Work Text:
Lolo pulls the tattered denim jacket even tighter around her shoulders—it barely fits her frame in the first place, but she’s making do—and tips her head back, further and further and further until the first strains of dawn on the horizon disappear, leaving her vision all darkness and starlight. No matter how many times she comes back, she’s always struck by how bright they are out here, even the most distant of them a clearly defined pinpoint against the black.
It’s quiet , too. She pushed the warding out further than usual as they pulled in, just in case whatever had taken—just in case something tried to follow them home, so there are no cars around for miles, her only company the steady rattle of the AC unit against her back.
She should be crying, shouldn’t she? Isn’t that the normal reaction after you watch the person you love—she’s still not used to letting herself admit that—get eaten by a haunted house? Lolo knows that she had wanted to, when the tips of Janet’s fingers just barely grazed her palm, the riptide of darkness dragging her under the earth. But she had choked the tears back and put them in a nice little take-home box for later, focused on getting them out before anything else could go catastrophically wrong (she thinks it’s what Janet would have wanted her to do, but she doesn’t know if that makes her feel any better about doing it).
But when she reaches for the box, she finds… nothing. She feels like her head has been pumped full of novocaine, all her feelings crushed down to vague, distant shapes that might be sadness or a flickering spark of anger, grief waiting to swallow her whole but never quite coming. She drums her fingers aimlessly against the small digital recorder that had already been in the jacket’s pocket when she found it resting over the back of her chair. There’s one single file on the memory card—a little under five minutes; recorded sometime in the early afternoon when she had been running circles trying to gather supplies. She knows what it is, more certainly than she’s ever known anything else. She doesn’t have the heart to listen to it yet.
The real reason Lolo comes up here is for perspective. It’s always been so easy to feel like the walls were closing in on her, the world too finite and filling up too fast, ghosts on top of ghosts on top of ghosts until she can barely keep her head above water. But from here, the desert seems to stretch out so far that she could walk forever and never find the edge, rock-strewn sand unfolding in every direction like a dissected paper crane. This place is old . It has seen more death and rebirth than a human mind could ever hope to comprehend and it remains beautiful, remains vast and empty and teeming with energy at the same time.
So she comes up here when she needs to feel small, whispering prayers for guidance and stability to whoever is listening to her, whatever decided that she should be the one to bear the weight of her gifts—it seems like a fair trade to her, at least.
This time, the answer comes in the form of someone clambering up the drainpipe, a stream of low curses pouring out of their mouth in a language Lolo doesn’t recognize as they hoist their weight onto the roof.
“You can tell me to fuck off, if you want; I won’t hold it against you if you just want to be alone right now,” comes a voice from behind her, “but I figured I would offer to join you, at least.”
Lolo shrugs, gesturing out towards the horizon. It seems to be enough assent for Mabel, at least, to step into her field of view, carefully avoiding meeting her eyes as she settles a few feet away, long legs dangling over the edge of the roof. She’s shifting uneasily, like she’s still unused to being on solid ground—which, Lolo knows, she probably is.
“Brought you some snacks, too,” Mabel adds, shrugging a bag off her shoulder and tentatively setting it between them like some sort of peace offering. There’s something strange about her eyes, Lolo notices as she flashes a quick smile, something too-green and maybe a little snakelike. It probably doesn’t do her any favors with most people, but Lolo finds it… oddly comforting.
“I—Thanks.” Lolo says, “How are you feeling?”
Mabel hums softly, extending one hand in front of her and curling each of her fingers in turn before answering, “ Strange , mostly. Down there everything is liquid, of a sort, spilling outward and blurring together. It feels like someone reached in and scooped me out in a cup but couldn’t quite get the entirety of me without bringing something else up with me—part of me is still down there somewhere, and I can feel the edges of the wound if I press myself too hard,”
“I’m… sorry. Things didn’t exactly go as planned,”
“Don’t be. I think you’re the only person in the world who would have even helped attempt it,” Mabel cuts her off, fishing a scavenged bottle of gatorade from the bag and offering it to her. Lolo accepts it gladly—she’s suddenly achingly conscious of the rasp in her voice, cracking the bottle open and slamming back almost half of it in a single go before setting it aside, “I could ask the same question, though—how are you feeling, Eidolon?”
“It’s… it’s just Lolo,” she responds, a slight smile tugging at her lips in spite of everything, “I only make people call me Eidolon when I’m on a job, or if I don’t like them,”
( Does she like Mabel? Part of her recoils at the implication; wants to resent the other girl for being the thing that Janet decided was worth more than her own life. But that would make her a hypocrite, wouldn’t it?)
“And I don’t know,” Lolo says quietly, drawing her legs back up to the roof and tucking her knees against her chest, “It feels like it still hasn’t landed yet. You would think that I would know how to deal with this, when I’ve been surrounded by it for most of my life, but…”
“When I—it’s different. It’s different when it’s personal. I get that,” Mabel nods, picking up where she trails off, “Anna wanted you to know that she doesn’t blame you for snapping at her, by the way.”
Lolo cringes a little at that— snapping is a bit of an understatement for the way that she rounded on Anna the second the door closed behind them, burning her single moment of emotional clarity like a gasoline-soaked rag before storming out the back and dragging herself up here.
After that, they fall into silence for a while. Mabel seems content to simply exist in the same physical space as her, being there to hear it when she wants to say anything or nothing at all. Lolo can’t seem to stop herself from stealing the occasional glance—Mabel has existed to her for so long as empty space: a blacked-out name in school records and a gap in police reports; a bloodstained porch and an empty grave; a hole punched straight through the universe. It feels almost surreal for her to be a real, flesh-and-blood person, just a girl who someone loved enough to rend the fabric of reality to get her back.
“I don’t think I’m even mad at her, really,” Lolo says, the admission surprising even herself. She desperately wants to pull everything back inside her walls, to push and push until there’s no one around to see her weak points, but she doesn’t. Something about Mabel’s presence—somehow both a familiar comfort and something that’s too new to be anything she can ruin—makes it almost alarmingly easy for her to open up. “I want to be, I keep trying to be, but I know now—there was nothing else she could do except exactly what she did. That’s how this works, isn’t it? That’s what scares me: I understand . If things had been different, if our places had been switched, I wouldn’t have tried to stop her either.”
If the implication catches Mabel by surprise, she doesn’t show it, idly plucking flowers from her hair and knitting them together between her fingers as she turns to face Lolo. “Okay, so who are you mad at? It’s clearly someone,”
“I thought it was Janet at first—maybe it still is, a little—but she was just trying to help, or… trying to prove something, maybe, that she could keep up with me or make herself useful,” there’s no point in dancing around it. She knows the answer, just as solidly as she can feel the knot forming in her throat, “but it’s my fault, isn’t it? If she hadn’t seen my notes, she never would have been in that house in the first place, never would have found Anna, never would have been there for the ritual. It’s my fault , if I hadn’t shown her, she wouldn’t be—”
She chokes on the last few words, tears accumulating in her eyes but never quite breaking free. It feels wrong to call Janet dead , somehow. Death is… natural, even at its worst, not a cost to be paid but a simple inevitability, the distinction that gives life meaning. What happened to Janet was none of those things—when Lolo closes her eyes, she can still see her face, looking to Lolo for help, for safety that she had completely failed to provide.
Mabel lays a hand gently on her arm, waiting for a moment to see if she’s going to be pushed off before sliding a few feet closer.
“No, it isn’t.” her voice is soft, but leaves almost no room for argument, “I know that it’s easier to think that. If everything is your fault, that means you have control, right? But you just—you have to take it on faith that she made her own choices. They may have been bad choices, sure. But they were hers, and you didn’t force her into any of them.”
“Oh, because you know so much about what happened, don’t you?” the words fly out of her before she can stop them, cracking like a whip in the cold air. Lolo reels back, gripping her arms as hard as she can and counting to ten under her breath and then doing it again backwards and again in english. It’s not how she would center herself normally, but her grasp on her own intent feels too slippery right now for her to be comfortable with anything that she might accidentally give power to.
Out in the desert, some animal howls at the encroaching dawn like that alone might be enough to stop it, the sound carrying on the wind for miles.
“I do know, for the record,” Mabel says, sounding slightly—and justifiably—annoyed for a moment before her voice levels out again, “Anna… did something similar for me, a long time ago. Traded herself to the underhill for my freedom.”
“ Ay, mierda, ” Lolo swears under her breath, “I’m sorry, I—”
“And you know what I did? I spent the whole week trying my hardest to make her regret it, trying to make her hate me enough to leave me behind when she got the chance. I was so convinced that… that I had poisoned her, that the only reason someone so good and pure would ever allow herself to get hurt like that was if I had somehow forced her hand. That’s what they tell us, isn’t it? That we’re dangerous; that we’re playing some kind of trick?” Mabel pauses to collect herself, blunting the edge slowly working its way into her voice before she continues, “As you might have noticed, it didn’t exactly work. I gave her plenty of outs—I have to assume that you did, too—but she kept coming back, over and over again.”
“I tried . I tried to keep her on the outside, but she convinced herself that I didn’t trust her, or that she had to prove she could handle it somehow—I was just trying to keep her safe ,” Lolo pauses to push her hair out of her face, studying the lines of her hands like she might find the answer there, “This is what happens, every time. Every time I think I know how to help, I think I’ve found the right way to wring something good out of the hand I’ve been dealt, it blows up in my face. I hurt someone, or I get hurt. But I don’t know how to stop. I just keep trying , keep telling myself that maybe next time I’ll finally get it right. I don’t think I know how to stop,”
“There are worse character faults to have,” Mabel says with a shrug, shoveling a handful of candy into her mouth, “Listen. Anna showed me your files, the ones about the school—do you have any idea how good it felt to see it all written out like that? To see that someone cared enough to go through and document everything that they did to us?”
“That’s—I didn’t do anything. I was just compiling information. Nothing I do can actually fix that, or change what they did to you, or—”
“Sure. No one can do anything about that. But the worst part was always the idea that they might get away with it, that we would die without anyone else ever knowing what happened. You’ve made sure that I don’t have to worry about that ever again. You have successfully helped me and everyone else who suffered under that monster. I owe you some measure of thanks for that, even if we’re going to discount everything else.”
“You sure about that?” Lolo’s small laugh breaks through the tears caught in her throat, “Last I checked, people take debts pretty seriously where you’re from,”
“We certainly do. And I—Anna and I both—have accrued a great one to you, as well as to her. I have been called a lot of things, many of them true, but I have never been one to break a promise made in good faith,” Her voice is sharp now, her eyes narrowed to a point as she extends a hand, “Eidolon Garcia, you have my word as chosen consort of the king in exile that we will do everything within our abilities to aid you in retrieving what you have lost. I swear it, by my own power as well as that which my king has vested in me.”
“No catch?” Lolo raises an eyebrow, “don’t you usually try to get something out of this?”
Mabel shrugs, the vines and flowers in her hair twisting toward the light, “You have already reunited me with Anna. I can ask nothing more of you except to bind me to this. Do we have a deal?”
Lolo hesitates only a moment longer before taking her hand.
“Speaking of Anna,” Mabel says, the tension dropping out of her body as soon as they break apart, “I should probably go check on her—I think she’s still worried that I’m going to disappear again if she lets me out of her sight too long, and I can’t really blame her. Are you going to be okay on your own?”
“Yeah. I’ll be down in a few minutes. I just… there’s something I need to do first.”
By the time Lolo looks at the horizon again, it’s streaked with red and purple, the sun just visible enough over the mountains to wash out the stars and warm her face.
There’s no point in putting it off any longer. She pulls the recorder out, uncoiling the cheap headphones and slipping them into her ears, her finger hovering over the play button for a moment before she steels herself enough to press it.
“ Hey, Lolo, It’s—I mean, you know it’s me, duh, ” Janet’s voice is half a whisper, still enough to make Lolo’s breath catch in her throat, “ It’s the middle of the afternoon right now, 3:24 pm, although I think being around that weird bird-head guy messed with my watch. You and Anna are in your office working out the diagrams for the ritual, and I’m out here behind the gas station, trying to keep myself out of the way. This is… a contingency plan, I guess. Like they do in the movies, y’know?”
There’s a beat of silence in the recording as she collects herself. Lolo closes her eyes and fiddles with one of the pins on the jacket, a bug-eyed green alien straight out of some ‘50s sci-fi movie they would have watched together, trying to distract herself from the way her heart flips when the audio picks back up with an uncharacteristically shaky laugh.
“ You’re gonna be so annoyed with me for saying that if you hear this. I can practically see you rolling your eyes, always telling me not to treat it like it’s some kind of story. And I’m not, Lolo. You asked me the first time we talked to take you seriously, and I always have, even if I get… overexcited, sometimes. But right now, thinking about it like that, doing this—it’s helping to calm me down, a little. I hope that’s all this is. I hope we, all three of us and Mabel too, stagger back into the gas station at some ungodly hour of the morning, and I pretend to be surprised to find my jacket over your chair and crack some joke about how nice it would have been to have it and delete this without ever taking the recorder out of the pocket. I think that’s the most likely thing to happen, because I trust you more than anyone else in the world, and I know that you would do everything you possibly could to keep me safe. I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t believe that with my entire heart.
But if you’re hearing this, then either you stole my recorder and you should turn this off and give it back to me, you absolute dick, or—something went wrong. Something went wrong, and I’m… I’m not there. Maybe I’m alive, and I’m just banged up and in the hospital or something, but I should be there with you and I’m not.
So first off: I’m sorry for that. If something happened to me, you probably feel like shit, and I wish I could be there to watch bad movies with you and listen to you complain about how ghosts don’t work like that until you feel a little better, because I really, really don’t want you to feel bad about it even though I know you will. I’m sure you did the best you could, and that’s all anyone can hope for.”
Another pause. Lolo can almost see her now, bouncing on her heels and trying to psych herself up for whatever she’s about to say, the way she used to pause for a moment with her hand on the doorknob before pushing through.
“ Okay. Enough beating around the bush. This is the scariest thing I’ve ever done—which is a weird thing to say, considering that I’m about to help you perform real, actual demon-summoning—but I’m going to try and be brave about it even though I’m really, really afraid, because I know that’s what you would do.
I’m going to try to say all of this to your face, too, sometime between now and when we start the work, because you deserve that. You deserve more than a stupid recording. But knowing me I probably talked myself out of it at the last second, so I’m putting it here too:
I love you, Lolo. I think that’s been true almost as long as we’ve known each other. I couldn’t pinpoint the moment it happened, but I can tell you that I only realized some time in the past week. I feel stupid for taking so long, but I know that’s pointless. I wouldn’t have been able to make myself say anything, anyway,
I don’t expect you to reciprocate any of this. I know you probably don’t, even. But you deserve to hear it either way: ghosts or no ghosts, you are the single most incredible person I’ve ever met, and I’m so, so lucky that I got to know you—nothing that happens will ever change my mind about that.”
That’s enough for the dam to break. Lolo pulls the jacket up high enough to bury her face in it as sobs rattle her body, everything that she’s been pressing back for the last twelve hours finally breaking through in one moment. How could she have been so stupid? How had she not seen? If she had given Janet just a little more credit, hadn’t gotten herself so wrapped up in the idea that she needed to keep her safe… would things have been different?
“ I love the way you get so focused on sorting through a document or practicing a spell and you barely remember that anything else exists. I love the way your face lights up when you find the connection you’ve been looking for and everything suddenly makes sense and you’re rushing over to your bulletin board with the red string. I love the way you dropped everything to go rescue that DDR cabinet when we found out the arcade was closing, and the way you jumped up on your chair when we started playing and that mouse ran out of the pad.
That’s all true, and it all matters—there’s nothing I want more than to spend the rest of forever breaking into abandoned buildings and chasing ghosts with you.
More than any of that, though, you just… you care so much. I know that you try to act like you don’t, like nothing ever gets to you, but I see it anyway. I’ve known you for, what, three years now? Four? And I’ve never seen you do anything except try to help people, even when it would be easier for you if you didn’t. I know you give yourself a hard time about it when it doesn’t work out. I know that’s probably what you’re doing right now.
And you do help. Maybe not always in the ways you try to. Maybe not always in ways that you can see. But it’s true. I hope… I hope you hold onto that. No matter what happened or happens to you in the future, I hope you keep being stubbornly, unflinchingly kind,”
There’s a noise in the background—the rumble of an engine, a faint impression of Lolo’s own voice floating on the edge of the recording like a ghost.
“ I— One minute! I just need to grab my notebook and I’ll be right there!— looks like it’s time to go. I think I’ve said everything I wanted to, but I’ll say I love you again for good measure. I… I hope this helps, if it needs to.
Thank you for making everything real, Lolo. Take care of yourself, okay?”
Her voice gives way to microphone hiss for a few seconds before the recording properly ends, and for those few moments there’s no sound in the world except for Lolo’s heart lodged in her throat. She’s not even crying anymore—she ran out of tears somewhere in the home stretch. Then, in absence of anything else in storage, the recording starts from the beginning again. It’s exactly the same as the first time, like someone has sectioned those five minutes off and surgically extracted them from the rest of the timeline, preserved them in their own tiny endless loop. Lolo doesn’t stop it, listens without really listening as she makes her way down from the roof and through the back door.
Maybe she’s caught in the loop again. Maybe she’s doing what she always does. It doesn’t matter. She’s going to do it anyway—Janet would be a fool to expect anything less of her, really.
After all: this would be a shitty way for a story to end, wouldn’t it?