The Five Stages

[Lancaster]

D E N I A L

It was a waste of time to deny.

To deny fact.

To deny fault.

To deny the basic urges and the inescapable consequences.

The darkness was all-consuming. But it wasn’t the darkness that did in Elliot Lancaster’s sanity. It was the silence. To a man accustomed to hearing noise and creating noise, the silence was not welcome. The life that he led was a busy one. Although the family itself wasn’t so active, Lancaster had plenty of things to keep him occupied. With four businesses to run, a man didn’t get much time to himself. If he wasn’t in the mall at the music shop, fixing instruments or giving private lessons, he was at the party boat, surrounded by revellers and booze. If he wasn’t on the boat, he was at Lancaster’s serving beer or getting travellers settled in the backpackers upstairs. And if he wasn’t helping the customers, he was on the stage, or he was out the back doing bookwork; the music was loud, even in the office.

And if he was not working, if he had some precious time to himself, he was with Pi, talking to her about their nights. Or he was in his own small little recording studio, testing new music and writing new things. Always, his hands were doing something. Always, there was that tune in his head, that constant beat which kept the rhythm of his mood, the melody of his emotion twining through it, twisting it into something playable, something consistent. Something that can stay with him forever. Or at least for a few years.

And if he wasn’t doing any of that, he was sleeping, because when the sun climbed into the sky, sleep was all that he could do. He knew that it irritated Pi, who could stay awake, and who he knew often did stay awake when he could not. But down here? There was no definition of time. There was no rising or setting of the sun. It was perpetual darkness and Lancaster could not tell whether minutes or hours had passed.

The first two were the worst; the hours within which he couldn’t contact anyone. He was dead. Dead, dead. One second he was at the bar trying to forget the state that he had left Roderic in and the fact that Skylar was slowly going to start to see that Lancaster himself was not infallible. There was a violence in him that he could not control once it had been let off its leash. There was a darkness that, once peered at, consumed. Much like the place he now inhabited. One second he had clearing glasses and the next he was in the middle of a clearing, surrounded by vampires. One, at least, he recognised. The rest he did not. With swords and guns they came at him, and though he fought back in a flurried, raging frenzy, it had done no good.

Lancaster was not stupid. He could put the pieces together. Roderic was Tytonidae. Tytonidae had come to take their revenge. After the fact, he was not surprised. He should have thought of it before he had called Roderic out. But he had not been thinking. There was no plan behind Lancaster’s actions. This was what he denied.

As he paced and continued to find solid barriers, as he drifted between shifting ruins and damnable shadows, he denied the lack of a plan. He denied his own uncontrollable violence. He denied the fact that he wanted to find some kind of satisfaction in beating the ever living **** out of that puny asswipe who was not good enough for Skylar, and who would not ever be good enough for Skylar.

The scene played itself over and over in Lancaster’s head. What else could he do? What else could he think about, but the violence that had led him to this spot, to this vast cage that he could not escape?

The Allurist had thought that Roderic was stronger. The way the guy spoke, the way that he held himself. He was in the biggest murderous faction in the city, for ****’s sake. Surely it wasn’t beyond reason to assume that Roderic could keep his own in a duel? A duel that they had both agreed on. Roderic had not backed out.

The first few blows had filled Lancaster with an odd kind of glee. As the blood was spilled, a beast was released, and there was a hidden part of the musician that was finally free. After the third blow and still no decent retaliatory hit, there was that small voice in the back of his head. That voice telling him to stop; that he would kill Roderic and he could do so without gaining a scratch of his own. He had backed away, hadn’t he? He had wanted to stop…

…but Roderic had come at him again and again. The other man did not want to give up and whatever clarity had crawled into Lancaster’s line of vision was banished. Gone. But enough had remained. Enough to leave Roderic there once he could not move. To text Skylar and tell her to come pick up her husband. Enough to walk away without becoming a murderer. That was the main denial. The main thought that circled around and around in the confines of Lancaster’s mind, such as it was there in the Shadow Realm.

I am not a murderer.

I am not a murderer. I am not a murderer.

No, he told himself. He denied that he’d done it because he was a murderer, or because he had wanted to. Of course, he told himself, there was a point. A lesson to teach. A lesson that could not be understood with words but with actions. This is what it feels like, to be beaten down by someone stronger than you are, with no hope for survival.

But I am not weak.

I am NOT weak. I am no coward. I am not weak.

The colour and consistency of Lancaster’s thoughts changed, as shiftable and unpredictable as the landscape around him. The non-existent buildings shimmered. Like they were laughing at him, though there was no sound. The baritone of his voice roared into the abyss; he wanted an echo. He wanted that roar to come back to him.

But there was nothing. It was swallowed up by the gloom, and what was left of Lancaster d’Artois quaked.

[Pi dArtois]

R E P U D I A T I O N

It is the antithesis of coping well with a situation, in an attempt to reconcile what has happened with what you had expected it to be. You lash out, because anything more moderate would be a mockery of what you were feeling and why you were feeling it. Inside of her chest her the muscles around her heart squeezed, tightened its hold around her unused organ, as if the clenching fist would yank the offending part of out of her body to throw it at her feet and kick it.

"Damn you Elliot."

Yanking her jacket off her shoulders she slammed into the penthouse apartment, kicking off her shoes before picking one up to throw that across the room too, the black leather making contact with Elliot’s piano.

She would never have coped with this situation well. She was ill equipped to handle this with equanimity. All she wanted to do was hit something, hard. She wanted to make someone pay for the mess they all found themselves in.

They all deserved to be kicked in the teeth. Elliot, Ric and Skylar and now she’d add Charles to that list too. Knowing he was a puppet was cold comfort when all he did was spout rhetoric she knew wasn’t true. As if saying it repeatedly made his words right, when all they was nail the coffin in how indoctrinated he was.
But mostly, she wanted to kick Elliot. She was so angry with him, so angry and hurt and furious. And at Skylar, and with Ric. Her rage burned hot, blistering and scorching through her bloodstream. Then it burned cold, vicious ice, chilling intention freezing all feeling in her veins.

Pi had lived the first half of her life killing for a living. She had learned a million ways to kill with impunity. The act was a detached design, with an expected outcome, efficiently orchestrated to produce results and leave the asset uncompromised. In comparison Tytonidae was a hot ******* mess. They were bored, and sloppy, and ugly in public. They were cruel and stupid and had little pride in what they did.
And Skylar had brought Ric into their family.

She had lived the first half of her life in an organisation that did exactly what Tytonidae professed to do and they did it better. Cleaner, sanitised and efficient. Tytonidae was bored, just bored. Bored of their little lives that would stretch on for eternity. They were bored of their little jealousies and their little expectations. So they killed for sport and for fun. They killed pretending to care, but really caring not at all. It was as sad, as it was… wasteful.

And Elliot had given them the key to his life, slipped into the hand of the man Skylar had told them they could trust, because he was different.

No one, showed to all people the same face. No person was as good as they professed or as bad as they posed. Grey inflicted all of them, with a sanitised exterior projected in order to hide the other bits, best kept hidden. Pi knew Elliot’s conflict, understood its roots and the confusion it cultivated in a man who should never have been turned into something he may one day grow to despise.

As much as her own struggle to come to terms with how little she wanted to kill anymore, despite the fact she did it so damn well. They were at a mutual cross roads, intersecting paths, a killer and a gypsy musician, destined to converge.

She just hadn’t expected it to come to something like this. She had trusted Skylar. She trusted what Skylar had told her about the man she loved. Because she understood the same of Elliot, understood the light he held inside him, as intoxicating as the pull of burgeoning darkness he tried so hard to deny.

"And damn you too."

It was too much. And she couldn’t cope. She didn’t want to cope. She wanted to smash and to burn and to hate and to rage. She wanted Doc to come back to Crownet so she could yell at him some more and then yell at Skylar too. No, she wanted to kick Skylar in the teeth, and smash her heel into the soft part of her neck and listen to bones snap.

But mostly, she wanted to rage at Elliot, to scream at him for leaving her to deal with a mess she was ill equipped to deal with. Except he was dead and she had spent as much time in the SR with him as she could before the magics she used to get into the damn place ousted her and dumped her back where she came from.

So she was alone, and had repudiated everyone, pacing inside the penthouse, the only sounds the slap of her bare feet against the hard wood floors.


"And damn me most of all."

[Lancaster]

F U R Y

Silence begot fury. Silence and fury went hand in hand. Like the deadliest heat can at first feel cold, the deadliest fury will at first have no sound. Fury didn’t often have a place in Lancaster’s heart, much like silence. But it lived there now, like a stray cat that spits and slashes but which you can’t help but feed. Because you want to be able to tame it. You want to be able to love it, and for it to love you. But in the end, that stray cat will always be just a stray. It will take your love and will not give it back. It will stay. Just for the food.

Roderic.

You are the worst kind of person. You murder without remorse. You have no morals. You kill your wife’s best friend and you let her forgive you. You give her childe no option but to die. Your words are so large but they are not graceful. Your points fall short, your evidence and your arguments are pointless. You evade the questions asked and you respond to criticism with insult. I am not a small man. I am not worthless. It is your fault. Your fault entirely that you got your skull beaten in, and I should have killed you. I should have skinned you. I should have torn your heart out of your chest to examine it, and see whether it could ever, ever give any kind of love. I don’t regret any of it. I don’t regret the blood spilled. I will not take it back. I will not scream for repentance. Not this time. Because now you know how it feels. Except you were given more lenience than those you help to slaughter. You entered into the fight of your own accord. You were given time to prepare. But now you know how it feels to try to fight back but have no hope of victory. I hate you for all that you are worth.

Skylar.

I texted you. I told you to come and collect your husband. I thought you’d take care of him. What did you do? He couldn’t possibly have had the brainpower to go back to that cesspit of murderous intent on his own. Was it you? Were you so ******* angry with me that you contacted them on your own? Did you tell them I attacked without provocation? Do you all sit around and talk about how much I ******* loathe that faction? I can’t even name for fear that the fury will tear my soul in two! He started it, you could have said. Because that’s how this whole thing started, wasn’t it? My hatred of that faction, spitting venom because a man died when he didn’t have to. If I hadn’t said a word, I would not be here and Roderic would not be a vegetable. That’s the justification, isn’t it? He hates Tytonidae. He hates you so much he’ll rise up against you. Roderic was just an excuse. How can you be with a man like him? Why did you have to bring him into our lives? Him and his stupid ******* playmates. You are better than that. You are so much ******* better than that. Why couldn’t you ever see that?!

Doc.

You smug ****, with all your high and mighty words that mean absolutely nothing. You think you’re smart. You think you have authority when you have none. You make assumptions and you breathe them in such a confident way that people can’t help but believe you. You are the worst of the worst. You are worse than the puny asswipe Skylar married. You are pure evil. You should never have been born. I can imagine you up there like King ******* Muck, doing just enough good that you blind the people around you. You slowly poison them so that they think you are right, so when they truly see you for who you are they can’t hate you. Because they have become just like you. You stole my first from me; she was so pure and so innocent. I may have killed her but I did my best to make up for it. I did my ******* best. And then you come along and you ruin everything. You hurt her. You broke her ******* heart. You ripped it to shreds but somehow she came back to you. She is not what she was. I grieve for her, that you got your talons into her. I wish it were you. I wish it were you that I beat to a bloody pulp. And I would have killed you, too. A thousand times over.

Pi.

Where the **** are you? You were here. You were here, weren’t you? Or was it my mind, playing tricks on me? Were you a figment of my imagination? Could it have been you… you, who tried so hard to be one of them. Do you remember the things you made me do, in the beginning? I did as you said because I thought there was no other way. I was naïve, then. I was like those fledglings they like to kill so mercilessly. I was like Patrick, who accepted his fate no questions asked because he didn’t know any better. Do you remember that interior designer? The one at the cabin. She knew too much. You told me to kill her. You told me to, and I did. And I feel like she haunts my dreams. Every single person I’ve killed, they weigh on me. A piece of them lodged in my soul and I am drowning, now. I am drowning, and you are to blame. Not entirely, my love. I love you. I need you. Was that you? WHERE ARE YOU?!

.

.

.

The names and the faces collided, the shadowy exterior of the lean musician a crouched figure, curled in on itself like a too-round comma. A body in the realm was not a body. It was a ghost. A wraith that bent to the will of its thoughts. Whatever Lancaster had become in the recesses of the darkest darkness did not resemble anything human. The fury had taken up residence; it lashed out at all that it might previously had loved. Denial had bled into anger and it had become this, twisted and violent, a chaotic mess of blame and discordance.

And still the silence reigned.

[Lancaster]

B A R G A I N I N G

“Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast and one is striving to forsake its brother.”

What will it take, for normalcy to become the status quo? What must I do to satisfy you, brother? What can I do to make you leave? Get off my doorstep, leave me alone, let me get on with life as I used to? What have you done to me that I can’t let their words wash off my back like water from a fish’s scales? It never used to bother me, when people insulted me. They could think what they wanted about me, I didn’t care. I knew what I was and who I was. I knew what I stood for. And now I’m not so sure. I knew that they were wrong. They have no morals. Just because we have become something more than human does not mean that we can treat humanity with disdain. Humanity is our past. It will come back to us, sooner or later. It will always come back. It was what created us. It is not usual, it is not normal for children to tear down their parents, so.

But don’t you know – you should fight fire with fire?

Of course that’s what you would say. Only those who have psychopathic tendencies of their own think of fighting fire with fire. They want to know what it feels like to live on the other side. They’re happy for the excuse to let loose. That’s what you’ve done to me. You make me think that it’s okay. But it’s not ******* okay. I should never have done it. I should have walked away.

But then they would have thought you weak. A coward.

They think that anyway! What does it matter? It only matters if I’m ever called upon to defend those I care about, and in that situation they would know that I am not weak and I am not a coward. Except, now, I have done this. And they will call me far more than just weak and coward. Now they have seen me for who I am. I am conflicted. I am a mess. I am no pillar of strength or goodness. I am not what I preach. I used to be. But I’m not anymore. And it’s all your ******* fault. Why won’t you go away? I have tried so hard to find balance and to let you have your place, but you keep pushing the boundaries, don’t you? You keep overstepping the mark and you do it before I notice. I can’t stop you.

That’s right. Because I am you. You ******* idiot, don’t you know?

No. I refuse to believe that. I will not be like them. I will not be a hypocrite. I will not become what I despise. I will not become some high and mighty bloodsucker who thinks that because he has power and means he can do what he wants and kill where he sees fit.

But you like the blood. Admit it.

No! You like the blood. You do. Where the hell did you come from? You were never there before. I do the raids and I kill the monsters but it doesn’t satisfy you anymore. You want something of worth, don’t you? What is it that you want from me? I won’t tell you that I’ll do anything. I won’t. I’ll admit that I fear what you would make me do, if I promised. I fear what you would have me become. I fear that you would take me over and…

You have me all wrong, brother. I am you as much as you are me. No need to kill the young and the innocent…

…because there is no enjoyment in killing the young and the innocent. You enjoy making the deserved bleed though, don’t you? You would be a vigilante. You would seek to … but what the **** is the point? Death isn’t death isn’t death. Life is a shifting perception. It isn’t a precious thing anymore, that we only have one of and that we must watch with great care. Violence is not the answer and that’s all you care about. You don’t care about the end goal.

And what do you care about? You don’t seem to care about the end goal either, mate…

I care about plenty! I care about those who have become family to me. Yes, maybe you’re right! My selflessness does not extend too much beyond my own little circle but what can one man do, on his own? What the **** do you expect us to be able to do, you and I? My point of view is not one widely held, you might have noticed. All my childer are gone and those that have remained are in cahoots with the enemy. They love the enemy. Maybe I am insane and the world has been turned on its head. Maybe I did die! That’s it. I died and you are some form of Memnoch, aren’t you? You’re an apocryphal demon and this is hell. This is my punishment. To live in a world where evil is loved. Where innocents die and no one cares. Why is it such a bad thing that I wanted only to protect those close to me?

Wanted…

Yes, wanted. Past tense. I failed! Those poor girls were delivered right into the hands of darkness and I tried, didn’t I? I tried to make sure they stayed with me, but what am I? I am just a man and I can’t tell them what to do. Let them. Good God, let them, if that’s where they’re happy. But I will mourn for them, for the loss of them. I have lost them.

Not all of them…

No. But it’s only a matter of time. If you stick around? It’s only a matter of time.

You know I’m not going anywhere…

As I said. It’s only a matter of time.

[Lancaster]

D E P R E S S I O N

One cannot live in complete darkness and silence. Humans live with a pack mentality. They live with their family until they are seventeen or eighteen years of age; the leave, they find a job, they go to school, they find a partner. They have babies. Only the rare few were able to live by themselves; only the rare few sought the silence and the solitude. Elliot Lancaster was not one of those rare few.

Elliot Lancaster left home at eighteen to travel the world. It was supposed to only be a year. Then he was going to come back and he was going to get a job, and he was going to make music with his band. They were going to make it big. In those days, he had clung to the belief that he, too, wanted to make it big. But in those days, he had wanted what his friends had wanted, only because that’s what friends do. They stick together.

But the world had beckoned and one year was not enough. One year turned into three, which turned into six. Which turned into… never going home for prolonged periods of time. Backpacking was Lancaster’s life, and home was a holiday. He never got a solid job. He worked as a bartender or a barista or a waiter, as a performer, as a teacher. He stayed at backpackers lodges or in communes with other creatively inclined minds. The point, in the end, was that he was never alone. Ever. But now he was. Completely, entirely alone.

The telepathic conversations had been brief. Cytherea had stopped responding. He still wasn’t sure whether he’d imagined Pi visiting or not; the darkness blurred everything together into misshapen shadows; there was no bright light. The only glimmer of hope was that ray of inspiration sent to him most nights from Skylar. But even that, down here, didn’t do much good. It was of no use. There was nothing to do but stay still, or wander. But wandering only reminded him of where he was. When he wandered, he was constantly searching for light, for a gash of brightness. It was a subconscious search, and he was only ever let down.

The silence and the solitude slowly ate at his soul; he could have talked into the minds of the living, but to what end? The majority could not answer him. The majority probably didn’t want to. This was a place he’d been in before; that dark hole that he’d dug himself into that Pi had to forcefully wrench him up out of. But she wasn’t here. She wasn’t here. All he had was the darkness, and the silence, and a dark corner into which he folded himself.

The baritone voice bled out into the atmosphere. If he had a body, Lancaster’s throat would be hoarse from over-use. For hours upon hours upon hours, he sang to himself. Old songs and new. His own songs and covers. He screamed into the ether, which swallowed up his melodies without applause. He sang to distract himself; to think of what lyrics came next rather than focusing on the guilt. His constant boon buddy. The thing that most would call him weak for. The demonic monkey always clinging to his back. Always, always because he could not control himself; because the violence always broke past the boundaries that he tried to place, and he lost control.

And he was going to lose them all, one by one. It was only a matter of time. The phrase stuck to his thoughts like an irritating song that would not go away. How many people had he turned to darkness? Cytherea often disappeared. She was here, now, but for how long? She said she cared. She said she was torn. But of course, if she felt the need to choose, if a choice was forced, she would choose Doc. Skylar was the only other one still around. Skylar, who always thought that she would be a disappointment, that it was Lancaster who would disown her. Little did she know that it was going to be the other way around. Skylar, who had made that choice, once. She had chosen Roderic, and would do so again. And again.

Who else was there? Who else was around? Who else gave a **** that he was dead? No one. Because what worth was he to them? A man who preached peace but who so often descended into chaotic violence? A hypocrite. A wayward, dangerous thorn. Why would they want to get close to a man who could break and ruin everything, like a sudden unpredicted storm?

This self-loathing was new to Lancaster. He had his flaws, but he accepted them as part of himself; he accepted them, when Pi was there to help him accept them. But Pi wasn’t here. He was alone. The darkness crept in like a solid wall, suffocating him. So he continued to sing. To sing, as loudly as he could, for as long as he could. Who knew how long he sat there in his corner, unmoving, singing to the void with no noise in his head but the constant reminder of his own failures?

Too bloody ******* long.