Chapter Two [closed]

[Clover]

--The following transcript was a live chat roleplay--

<Clover> Everyone wanted to help her childer. Rhett wanted to help her childer; Kaelyn wanted to help her childer. Was she that incompetent? Was she that much of a failure? And below her feet, beneath wood and support beams, Jesse received the same support. She had nothing to offer. Clover was nothing more than a bank and an arms dealer, a temporary fix for a much bigger problem. Kaelyn was better. Rhett was better. Clo let her thoughts carry her into the darkest recesses of her mind, a place that she accessed by sitting in one of the recliners located in the middle of the family compound.

“I shouldn’t have turned them,” Clo muttered to herself, her voice just loud enough to drown out the intermittent clicks coming from her wraith. “I should have killed them. I should have let them go. I should have done anything else. I’m a terrible sire. I knew it. I’ve told Jesse. I’m a terrible sire, Junebug.”

Clo looked up as if she could see her wraith, even though she couldn’t. She didn’t know whether her wraith was the spirit of her sister, but she thought it appropriate to apply her sister’s nickname to the feral little creature. Summon them, it whispered to her. Summon them and kill them, it reasoned. Finish it. Finish yourself.

Clover pressed the bottoms of her palms over her closed eyelids and let out a frustrated groan. She couldn’t tell whether the wraith was actually speaking to her, but then she heard the clicks and a deep, disembodied growl. No, it hadn’t been the wraith. She was losing her ******* mind again. Clo summoned her childer. She tried, at least. She kept her eyes closed and she focused on her blood. She called them to her as if she were slowly tugging at a rope, slowly dragging them to her.


<Nona> The zombie was everything that every horror movie ever said it was going to be. All of them were, in their various degrees of decay, of greying sinking skin, of rot and stench, of baked and bathed grit and gristle on their hands and mouths. And it was as stupid, too -- of that, Nona was grateful. It shuffled its way forward toward her, rocking and sliding, with its moans growing louder and louder as if it were beckoning her to it without the added effort of reaching her.

She readied her gun and took aim, closing one eye tight as if it better focused her sights. Before, in the normal world — the world just beyond that fence that separated the living from the dead, the natural from the unnatural — she’d never even held a gun, much less fired one. Her mother didn’t believe them, even as a single woman raising a daughter (for the most part) on her own. She had pepper spray, kitchen knives, and baseball bats for that, but no guns, and so it felt foreign in her grip. She squeezed the trigger, flinched against the pop, pop, pop! that echoed up around her from the rapid fire and quickly released to conserve as many bullets as possible.

Lucky for her, the zombie collapsed, dead, but it was only a matter of time before another trudged along, attracted by the sound. And if she crossed the river (Jesus and God-like, as she discovered) it would be the world she had been used to — entirely normal, no zombies in sight. At first she’d followed Okoro into the Quarantine Zone for answers, searching together with the same curiosity. And now that she were no closer to the truth of anything, she stayed for the practice and the safety net. After all, if something went wrong with her, if she couldn’t control herself, she couldn’t hurt a zombie the way she could a stranger on the street — a human, which she no longer was.

Her fingers worked the release of her gun’s magazine to start the blundering process of reloading it — something that should’ve taken seconds to do, but it took her minutes, at least. That was when she felt it. The air around her drew against her skin like lightweight fabric, a definite substance caught in a wind that shouldn’t have existed indoors. Nona quickly looked around, but nothing was different or changed, just dizzying, and so she knelt down on the floor as her balance suddenly felt shifted. Maybe, she thought, this is what it feels like to faint. But she wasn’t fainting and as soon as she took a breath in, she felt herself stumble forward through air without moving at all.

The floor underneath her changed from scum soaked tile to sturdy hardwood. Her gun clattered against it when she released it, quickly followed by the clicking of heavy bullets. She scrambled to pin them down with one hand, still kneeling on the floor, while looking up desperately. She saw Clover immediately, seated, and caught a breath in both relief and fear. “What was that?!” she asked, scooping her bullets toward her on the floor. “Where are we?”


<Okoro> "Nona?" Okoro called, his throat hoarse and tight from the stress and tension of clenching every muscle in his body together. He swore if he didn't, he would come apart, which is what he was most assuredly thinking was happening when his body tingled and his vision blurred. He blinked and he saw somewhere else, but in a split second, he was looking at a rotten, dilapidated building in the Quarantine Zone. He told himself this was it, that his body was finally giving in because it couldn't take all of the changes, all of the sounds and all of the pain. This world was too real and too hard, a finality that he could now admit to himself. "Nona?" he called again, but he heard nothing except a buzzing in the back of his ear, like a firefly buzzed happily just behind the shell of his ear. He released the dual hold he had on his gun and rubbed his ear in an attempt to clear out the sound and the vibrations. He squeezed his eyes shut and focused on this world, if only for Nona, but it didn't work. His body felt like it split apart and then rapidly came back together, molecule by molecule until there was only silence; not even the buzz of his body hummed. When he looked up and opened his eyes, he saw not only Nona, but Clover. The building was unfamiliar and he released the hold on his gun in the panic. "What happened?" he asked Clover with a new intensity.


<Clover> Where were they? What had happened to them? Clover couldn’t say. She couldn’t say that they were home, because she didn’t know what it meant to be home anymore. Clo knew what it meant to run. With the both of them present, she looked back and forth between the two of them as if she were sizing them up. She studied them as if she were deciding on saving them all over again. And in the moment, right when she needed such concentration, she heard the steady click of her wraith. Her concentration was broken.

Clover sat up in the plush chair, her palms tucked beneath her thighs, and sighed. She expelled the air from her lungs until her chest began to ache. She wanted to expel more than the air. She wanted to rid herself of her lungs altogether. “I summoned you here. I can do it whenever I like,” she stated, a certain finality in her tone. “This is where you live. You’re Fforde now.”

Her effort went into overcoming her insecurities, or at least masking them. They were Fforde. They were Fforde more than they were her childer. She’d released them as she’d released Crimson. Three mistakes in a row. She’d hoped that something more would have developed. She’d hoped for the type of bond Jesse had with his childer. But Clover felt nothing. No, she felt jealousy. She felt fury. They wanted Rhett. They wanted Kaelyn. “This is everything you need. I have nothing else for you.” She had nothing else that someone else couldn’t give to them. “You can leave through there,” she muttered. She raised her left hand and motioned toward a fadeportal that led to the other Fforde home, to the one at Larch Court. “Don’t die.”


<Nona> The slender bullets spun and clattered across the floor as Nona tried to fist up as many of them as she could before any skidded out of reach. She turned quick to look at Okoro near her, and the sight of him — oddly familiar, these last few days — was enough to bring her to stand. She picked up her gun from the floor and shuffled closer toward him, but she didn’t take her eyes off Clover and where she continued to lounge, and speak. For every word, a thousand questions leapt across her mind and up the back of her throat, vying to be voiced and heard and answered as strongly as the need to feed.

Don’t die. A request never sounded so ominous and all Nona could do was shake her head to make everything and everyone slow down, including herself. Her body felt as though it was pulsing, but not supernaturally — not in a way that everything else was, new. This was a familiar feeling, an urge to move, and to run, and to do exactly as Clover had commanded: to not die, but to live. Maybe it was adrenaline (built on something physiological and biological, a chemical) or maybe it was subconscious and brain-bred into being, what she simply thought she felt. Either way, it was there, and it left a slight tremble in her hand as she pushed the bullets down into the pouch of an overneck bag she carried with her everywhere. She’d been wearing it when they were attacked.

“Wait, wait,” she commanded before Okoro or anyone else could. “Summoning? What do you mean, you summoned us? How do you do that? — Can we do that?”


<Clover> The sound of the bullets against the hardwood floor irritated her. She gritted her teeth to keep from snapping at the both of them, Okoro and Nona.

[Nona (DELETED 7562)]

--The following transcript was a live chat roleplay--

<Clover> Okoro had nothing to do with the noise, but he stood there. He was there and he shouldered part of the blame simply by being present. Clo kept her dark eyes on Nona, trying to communicate her own distaste. The noise. Between the clicking of her wraith and the clicking of the bullets. And Nona’s voice. When had Nona developed such an aggravating voice?

Clover closed her eyes and inhaled. Jesse had been patient with her, even when she’d plotted to slaughter him in his sleep. She had to summon patience in the way that she’d summoned her childer. She said she’d had nothing else for them, but she had more. She had time. She had patience. Somewhere, lost amongst her jumbled insides, she had niceties.

“It took me time to learn summonings. You can’t do them yet. You’re new,” Clover replied, her voice strained as if she were trying to maintain a level tone. Again, she reminded herself that she had niceties. Clo clenched and unclenched her fists. She dug her fingertips into the cushions and reveled at the feel of the fabric. “You can do other things. You might be able to speak to people without actually speaking. You might be able to walk on water. I don’t know the extent of the other paths and possibilities. You have to experiment on your own. Just like I did.”


<Nona> “I can do that,” Nona blurted. She looked over at Okoro, speaking to him too. He wasn’t there when she did it, and they hadn’t had the chance to talk about it. And up until that very point, she’d forgotten about it entirely — too focused on finding her bearings. “I told you I was going to stay and practice more, with the gun, but when you left the Quarantine Zone, I felt…weird. And hungry, too. So I tried to find another way out, rather than the sewers. I thought, maybe, I could swim across the river to the other side, but I didn’t need to.”

Nona turned back to Clover placed her gun into the hanging bag at her side. She pushed the flap down over it, securing it, and took hold of the strap like an old, comforting friend. “I walked on the water,” she explained. “I don’t know how, or why. I didn’t even think about it. I just stood right on it and walked across, like it was… frozen, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t even slippery.” But judging by Clover’s expression, Nona slowly became aware of the fact that Clover didn’t seem to care one way or the other whether she could walk across water, land, or anything else. It made her nostrils flare with realization and she shifted in place to glance at Okoro.

“You said a name,” Nona said to Clover, quieter. “What was it? Fforde? Who is that?”


<Clover> Nona was a shadow. The realization hit her right in the center of her chest. She could actually help Nona. Clo had the ability and the presence to guide Nona through their powers, even with her own deficiencies. She felt an overwhelming sense of pride. At least part of her insecurities had fallen to the back of her mind. No one else had the ability that she had to guide her childe. To Nona, at least, Clover was more than a bank and an arms dealer. But what about Okoro? What about her first childe? What about her future childe? And there would be at least one other.

“I’ll help you,” Clo interjected. “I can help you with your powers. I’ll teach you. I promise.” Her words were crammed together, spoken as quickly as her imaginary heartbeat. She clung to their common thread as if her very existence depended on it, as if their shared trait kept her sane.

For the time being, she forgot about Nona’s question. Fforde mattered less than the fact that they were both on the same path. She had to make sure that Nona avoided the same struggles. She wanted to make sure that Nona didn’t suffer the same fate. Clover smiled, a small, pathetic little smile, but a smile, nonetheless. Kaelyn couldn’t have Nona. Rhett couldn’t have Nona. Nona belonged to Clover.

“Fforde is the family name. It’s Jesse’s name. He’s my sire. He’s the head of this line,” she explained, much calmer than she’d been at the beginning of their meeting. “You’re Fforde now,” she repeated, “because you’re mine. You belong to me. You both belong to me.”

I’ll take care of you.

I’ll protect you.


<Okoro> Though Clover prattled on about things that he both knew and didn't know, Okoro stared at Nona for the duration of Clover and Nona's back and forth. She walked on water and he did nothing. When he sat in the lobby of the apartment last night, at the service desk, talking to Kaelyn, not even she could explain to him why he couldn't do anything special. He talked about blood, but all vampires needed blood. "I can't do anything," he said, rerouting the entire conversation. "Maybe I didn't turn correctly," he fought to explain for both of them, as well as himself. "Or I'm missing something. I don't know," he said.


<Nona> “No,” Nona said immediately. She turned on Okoro, eyebrows lifted. She shook her head again. “No, that’s not true.” But maybe it was. She wouldn’t know any differently, at the end of the day (night). She didn’t know anything about what they were or how they were, and who was to say that he wasn’t actually…different? But ‘different’ was just another word for ‘broken’, and ‘broken’ meant busted, cuffed up, and (to the right person) disposable. ‘Broken’ could mean ‘wrong’ to anyone that heard it by chance, and suddenly that sounded so similar to the zombies that she and Okoro both practiced shooting down. They were wrong and broken, but surely not Okoro.

“That can’t be true, can it?” she asked, facing Clover again. “We’re Fforde now because you changed us, and created us, and you said both of us, so you would know if there was something wrong. Wouldn’t you? — Maybe you just need to be taught, still,” Nona reasoned with Okoro again, looking at him.


<Clover> Maybe her blood wasn’t enough. She’d never made a conscious decision to turn someone, and yet she’d made two such choices in one night. Had she done it wrong? Had she missed the class on how to turn a human into a monster? Bite. Exchange blood. Embrace. The end. Okoro and Nona wanted her to answer something that she didn’t know how to answer. She didn’t know what was wrong with Okoro.

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Clover lied. No, Clover hoped it wasn’t a lie. She had taken time to develop her powers, so she had to assume that Okoro would learn and grow. She didn’t need to get up, but she rose from her seat and walked over to the both of them. Their scents had changed. She couldn’t hear their heartbeats. They weren’t human. “You’re not like us, but that doesn’t mean you’re missing something. It doesn’t mean that anything went wrong. You have to be able to do other things.”

And what if she’d made a mistake? What if her poisonous bite had done something to her blood and ruined the turning? What if he didn’t survive? What if he didn’t prosper? Clo wondered what her kind did with the ones that didn’t thrive. She wondered if vampires destroyed their runts or merely cast them aside. Clo hadn’t been cast aside. She was a runt. Okoro was her runt.

“If there were something wrong with you, I’d kill you,” Clo reassured him, as if saying such a thing would put his worries at ease. She said it as if she would have been putting him out of his misery.


<Okoro> "Are there different kinds of vampires?" he asked, as if Clover hadn't already answered that. "Are you sure I'm one? Maybe I'm still human," he suggested. Okoro looked at his hands, then Nona next to him and Clover in front of both of them. For the first time, he saw their surroundings, the building that Clover had summoned both he and Nona to, but he wanted to leave. "When does the sun come up?" he asked, hastily looking for a clock. "If I burn in the sun, we'll know. But maybe--" he said. He broke away from their triad in search of windows, in search of a door, an exit, anything that would bring him closer to the sun.


<Nona> Nona reached for him, to catch his arm before he trailed too far away, but she missed and he was on the hunt. She walked after him, effectively putting herself between he and Clover in her attempt. “Okoro,” she said, following him with eyes. “Okoro, no… Stop. You’re not a human anymore. You did change.” Then, to Clover behind her, she quickly assured, “There’s nothing wrong with him,” despite the strung way he was acting. “Okoro,” she called after him again. “I can tell the difference myself. If you were a human, I’d know. I wouldn’t lie to you.”


<Clover> He amused her. Until that point, she’d forgotten how funny he could be, how utterly amusing. She didn’t move to go after him. She didn’t reach out for him at all. Clover stood and watched Okoro’s movements. She watched the way that Nona tried to soothe his worries. Turning them both had been a good idea. Alone, he might have gone the way of Mickey. Alone, she might have retreated to the shadows until there was nothing left. Clover needed both of them. “If you start doubting me, I’ll shoot you. Then we’ll know.” Clo nodded to herself, “I like that. Let’s make that rule. If you imply that I’m lying, I’m going to shoot you.”


<Okoro> Suddenly and uncharacteristically for Okoro, he stopped, put his hands in the air and called, "Shoot me!" to Clover. The smell alone of where they were was enough to drive him insane, to make him sick and send him retching somewhere in the corner.

[Okoro (DELETED 7560)]

--The following transcript was a live chat roleplay--

<Okoro> "Shoot me!" he called again, even taking a step forward to prove just how much he wanted to test her theory, just how desperate he was for answers when there had been none. Weapons, they could teach him, but if he had come out wrong, if he turned into one of those zombies that he and Nona had been practicing their aim on, then he would have rather taken a bullet to the head.


<Nona> “Are you stupid?!” Nona asked. She’d put herself between the two of them to prevent anything escalating to that point and yet somehow, someway, there they stood, the three of them, Clover a little less than caring about anything, Okoro desperate, and Nona more lost than she had been when she first moved to Harper Rock on her own without the helpful guiding hand of her mother. Look where it landed her. “Okoro, stop it! Why would you want that? — Please… Please, don’t shoot him. He doesn’t know what he’s asking for, because he’s acting like a crazy person right now,” she said, cursing back at Okoro when she said the words.


<Clover> The wraith’s steady cadence of clicks came to a sudden end, replaced by a low growl, a pleased growl. Clo admitted that she felt the same sort of growl from within her gut, a primal need to give Okoro exactly what he requested. She’d offered him a bullet and he’d accepted. There was only one reason for Clover to hesitate, and that reason blossomed into a barrier that separated her from Okoro. Nona. Nona’s pleas. For a moment, Clover toyed with the idea of joining Nona in calling Okoro a crazy person. What kind of person wanted to be shot? The best kind of person.

Clover reached around to her lower back and pulled out her pistol. Without saying a word, she turned off the safety and fixed the barrel of the gun on Okoro. If he’d expected something different from her, something like reprieve, than he’d been wrong. She’d aimed at his head, but she jerked the gun down at the same moment that she’d pulled the trigger. She’d fired a single bullet at his leg.


<Okoro> As a child, Okoro had made the mistake many times of turning the water for his bath on too hot when his mother left him alone for a few short minutes to see to the rest of his siblings. Each time, he felt the same cold rush, the same white hot heat that ran over his flesh at that moment.

The moment the bullet connected with his body, whether he was expecting it or not, it burned, searing hot pain. To him, that was a good sign, a sign that maybe he was still human after all.

He let out a loud grunt from the pain and when he moved to fall to one knee, blood blossomed against the thick jean material of his paints. He wanted to shout and he wanted to curse, but he just grit his teeth and leaned on his good leg. "That wouldn't kill a human!" he protested. "Why shoot me at all if you weren't aiming to kill?" he asked through grit teeth.


<Nona> Bang. One loud, thunderous second stretched out for a minute, a full half hour even, in one gunshot, and she hadn’t been expecting it. Nona had seen the gun, and she’d seen it in Clover’s hands. She’d even seen her take aim right past her at Okoro, and yet she hadn’t been expecting it. Bang. Man down. It was as if her entire anatomy had leapt up into her throat and lodged itself there from how sudden she jumped at the noise. Both hands covering her lower face, bag hanging at her side, she turned to stare at Okoro partially on the floor, bleeding from the hole. For some reason she expected to see it smoking, see some great curls drifting up toward the ceiling poetically, but only a void of deep purple (so deep, it looked black; black on black) stared back at her.

Her entire body told her to run. Fight or flight, and her instincts were kicking in fast to flee just as Clover had told them both to earlier. Don’t die. And yet her feet remained anchored to the floor, for some ungodly reason — a reason she couldn’t put a finger to, or even begin to guess. But she didn’t move forward, either. Nona stood there, hands clasping her mouth, and staring wide eyed at Okoro who, she couldn’t forget, had asked for what he’d gotten.


<Clover> There was nothing wrong with him, as far as she knew. She had no reason to kill him when there was nothing wrong with him. They were still discovering the extent of his abilities and his situation, but her blood had taken. He wasn’t human. His question made no sense. He’d told her to shoot, and so she shot him. And he acted surprised. Perhaps she should have shot him in the head.

Clo looked away from his bleeding wound to his face. She took in the expression on his face, the clenching of his jaw. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” she answered, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “Why would I kill you when there’s absolutely nothing wrong with you? You’re mine, Okoro. I take care of what’s mine.”

Clo flipped the safety on her gun and slowly put it back into its holster. She readjusted the fabric of her slouched dress, fussing with it in the way that she should have fussed over him. She paid attention to detail. She took time to assess her clothing. When she looked at Nona, she recognized the shock written all over the woman’s face. “Do you want me to shoot you too?” It was a joke, but it was ill-timed and all too morbid. They didn’t understand her sense of humor.


<Okoro> The wood flooring creaked under Okoro's weight when he slowly rolled from his crouch to sitting entirely on his rear. He stretched the wounded leg out, despite the pain, and attempted to roll the leg of his pants up.

The only other time he'd been hurt in this life was from a zombie -- or something -- that got ahold of his middle. At the time, he dared not to think about how his guts would surely be spilling out onto the floor, but they hadn't.

He cupped his hands around his calf, where the wound was and concentrated on the feeling of the bullet slowly wiggling its own way back out the way it came. He clenched his jaw at the pain, but looked back up at Clover.

"Please don't shoot her," he pleaded. "She did nothing wrong," he said and waved at Nona with his hand, now dotted with his own blood. "We've already proven that she's okay. She's okay," he repeated, that time taking his attention to Nona.

"I'm sorry," he said. When he spoke, his voice cracked and the tears that started to swell in his eyes gave him a headache. Everything was too loud, even the people out on the street; everything hurt and he was overwhelmed.


<Nona> Her eyes were so wide from over the tops of her fingers that they hurt, they stung, and eventually she had to squeeze them shut to let the rush of moisture that had gathered sooth them over so that she could see again, for what that was worth. Carefully, she pried her hands away from her face and crossed the distance to Okoro’s spot on the floor, reaching out for his knee. When she put herself down on the floor beside him, she was careful not to touch any part close to his wound except in helping roll up his pantleg. “Do you believe her now?” she asked, voice just as shaky as his. “Did you test your stupid theory by getting yourself hurt?” But what she wanted to say didn’t come, at least not at the moment. ’What if it had been worse?’ ‘What if she had actually killed you?’ ‘I thought we were helping each other. Why are you getting yourself killed, Okoro?!’ ‘Please… Please, don’t do that again.’ But he suffered enough of a lecture for someone with a gunshot wound and had to deal with it as she tried to help, as steady as she could. “Is that too tight? I’m sorry,” she said, rolling his jeans up one last time at the bend of his knee.

“Is there anything for the pain that we can give him?” Nona asked Clover, looking up at her. She’d hardly noticed the joke, or the threat (whichever it had been), and she suddenly looked less like a killer in front of them rather than an overly large child with a small attention span and the education of a middle schooler. Unstable, but not deadly. After all, she’d only been doing what was asked of her.


<Clover> He didn’t understand. Neither of them understood. Clo slowly made her way over to her childer and stooped down. She focused on Okoro’s injured leg as if she were waiting for the wound to stitch itself closed. The blood wasn’t black, but hadn’t they already established that he wasn’t like Nona? Yes, they already knew he wasn’t a Shadow. “Pain medication isn’t going to work with him, Nona,” she answered softly, digging deep into herself to carve away at well-hidden compassion. She probably shouldn’t have shot him, but he’d asked for it; she’d enjoyed shooting him a bit too much.

Clo rested her forearms atop her knees, her dress pulled tight over her legs. Her own wounds ached, but she’d given in to enjoying the pain, just as she’d enjoyed the pain from her sunburn all those nights ago. Apparently, Okoro wasn’t a fan of pain. “It’ll be okay. Make sure you watch what happens to the wound. You’ll see your flesh mend itself. Not immediately, but it will. Ours,” Clover stopped, her attention returning to Nona, “will fade back into existence.”

Were Okoro and Nona going to develop some type of codependency? Did she have any right to judge them, if they did? “This is going to happen a lot. Cops will shoot you. Hunters will shoot you. Other vampires will shoot you. You’ll be okay. It only hurts for a little while.”