end of the earth

The old woman’s eyes had ticked towards his for just a moment as he’d walked past her. He’d smiled, lifted the cigarette pack – with its dwindling load – towards her in greeting, but there’d been nothing more. It was like he was stuck on a ward for the comatose. There might be some flicker of brain activity left, that was all though.

Kace walked away, digging a cigarette out of the packet. This feeling of being a trapped animal was worse than nicotine withdrawal was gonna be and he wasn’t gonna go digging through the pockets of these zombified assholes to see if any of them happened to be a smoker. The cigarette ended up between his lips, the fingers that pulled the lighter only trembling faintly. Maybe they’d be out of here before he really lost his mind, either with one of those people who’d zipped in and out – or like the mouthless, dickless motherfuckers who came racing in here on their horses to drop off more of the people they … kidnapped.

He’d torn his shirt open after he’d remembered what had happened, clapping his hand to his chest like he’d feel another bullet wound. It wasn’t like he’d had a slow drawn out death the first time – thank fuck – but he could remember the way his lungs had suddenly fought every breath he’d tried to take and the sticky heat welling up from his chest under the clamp of Kit’s hand. There’d been none of that this time. Slightly clammy skin, cool in the fucking ice box of what felt like a waiting room for death. The story had spilled out to Mikey then, the one fucking saving grace in all of this. Little revelations spilled where nobody else seemed to be capable of listening to them. ’Hey everybody, I got killed by my brother first time around, maybe second time’ll stick huh?’ It better fucking not.

In the time since he’d wandered through every part of this place, only scurrying back when those things reappeared. Good little boys who kept their mouth shut didn’t get a whip around their throats or another bullet from the gun. Kace was pretty damn sure there was nothing that could bring you back from that. When others had blipped in and out he’d tried to catch bits of the conversation, but for now all they murmured about seemed to be hot air. Things that could gather souls and wipe out whole towns – that was fucking awesome – possible ways out, most of which seemed to hinge on someone out there remembering you, because right none, nobody fucking did.

The depression had bitten deep. Without him maybe Kit was alright. PTSD might still have clawed at him from time to time, but he wouldn’t have had the added weight of his death. Without him there he might’ve been a freaking accountant, married with a handful of kids, who knew how much happiness and success would’ve come his way. Even if it wasn’t all rainbows and sparkly unicorn shit, what was remembering going to do to him if it did happen. It was gonna be like getting shot in the heart, all that sudden pain and catastrophic damage.

Cigarette between his lips, Kace ambled towards the platform. The tunnel had felt off limits at first, but once he’d gotten used to the rhythm of those bastards coming and going, it’d been a retreat. In the dimness of it he puffed on the cigarette, the cherry end of it lighting up the gloomy space for a moment and revealing the blonde down on the tracks. He caught her swinging her arm, saw the coin vanishing into that black void and felt a chill run through him that even the hot smoke in his lungs couldn’t chase away.

As she looked up at him Kace lifted his chin in greeting. She’d reminded him a little of Ronni the first time he’d seen her among those who’d come to. There was more of her, for sure, but she had that perky surfer girl look to her – cute, and like Cassie, way too young for him to try anything, even if there was any sort of desire to hit on anybody here.

Kace looked down at the cigarettes as she asked for one, weighing up the cost of losing another. After a moment he nodded and went to shake one out. She was already carrying on talking though, reaching up a hand to him. Kace shoved them in his pocket, then reached down and hauled her up. Soon as she was standing on the platform with him he was fishing the packet back out, offering up the open box and the lighter. ”Found that out pretty damn fast. I guess they figure if you’re waitin’ for somethin’ you’re not likely to start lookin’ for a way out. Numb everybody with boredom ‘til you’re ready to really kill them all off.”

The shudder rolled through him again, leaving him wanting to just curl up in the fetal position. ”You from Mystic Falls or did they scrape you up before? Seems like there’s a lot of people here just to be from that tiny little town.” And that was part of the problem. Apparently these things took everybody in a town before they moved on. How many more did they have to snatch up before they were anywhere done with Mystic Falls?

Tagged: WINTER BEATON * Word Count: 902

At least he probably wasn’t gonna come back to life inside of a coffin this time. Echoes of the remembered panic of when he had clawed their way back through him as he and Mikey had rushed through one exit after another in this place. None of them had led anywhere but back to the waiting room. It was thousands of times the size of his coffin, but almost immediately had started to feel the same. Walls that he couldn’t break through, doors that offered false promise, that black void in the tunnel that left his skin crawling as he went to stare at it. Whatever this place was felt like a trap, and he couldn’t chew his leg off and escape it. He was stuck until someone remembered him and why the fuck would Kit do that when he was better off not recalling what he’d done?

Kace had ticked off everybody else in his head as he and Mikey had tried to finish all this shit out. His dad, Kamilla – unless it would get her another front page spread it probably wouldn’t even occur to her that she’d had a third child – Kanice and his niece (again, why open yourself up to heartache when you could just close your eyes and will the thought away, Katja, Frank, both probably glad for how much of the old Kit was back. Cassie … Maybe. She probably wouldn’t remember the way Kit had kicked him out of the club, or why he’d helped her out that night, but maybe there’d be some vague recall of the guy who’d helped her out of her shell. Dirty blond hair, blue eyes, the smell of cigarette smoke clinging to flannel. Who was he kidding, she was still so taken with that British kid that it would’ve been ‘Kace who?’.

Feeling sorry for himself wasn’t gonna get him the fuck out of here, but until some miracle happened out there it wasn’t like he had much else to do. Seemed like the blonde had the same idea. Study the few ways out, and when none of them offered an actual escape, find some way to burn the disappointment out of yourself – even if his cigarettes ended up being ever-lasting here, like they had been when he’d been on the other side, they probably weren’t gonan stick around long enough to die of lung cancer.

Kace inhaled slowly as the girl plucked a cigarette out of the packet and took the lighter, amusement huffing out of him on the exhale. Sandy brows hitched as he tilted his head towards the black void they came and went through. ”Do they look like guys runnin’ on logic to you?” Were they even guys at all? Who the hell could tell with the creepy cowboy get up. ”Sounds like there’s a dozen different versions of what we’re doing according to the people out there who aren’t still gorped out of their minds. Waiting here forever like it’s purgatory, eventually disappearing altogether, getting a happy little ending when someone out there claps for you Tinkerbell style … not sure I wanna find out.” Seeing the after effects of his dead were bad, being aware enough to know that there was nobody out there who gave a shit you were gone was worse.

The cigarette pack was shoved back in his pocket, the one he’d lit up before she’d appeared clamped between his lips again as she lit up. Kit had warned him from the start that Mystic Falls was all kinds of fucked up – especially the club – he hadn’t listened though. There was a whole world of scary supernatural shit around them, but it wasn’t something that weird that had killed him in the first place. It hadn’t seemed possible for shit to go so wrong again. It had though, sticking around with Kit instead of finding a way to go home meaning he’d been right there for those fuckers to take.

”Got there about the same time,” Kace admitted dryly, the cigarette bobbing as he spoke. ”Texas originally, then LA. Who woulda thought that it was somewhere like Mystic Falls that was full of scary, dramatic shit.” His first genuine snort of laughter since he got here hit as the girl choked on the cigarette. Not a smoker. It was a waste of one of his last cigarettes, but maybe that flash of amusement was worth it. ”Easy,” he muttered, demonstrating how not to choke yourself by taking a deep, slow breath. ”They’re fuckin’ golden if you’re used to it. Mellows you right out … for all of five minutes. You’re not a smoker.” There was no question to it. ”You think we could burn those assholes with these? They look like they’ve been carved outta wood. Spark one of ‘em up and maybe somethin’ changes here.” It was wishful thinking and more bloodthirsty than he’d ever been. He’d fought to live though, dragging himself away from the edge of the precipice after Cassie had pulled him out of it, he wasn’t ready to go again, even if nobdoy knew he had.

Tagged: WINTER BEATON * Word Count: 853

Mikey was here because of him. Maybe Mikey would’ve argued that it wasn’t his fault, but by now Kace knew when it was a dumb move by him that kicked a situation off. He’d drawn Mikey’s attention to the asshole who’d appeared with the gun, he hadn’t just told Mikey to run the fuck out of the diner and call the cops. It had been Mikey’s decision to try and turn claws and a freaking tail on the guy, but that very first turning point in the situation was on him – exactly the same way it had been with Kit. Turn on a movie full of fucking gun shots, surprise surprise, you trigger your brother’s war induced PTSD and get stabbed in the heart. It didn’t take a genius to see had caused both situations. There wasn’t a damn thing guilt could do to fix it though.

From the minute Cassie had dragged him back from whatever limbo he’d been in after he’d died, Kace had tried to shrug off the guilt and make up for the consequences of his actions instead of just wallowing in the guilt. The Diner was meant to be all about that and looked how fucked up that had become. He huffed out a smoke wreathed breath, bitter amusement rolling through it, at her comment. Them both being here and awake meant that they knew that the world was weird and entirely fucked up, but he wasn’t gonna go down the path of asking if maybe she’d been resurrected. That wasn’t why. Mikey hadn’t been, the guy had just spent forever in a jail cell and instead of sprouting fur and claws on a full moon the dude turned into Godzilla.

”I don’t know if I’d wanna dig into what the fuck’s going on in their heads,” Kace muttered, his lips pursing before he glanced back at her. It’d take a drill to dig through their tree trunk looking heads and even then there was probably nothing but the slick oily blackness he’d equated with evil. ”Maybe we’ve all got somethin’ in common, but half of them out there aren’t capable of sayin’ what it might be.” Not when they were still comatose and completely unaware of the fucked up shit that was going on around them. Kace’s lips pressed tight together, his throat working as he swallowed hard. ”Trust me, you don’t wanna. It’s never gonna be how you think it will be.” It’d be kinder on Kit though, wouldn’t it? No devastating memories of killing his little brother, no being haunted by him with every breath he took. This time all the pain would be for him and Kace didn’t know if he had enough strength to spend an eternity knowing nobody remembered him.

Kace felt a grin trying to break through as she choked on her first drag. It tugged at the corners of his mouth, his smile slowly turning wry. ”That’s better than gettin’ addicted to ‘em,” he told her, reaching out to take the part smoked cigarette as she handed it back. Kace kept his own clamped between his lips as he tucked hers back into the pack. ”I stole some from some asshole hangin’ around my mom’s place when I was 14 and that was it.” Now they were his lifeline when shit got stressful. Maybe he’d been on his way to barbecuing his lungs, but he was pretty sure that those real world dangers were non-existent in a place like this.

Drawing on his cigarette, Kace shook his head. He looked at her as he plucked it out of his mouth and exhaled slowly. Maybe he should’ve tried stubbing one out on those desiccated looking faces. Dry driftwood had always gone up fast when they’d built bonfires on the beach and those fuckers looked like someone had drawn every ounce of moisture out of them. ”Maybe with one of those guns they carry around with them,” he said with a shrug. ”Nothing seems to scare them and we didn’t get close enough to try.” Not when he was running out of there and Mikey had been shot before he’d got close enough to skewer one of the assholes with his tail, or whatever the hell was meant to happen with it. ”What happened when you got taken?” He doubted that stitching the details together would do much, but it wasn’t like they had anything else to do in there – except run in endless loops and stare at those boards.

Tagged: WINTER BEATON * Word Count: 751