stilljustandrew | [reverse darkest timeline] if i'm not beyond repair

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[reverse darkest timeline] if i'm not beyond repair

Composing the note takes him the better part of an hour, and a great deal of cross-outs and scribbling.

Brix,

I was wondering if y
It's been a
How hav
You said if ~~There's been some stuff and I wanted to~~

If you have some time to talk could you let me know? ~~I'm doing~~ I think I'm still doing better but something happened and ~~I'm not~~ I wanted to tell you about it.

Thanks,
Andrew

He writes out two clean copies of the note, leaves one at the Security desk and one with Bar.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Brix makes a prim moue.

"I suppose I can hardly blame it for that."

But her tone suggests that she might, anyway.

"Not for that," Andrew agrees, very soft, not looking up.

(His own tone suggests that he wouldn't. At all.)

"But ... it had a deal, right there in its hand, it could have gotten away clear. From its own world and from us. And it, I don't know, maybe it just ... hated us all too much to take it. She, she asked what its plans were if it could leave the cell in a body of its own, like Matt offered it, and -- and it couldn't even say I'll go away and leave you all alone and mean it."

"What did it say instead?"

"Something like ... I haven't decided yet, maybe I'll hang around here for a while and make you all miserable, maybe I'll go back and tell Lucifer where his lapdog is."

(Here and now, talking to Brix, it's hard not to think about the time not too long ago when he would have begged for exactly that.)

. . . Boy it's a good thing this demon has already been dispatched. Otherwise Brix would be about to go tear a few strips off its hide herself.

"It does not sound," she says, coolly, "like this demon had much in the way of a plan. It's a boon that you were able to find out as much, so soon."

"Yeah," he mumbles. "Anyway ... I think somebody called for a break around then? To talk it over outside. And I told them I got the demon's name so if we wanted to, we could Bind it to something, instead of exorcising it. Like, to a new body, even. So ... so we could still offer it something it wanted, if it would get out of Nita without hurting her."

He hesitates, and swirls the ice around in his glass for a moment.

"They didn't go for it. Said we should just destroy it."

Brix hms softly, watching him.

"How did you feel about that?"

"I don't ... I don't know. I wasn't, I didn't think destroying it was an option, I don't even know how to do that, but Kali said we could leave that to her, and Ava said she could hold it so it couldn't hurt Nita before we pulled it out, so ... it seemed like it should work?"

He lets go of the glass, rubs the condensed dampness on his fingers across his face and eyes.

Low: "I was still scared though. I think I would've been scared no matter what we did."

"What was it that scared you?"

He pulls in a deep breath. "What if it didn't work and Nita got hurt worse. What if it did work and the demon got away and wanted revenge, what if it started to work and then I screwed it up, what if the others thought I did it on purpose ..."

A faint, unhappy smile. "I mean, I'm a coward, I know that. Everything scares me."

"Yet here you are with me."

Her own smile is equally faint, but more encouraging.

"It isn't wrong to feel, particularly not under those circumstances. Your friend was in danger. What did you do when you felt that fear?"

"Nothing?" A slight, cracked huff of not-laughter. "I mean, I did it anyway, I had to. And it did work, I mean --"

He pauses.

"There was," slowly, "there was one bad moment. I didn't think about it until I was almost up to it, and then ..."

This time his smile is less unhappy, and more apologetic. "I don't know how much sense this is gonna make. Do you know anything about how exorcism works?"

"I confess that I haven't studied it."

"It's ... I mean, I guess it's a spell. It's a codified passage in Latin, where you abjure the demon in God's name to leave the body it's possessing, and that forces it to go. But it doesn't make any difference if you believe in God or not, or if the demon does, it works anyway. I don't ... I don't know what that means. I don't know if God even has anything to do with it, or if it's just magic, or what. I don't think anybody knows."

(Calling on God at the first sign of trouble, the demon said.)

"But the thing is, the exorcism calls the demon by all kinds of different names -- impure spirit, infernal power, cursed serpent, legions of Hell, stuff like that. And ... and there's one place in the text where it ..."

A long beat.

"It calls him out directly. Vade, Satana. Begone, Satan. That, that's one of his names."

"I almost couldn't say it."

Brix listens closely, quietly, her hands wrapped around her cup of tea.

"What do you think was preventing you?" she asks, after a moment.

"I don't know. I ... "

His hands are closed on each other, gripping tight, as though he's trying to stop himself from grasping his own wrists.

"I wasn't allowed," he half-whispers, "to say anything like that to him. For the longest time. And for most of that time I wouldn't even have tried to, or, or wanted to. I ... wasn't sure I could."

"But you could, in this case."

"Yeah."

He looks up at her, with a small unsteady smile.

"I did."

"How did it feel to say it?"

He shakes his head slowly.

"Huge. And ... scary? Like for a moment I couldn't believe I did it. And then everything else was happening so fast -- because that's when it worked, like the next second, the demon came out."

Brix nods.

"That sounds -- powerful."

"Yeah," he whispers, nodding slowly. "It was."

Another tiny smile, this one a little crooked, like something's just occurred to him.

"Huh."

Brix tilts her head, raising her eyebrows for him o continue.

"I just ... it's dumb, but ..."

His hands come apart from each other, settling loosely on the tabletop.

"If all this were happening in a book, that would have been like ... some major climactic victory. Like, everything after would be different."

"Well."

She picks up her tea and sips is, considering.

"Life is rarely so neat as our stories, it's true. But this moment can still be important to you. It can still be something that makes things different."

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