something squeezed and tightened inside her stomach. She stood up from the bed, the springs squeaking, the phone clutched in her hand. Celeste crossed the room, the soles of her bare feet swishing across the carpet. “What’s going on? Are you at home?” The brunette put the phone on speaker and set it on a table before grabbing a pair of jeans and sliding her legs into them, one by one. She stumbled a little and righted herself with a palm on the back of her chair.
James stared at the wisps of smoke floating above the bowl. It was burning down to the stems. He could still feel the weight of the crystal hanging around his neck. He knew without looking that it was black. A tug broke the cord. “In my room, in the back.” Like she hadn’t been there. “Don’t touch me when you get here, not until I say so. Okay?”
“Okay.”
She finished dressing, sliding her feet into a worn pair of sneakers and carefully placed the piece of shale into her bag. Celeste slung it over her shoulder and exited the motel room, locking the door behind her and set off in a run. Two nerve-filled blocks later and she was at his trailer. The brunette took in a deep, steadying breath and slid a key into the lock.
Celeste opened the door carefully, crossing the threshold. She smelled a heady mix of burning herbs and something else that she couldn’t identify. Sneakered feet carried her through James’s home. Her fingers clutched the metal pendant he had given her, it hung from her necklace. She pushed open his bedroom door.
He raised his head.
It was Celeste. It was more than one Celeste. James struggled to bring her into focus. There were layers of her, overlapping, multiple dimensions slightly offset. It reminded him of a time when he’d gone to a 3D movie as a boy and taken off the glasses. James knew he wasn’t really seeing more than one of her now; it was his mind pulling up versions of her, from the dozens of versions he’d seen of his life. He was desperate to hang onto them but it was too much input at once.
He wiped at his eyes with his fingers. “She was here.” He stared at the floor. There wasn’t any trace of her except for the moisture that had collected around the spot on the carpet. Darker than water. “I need to get this cleaned off but I can’t think. I need to do something so I can think.”
She stopped dead in her tracks in the doorway, looking at the floor as a slideshow of emotions played over her face. Confusion, fear, horror, worry. Celeste swallowed, pulling out the rock from her bag. Him telling her over the phone not to touch him only made her want to do it more. She wanted to grab his hand and pull him out of this place and run away.
“Can you think enough to tell me what to do?” she asked.
He wasn’t confident, but James nodded because he didn’t want to upset her, although he had an idea that finding him soaking wet in his boxers was doing a good enough job. There was fluid in his ear. He tipped his head to get it out. “We need calcite. White candles. A bowl of water.” He frowned. That couldn’t be right. No, clear quartz was for mental clarity. Calcite was for psychic ability. It helped the user recall soul experiences.
“Not calcite. Clear quartz.” He tried to shake some sense into himself. “That would've been bad.” James tossed the crystal on its broken cord onto the dresser and got himself to his feet. “We can’t do it here. You shouldn’t be in this room.”
Celeste nodded slowly, making a mental inventory of the items. This was obviously worse than a hitchhiker. “When you said she, you meant the one that had to be exorcised?” The black feather on the floor of the apartment. The dark on the floor of James’s bedroom.
“Where can we go?”
“Yeah. The living room’s fine.”
Careful not to touch her, James eased past Celeste, took hold of the doorframe, and tried to get down the hall at a normal speed. His body didn’t want to cooperate. The amount of time he’d spent in that other realm had cast a pall over him; his legs were heavier than they should be, a flu-like fatigue making it feel like the living room was on the other side of the moon. In the dark, vivid ideas kept flashing up, stacking one on top of the other. The pictures on the wall were askew. He remembered crashing into them on his way to the front door.
No, that was happening now. He’d just already seen it.
A frame fell on the carpet and cracked.
“Fuck.” He shook his head.
She wanted to help him. To reach her hands out and steady him, somehow. If she could have done so without touching James, she would have. Celeste was limited in her scope and abilities and it became apparent, then. The brunette watched the glass splinter, catching the light and obscuring the picture beneath it. “Keep going,” she told him. Her eyes were on his back.
“Clear quartz. White candles. Bowl of water,” Celeste repeated aloud.
He nodded. When they reached the living room, James fumbled to turn on a lamp. It wobbled on its base, casting light that was sulfuric yellow. He stayed behind while Celeste got the supplies. An old water bottle sat on the coffee table beside the empty beers. Thirst overtook him. He unscrewed the cap and drained it to the last drop, then tossed it on the couch. He chased it with the warm remains of a beer. Next to the couch, there was a heat-proof dish. He went into a drawer in the side table and pulled out a bundle of dried rosemary. He lit and tossed it in the bowl.
“Okay,” he said. James pointed at the ceiling and the smudged remains of a pentagram that had been drawn onto it multiple times. “I’m gonna stand in the middle. Light the candles around me. Put the pieces of quartz between the candles. You… you hold the bowl of water. I’ll take that shale off your hands.”
He stretched out his arm. “You can drop it.”
It was too much to look at her, so James watched his open palm and waited. Sam was the only person he asked for help with magic and he reserved it for emergencies. Celeste seeing him like this wasn’t sitting well, but he didn’t have a choice and he didn’t trust anybody else. They’d been working on things like this. “This one’s yours. I can’t do it. Look at the ingredients. Water, earth, fire, rosemary.”
The shale was deposited into his outstretched hand without touching him. Her eyes strayed up to the pentagram above them. Celeste was oddly calm, or maybe something else was taking over for her. There was the concern she had for James, but she also knew that he needed help. And there was no room in the mix for nervousness and uncertainty.
Celeste took a lighter and made her way around the perimeter, touching flame to wick. The illumination from the flames danced and bounced in relief against the walls. The pieces of quartz were set down gently. The bowl of water was lifted and held. These were all things she could do.
“Focus on the water, Celeste,” he said. “Breathe.” The smoke from the rosemary bent towards them, its crisp, woodsy smell known for helping with memory and cognition, adding to ritual elements he picked because they were clean and inextricably tied to this reality.
“Think about having a clear mind. Complete focus. No confusion.” James held onto the shale, looking at the hexagon of green beryl embedded inside it. Each petal, like one of the disjointed pieces of his consciousness. He breathed. He let his eyes unfocus until the segments of the starburst blurred and there was only one green circle within the black. “When you’re ready, repeat this: Unum corpus, una mens.”
Around them, the candle flames bowed and flickered, the fire making a billowing sound on the wicks. “Then blow across the water.”
She watched the way the light played out over the subtle ripples of water, breathing level and even. It was the little things that were grounding. The same way she was taught to shoot, pulling the trigger on a partial exhale. Steady. Accurate.
“Unum corpus, una mens.”
Celeste let the rest of her breath push across the small surface of water.
As she exhaled, the candles went out and the center of the star in the shale seemed to expand, a widening black pupil. James took the bowl and drank the water. He lowered it and wiped a drop of water off his mouth. When he looked at Celeste there was only one of her.
He nodded. “I think that did it.” He could function without his brain trying to peel layers back from the world like an onion. “I need to rinse off.” He set the bowl precariously on the edge of a table and went into his bathroom, leaving the door open. James turned on the water and made a grab under his sink for a strong-smelling bar of soap with green and brown flecks in it. He took off his boxers, stashed them in the small trash can, and wasted no time getting in the shower while it was lukewarm. He closed his eyes and mouth, held his breath, and went face first into the spray.
While James was in the bathroom, Celeste had picked up the fallen photo. She removed the backing and slid out the glass pane, carefully to keep it from shattering further. It was transferred to the garbage can. Passing by his bedroom, she allowed herself to stop only briefly to study the strange stains on the floor.
James let the shower run scalding hot, until it sapped the water heater and went cold again. He worked up a lather with the soap and scrubbed so hard his skin felt raw. The water ran strangely reflective down the drain, like an oil slick. Steam wafted over the curtain. It carried a potent whiff of the soap’s ingredients into the hallway - sage, lavender, valerian root, herbs that washed away negative energy.
He cut off the water and listened. The trailer was quiet. All he could hear was the tap-tap-tap of rivulets falling off the shower head. No sounds of Celeste. James ran the curtain back. He toweled off and went into his bedroom to tug on a t-shirt and jeans in the dark. James spotted the cuff with the runes on his dresser and paused, going down the rabbit hole of why he’d taken it off.
The carpet was still damp.
James stepped around it.
“Celeste?” He went down the hall, past the empty spot where a nail jutted out from the drywall.
“I’m here.” She had gone back to the living room, looking at the remnants of the spell that had just been performed. Her thoughts were unusually nebulous, difficult to pin down. Celeste turned to look at him, eyes drifting over his face. The questions she had for James were easier to call to mind. It was only a matter of where to begin.
“What happened?”
He stopped in the doorway of the room, turning the piece of shale in his hands as he looked at it. With a clearer mind, he could see how strange it was to be locked in here, in this house. How small it all was. A living room in a trailer in a living ghost town One grain of sand in one desert, except there were millions of deserts.
It took James some time to answer, but he figured he should come straight out with it. “I was asleep,” he said. “She got past the wards, came up through the floor. She told me she wanted to show me…” He broke off, unsure how to describe a conversation that had taken place partially between minds. “What I couldn’t see here, on my own. I went with her.” He looked at the object cupped in his palm. “Willingly.”
He approached Celeste and reached for her hand. He put the rock back in it and folded her fingers around it.
She tightened her hand around the solid object, letting the edges dig into her skin. Willingly. Celeste looked around at the markings on the door and window frames, the ones etched onto his skin, and tried to square that with the idea of this entity pushing past all of it.
“What did she show you?”
A muscle in James’s jaw twitched. He watched a point that was not quite Celeste’s shoulder, but somehow through it. “Hell.”
He let his eyes find her face. “The past, things that haven’t happened yet. And me. I can’t,” he shook his head, “I can’t think of everything at the same time, it’s like trying to drink water out of a fire hose.”
Celeste supposed that made sense. It stood to reason that if there were angels, and a god, that there was also a hell. The thing that was hard to wrap her mind around was James seeing it. The brunette relaxed her hand and slipped the rock into her jeans pocket. “Are you…” She wasn’t sure what she was trying to ask. “What about her influence?”
James shook his head. “I wore a necklace,” he said, not sure how to explain what happened. “And she shielded me.” He noticed the buffer of space between himself and Celeste. The feeling of Elfleda’s dress was fresh in his mind, close enough to brush against him. Her hands, pulling him down into that void. Contact he wanted to recoil from but couldn’t. James turned and walked to the kitchen. He opened a cabinet, took out a glass, and poured himself a glass of tap water.
“There’s a lot that I want to ask you,” Celeste said, watching the glass fill with water. “But I don’t know...” She moved to stand next to the sink, looking up at him. “I don’t want to overwhelm you.” Her palms came to rest on the edge of the counter. He had been to hell, or seen it, or...she wasn’t entirely sure how it worked. And now he was there, standing next to her. There could have been a reality where James didn’t come back.
A rough chuckle of black humor made him smile. “You won’t.” He thought of the chamber at the end of his time with Elfleda. The person swallowing itself, becoming a circle with no beginning and no end. If he could force his way through everything that had come at him in that liquid room, he could handle whatever she wanted to ask him. The glass of water waited in his hand. “It’s not that I can’t answer. It’s more like picking one answer out of… a thousand.” James drank it.
“Why did she want to show you?” Through a window, the shadows were starting to break and lighten. There was a residual drip from the tap, water that had clung and remained to the metal surface after he shut it off. It was important to her that she noticed these things. It made it easier to process what he had told her. “Why you?”
“Because I put myself in her way,” he said, repeating the Emissary’s words from earlier. He poured the rest of the water in the sink and set the glass in the basin. James turned around and leaned back against the sink, his fingers holding onto the edge of the counter. “Because of what I did before we met and what I can do.” It was easy to forget, he guessed, that what he painted on her stomach to heal her was rust red, or that he’d instinctively used the blood from Radek’s injury to paint a mark on Abby’s forehead before he sent that spirit packing.
His head tilted, a sharp twitch. “Come on, don’t,” he shook his head, “Don’t pretend you don’t know.”
There was a flicker of annoyance before a mental finger tamped it down. “I know what you tell me,” Celeste said, blue eyes meeting his. “I would have to fill in the blanks with assumptions, and I don’t want to do that. Not with you.” She inhaled sharply.
“I know that I spent the other evening pulling some kind of weird...poison out of a vampire’s veins, and it was courtesy of Elfleda. And I know, now, that she showed you hell. I guess what I’m really asking is, what are you going to do with that?”
That was the bottom line? Questions laid out carefully: Not how he was or how it felt. Not what he needed. But what happened, what he saw, why him, was he influenced, what was he planning to do with it. “She didn’t show me hell,” he said, watching her. “She took me there. Why beat around the bush next time, when I can open a portal to it in the middle of town? Let it all fall in.”
Something he had dared to feel when he reached for the phone and called Celeste was curling in on itself. James eased away from the counter and moved around the small footprint of his kitchen. “Assuming is what you do when you don’t have access to information. I’ve always been an open book. To you.”
Celeste was treading water. She knew how to identify and give name to things, and she knew how to order them. This was foreign. When she had first arrived at his home, she had the urge to grab him and run far away. There was no running away. That option being off the table manifested something desperate inside her.
She reached out a hand for his.
James considered it.
The silence, the measured way she’d been since she got there, wasn’t the Celeste he thought he knew. He remembered the beginning, before they got together. When he fixed her ribs and she figured out that doing so would make him sick, Celeste had put her hands on his shoulders, asked him to tell her he’d be okay. When she learned that something latched onto him during the spell, she flew into a panic; she was all over him, demanding to know how they could fix it, putting her arms around him. She wouldn’t have let him out of her sight. He had always told her not to worry, that he had it. Until now.
But all the worry, all the warmth, was gone. He didn’t know what this was, or how much he needed to be James to her, and not a supernatural problem to approach with kid gloves, like whatever news she just dropped on him about a minute ago. “Since when do you ask?”
Celeste let her hand drop, before electing instead to step toward him and encircling him in her arms. She could smell the soap he used, the sage, lavender, other notes. Her forehead touched the edge of his shoulder. “I don’t know what I would have done,” she said slowly, picking the words out from the swirl in her head, “if you hadn’t come back.”
The brunette tilted her head up to look at him. “I think if I try to understand it, instead of…” She trailed off.
He felt her arms go around him. It didn’t make any sense, but it felt like years since he’d been touched by a person, one who radiated life, who was safe, instead of some invisible, formless thing in the dark that prodded him for weak points so it could get inside. He swallowed and thought about the first time Celeste did a spell. She told him she wanted to see evil because she was tired of hearing about it for years. She ended up trying to carve it out of her shoulder.
James shook his head. “Don’t do that,” he mumbled. “Please don’t try to understand. Don’t go anywhere near it.” He squeezed his arms around her tight and hid his face in her hair.
Her hands found his back, palms pressing against the material of his t-shirt. She was certain that she already had, if only indirectly. “What can we do?” Celeste asked, eyes cast downward as they embraced. “Besides that spell.” If Elfleda could break through his wards, she hadn’t the faintest clue what would help.
“You can keep your conscience clean,” he said, working his fingers into her hair. “Do the kind of magic you’ve been doing. Elemental. White. That is who you are, okay?” James leaned back and put his hands on either side of Celeste’s face. “Do as much of it as you can so you’re prepared for whatever comes. Then it doesn’t matter if she comes or not. Strength to greet strength.”
She closed her eyes, burying her face against his chest. “What about you? How do we keep you safe?” In her head, Celeste was back at Curiosities with Sam. He was asking what color the orb would turn if wielded by James. She decided then that the answer was she didn’t care, as long as he was the one holding it. As long as it kept him there.
James put his mouth on the top of her head in a long kiss. He breathed in the scent of her hair. Thoughts returned to the places he’d seen while he was gone, to the waves of energy that ran through him, to the versions of himself that were possible, the lives that could be unfolding somewhere even now, because time wasn’t the same outside of this realm. Things were born, they became, they died, they regenerated. He wondered if he had searched the fields Elfleda showed him, or looked more closely at what was behind the doors of that glass hall, would he have seen something that looked like him?
“I’m not sure that’s the point,” he said. “But I’m not afraid.” James rested his face against her head. “I need to sleep. Can you stay for a while?”
“Yeah,” she murmured against his shirt. “Of course.”