Chapter Text
~*~
I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries
the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,
and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose
from the earth lives dimly in my body.
~*~
Kevin Crumb escaped, and in a different sense, so did Casey Cooke.
Elijah Price, before the Beast crushed his chest wall, turned to the-girl-that-got-away and said, “Every hero has a weakness - David has the water, I have my bones. He has you. It took me a while, but I can see it now. And Dr. Staple sees it to.”
She had only a few precious minutes to digest this enigmatic statement, but as she held the Beast’s fist in her hands, looked into the flat glossy black of his eyes, she realized she had a choice.
If she let him go, he would continue to maim and kill and terrorize, unchecked, virtually unstoppable.
If she held on, she would lose him - this strange and terrifying creature, this man who was weak for her, who looked at her, no matter who inhabited his body, like he never wanted to look away.
She knew she had to stop him. She knew he had to die. But Casey had been denied so much for so long, and she was tired of being in pain.
She let him go.
~*~
David Dunn drowned in a puddle. An ignoble death for a noble man. Casey saw Joseph a few times, meeting up in coffee shops pretending to be the adults they really weren’t. He was a quieter person now, that frantic energy gone, long silences stretching between the two of them that became unbearably full of words neither could say.
“I could help you find him,” Joseph offered her once. “It’s what my dad would’ve wanted.”
“And what happens when we find him?” Casey picked her chipping nail polish absently, looking out the window at the happy sleeping people strolling by. “Hand him over to the authorities?”
She felt Joseph’s eyes on her, sad and uncomprehending. “The beast has to be stopped, Casey.”
“I know,” she said. She pulled out a five dollar bill from her pocket and set it on the table. “I know.”
The next time Joseph texted asking for coffee, she didn’t reply.
~*~
She spent the first few months scouring news reports across the country, looking for signs of his pattern - missing young girls, maimed bodies, cannibalism. She refused to acknowledge the thrill of hope each time she entered the terms in her search engine, refused to accept she was hoping to find evidence of his crimes.
She never found anything.
Had he died after all? Had they found him and destroyed him? It was plausible, and Casey was by no means owed any notification if they had. It seemed less likely that he had simply given up on murder, although perhaps he had gotten better at disguising his MO.
The absence of him - the absence of any knowledge of his ongoing existence - felt to Casey like a gnawing hunger, a void inside of her. She was constantly preoccupied by the memories of Dennis’ knotted brows, or Hedwig’s shrieking laughter, or the softening expression of wonder as Kevin saw her for the second time. The Beast, as he spotted her across the front lawn of Raven Hill, stopping short, chest heaving with his growling breaths, and staring at her like she was something exceptional.
“You’re not,” she reminds herself, running late to work. She graduated high school in June, graduated from the foster care system a few months after that. She works now making sandwiches in a deli and gazing in periodic amazement at the sum of money the judge awarded her from her uncle - by no means extravagant, but more than she had imagined having.
She arrives at the shop a few minutes late. The manager shoots her a sour look. Casey has been no luckier in finding friends than she ever was, but the hard edge of rage she lived with for so many years has softened, and terror that shaped her every waking moment as a child has faded into a white noise of anxiousness she can tolerate. She looks normal at long last, and that is a gift.
“Sorry I’m late,” she mumbles, pulling an apron over her head. She has been distracted. This morning she woke with the sun to buy train tickets and pack her room into boxes. Her roommate, a young man who left the foster home she was living in several months before her, had chewed his lip nervously as she folded each item of clothing with precision and set in into her duffel bag.
The eight hour shift passes in a fog, Casey hardly aware of it all. She leaves with a grin on her face that feels foreign. Goes back to the apartment, drags her boxes down to pack into the car she bought on Craigslist four days ago. Climbs into the driver’s seat.
She pulls out onto the street, onto the highway, out of the state. Night falls, and the road dividers glitter off the black asphalt like diamonds.
Casey is finally free.