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When Gorgug opens the garage of the Thistlespring tree in the middle of the world’s most miserable band practice, he does not expect to see Cassandra waiting on the other side.
He sees them before Fig does, still hunched over her bass by the stairs for some self-imposed “corner time”. Gorgug isn’t really sure what “corner time” is all about other than its obvious components, but he’s willing to bet that it’s something that can be interrupted when their best friend’s god—up until this point believed to be dead or possessed or both, and separately not physically able to enter the material plane—crashes Sunday band practice.
“Hi,” she says, urgent and low and devoid of any of the quiet, wispy hesitation Gorgug has become accustomed to over the summer. It takes a second for him to realize it’s coming from her, and that it’s addressed to him. “Craig told me the two of you would be here,” they continue, clarifying absolutely nothing.
“Craig told—are you okay?” She’s obviously not, but Gorgug feels like it would be insane not to ask after how everything ended on Friday before the party; Kristen hasn’t been able to reach Cassandra—or anything other than whatever the fuck the growly threatening thing that was inhabiting that space where her magic was supposed to come from, now.
All of them have been, privately, assuming the worst.
“It’s okay if you’re not,” Gorgug adds on awkwardly, immediately regretting it as Cassandra’s eyes narrow, something in her throat twitching around the rage. For a second Gorgug thinks, Wait, is this even Cassandra, or is she still shatterstarred or whatever? But then Cassandra exhales a sigh, loud and forceful through their nose, and Gorgug realizes that there is no red to be found in the swirling, shifting form of them.
This rage is all her own.
“Or whatever,” Gorgug says, quieter, to his shoes, “Whatever.”
At this point Fig has extricated herself from the corner and is standing beside Gorgug, arms hanging slack beside her bass hanging off her neck, jaw hanging open. “Did you come for band practice?” she asks, blinking owlishly. Gorgug fully turns to look at her out of really nothing else but bewilderment—not dissimilar to the energy of when she accepted a shrimp platter mid-battle, and dipped—and waits for some sort of further elaboration.
Of course, no further elaboration comes.
“Yes,” Cassandra answers plainly, voice no less incensed than her initial greeting.
“Great,” Fig says, “I am so glad you took me up on my offer. And besides, we were really not getting anywhere with our own stuff, so it’d be great to hear what you have to add to the mix.”
“Anger,” they say immediately, “I have anger.”
“Good. That’s really good. Our band is a punk band, so anger is kind of the main thing, I think.”
Before this goes too far, Gorgug inhales and braces for the worst. “I have some questions,” he says, instantly earning two heads whipping towards him—Cassandra with that rage, denser than the heaviest neutron star, and Fig with an eye-widening Don’t blow this kind of look. He ignores both of them and speaks to his converse once more. “Uh, one, I’m assuming you don’t want us to tell Kristen you’re—here, I guess?” He feels the shift of the galaxy around him and quickly tacks on, “Which is totally fine, of course, happy to do it, just wanted to clarify so we’re all on the same page. Uh. Like, communication, yay…”
Fig lets out a couple poorly concealed nose exhale laughs before Cassandra confirms, “Your assumption is correct.”
“Great! Cool. No problem there. Won’t tell her, will let you navigate, uh, that on your terms.”
“Yeah, totally.”
“Right. Anyway. Second question: how are you… here, right now? On this plane? Just, like—it’s fine, but I just wanna make sure you’re like, okay and everything is all, uh, sorted for you or whatever?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Cassandra says, shifting her weight, “Craig took care of it.”
“Right, so that was gonna be my—”
“Which, by the way, did you guys know that Craig is actually a very high-level cleric? Did Kristen ever tell you that?”
“Oh, no, I—”
“Well he is,” Cassandra interrupts, letting out a shrill laugh and crossing their arms, “and he was able to take care of me—” She gestures vaguely to herself and their surroundings, her being here, a beat before the bitter look on their face cracks a bit, a section of resolve sloughing off to reveal something between devastation and indignance that Gorgug, horribly, has seen on Kristen before. “He was able to take care of me,” she repeats.
“I’m Cloaca,” Cloe says, “I suck!”
“You can ignore her,” Gorgug says, maybe even more hostility in his voice than Cassandra’s, “She shouldn’t even be—I don’t know how she got in here.”
Cassandra seems entirely unaffected as Gorgug shoos his stupid fucking homunculus out into the main part of the house, their complete attention focused on Fig as she says, “Okay, that’s okay.” She steps forward, holding her hands out to take Cassandra’s in her own, leading them further into the garage. “You are welcome here at our band practice. We can talk about it as much or as little as you want. What do you feel like doing?”
Cassandra sniffs, looks around the garage. Her eyes don’t land on anything specific, but they are glassy as they turn back to Fig and say, “I feel like fucking screaming.”
Gorgug watches as Fig’s lips curl into a smile—small and careful but still intense, knowing— and she reaches over to the mic stand, shuffling it over to Cassandra. She nods once, and Fig strums a single chord on her bass before saying, “Let’s hear what you’ve got.”
What Cassandra’s got, as it turns out, is somewhere in the ballpark of one and one half (1 and ½) uninterrupted hours of screaming at the top of their… whatever gods have in the place of lungs. Gorgug makes it through about eight minutes of intense, technical death metal style drumming before needing a water break, but he’s pretty sure that Cassandra doesn’t notice once when her backing musicians falter momentarily several times over the course of her screaming. At one point, Digby pops his head into the garage to check in, but he promptly pops it back out once he sees Gorgug’s warning look, not even bothering to ask for an explanation. By the time Cassandra’s voice finally quiets, an underwater sort of silence in the room, Fig looks absolutely ragged—blood dripping off the strings of her bass and her fingers that she numbly stares down at, seemingly just realizing the gashes are even there. Gorgug doesn’t look that bad but he doesn’t look much better, every item of clothing on him an entirely different colour after being drenched in sweat. He feels disgusting, smells it too, and he’s pretty sure that his arms might fall off at the shoulders—just pop right off him like an action figure or something, onto the also sweat-slick concrete.
Cassandra’s chest is heaving, but otherwise (and obviously not including the other, preexisting stuff) she seems fine. Energized, even. Which, Gorgug gets it, the healing power of music and having an outlet for your rage and everything, but also: jesus fucking christ.
“That was great,” Fig breathes toward Cassandra, not even looking at Gorgug as she waves him toward her with the fiery glow of a healing word in her bloody hands. He stands shakily from the drum kit, legs like the overcooked spaghetti Fabian tried to serve them the one (1) time he tried to cook on the road this summer, and shuffles into her touch, nearly collapsing to the floor before the spell can be fully completed.
Once it is he does, moaning out a halfhearted, “Yeah, you killed it,” and throwing a thumbs up in what he hopes is Cassandra’s direction. “That was awesome.” And it was—not physically, or mentally—surely not physically or mentally—but like, it was a very good opportunity to practice his technical drumming which he unfortunately has really, really needed and not otherwise been that motivated to undertake on his own.
Take that, Lola, he thinks weakly, reveling in the cool concrete of the floor under his cheek.
Some time after this, once Fig has handed out heals and very apologetically scrubbed up her blood from the floor of the garage and Gorgug’s sweaty clothes have successfully completed the transition from cold disgusting to hot disgusting, Cassandra asks if they’re ready for round two.
“I’d like to try my hand at lyrics this time,” they say, “if that can be part of the offer.”
“Sure,” Fig answers seamlessly, shaking out her hands and staring, somewhere between a hundred and a thousand yards, into the middle distance. “Whatever you need, dude.”
Gorgug looks at his drumsticks. Looks at Cassandra. Looks at his drumsticks. “Were you—were you thinking the same kind of, uh, style? As last time? Or did you want to shake it up. Again, whatever you want.”
“Actually,” Cassandra says, “I was thinking I could just—I could just start, and the two of you could play whatever you feels suits the tone best.” She pauses, firm, then her face cracks again and she falters, tone taking on something more like concession than rage. Again, it’s familiar. “But of course if you would rather—”
“No!” Fig and Gorgug shout at the same time.
“That’s okay.”
“Really!”
“We’re here to support you.”
“Yeah, and—”
“And if you—”
“—want us to, want—”
“For us to do improv? That rules, man.”
“Totally rules. We will improv under your lyrics.”
“We will improv under your lyrics.”
“Okay,” Cassandra says, only a little less small than before. This version of them seems closer to the one Gorgug has experienced previously, and he’s not sure if that makes him relieved, or just a little bit sad. Then they ask, “Do they still have slam poetry?”
Gorgug clears his throat and Fig lets out a, “What?”
“Oh. It’s like, this ancient art form that me and my—my original followers sort of—”
“You invented slam poetry?”
“So they do still have it?”
Fig starts to cry, just a bit. “Cassandra, can you please do improv slam poetry for us? Please? I will turn my bass into an upright for you. I don’t know how but I’ll do it.”
Gorgug takes this Impassioned Shared Interest Girl (“Girl”) Talk Moment as an opportunity to tune out and try to remember if he remembers any of the jazz drumming from his middle school band class. He knows Fig well enough to know exactly where she is going with this, so he slips out to get changed into a new pair of clothes, preferably dry, and makes sure to bring back a couple of bowties for him and Fig, plus one of his mom’s old berets for Cassandra if she can and/or wants to wear it.
If anything can help the Sig Figs find their voice again, it’s probably going to be a thematic bit. If not that, it’ll at least help Cassandra feel more at home, hopefully, and Gorgug is just fine with that.
Even if he doesn’t know the difference between slam poetry and spoken word and if that’s affected by if you have soft jazz improv in the background or not, and if any of that can even come close to describing what’s happening as Cassandra begins round two. He’s not sure if anything or anyone can, but he can try:
Back up at the microphone, Cassandra is not wearing the hat; emphatically in the want category but unfortunately not in the can category—instead it’s draped over the microphone so there’s a cool muffled effect on her voice coming out of the amp in the corner of the room. The only word for what they are doing that comes to Gorgug’s mind is writhing, or like, exorcizing some kind of demon from herself through an incantation where every word is punctuated, coming out more forceful than the last. He is mostly focusing on drumming—improv jazz is stupidly hard for something you can’t actually mess up—but it seems like Cassandra is having at least a somewhat cathartic time, doing it.
This kind of drumming, though stressful, is much less technically difficult than round one of practice, so after a while Gorgug kind of gets into a groove and lets his body go on autopilot. It’s then that he starts to think of some new progressions, locking eyes with Fig every so often as they play off each other, more in sync than they have been in months. Cassandra is definitely doing their own thing, but it seems like he and Fig are attuning to not just each other but her, smoother stops and transitions to punctuate her stanzas, lines of heartbroken poetry coming out and out and out of her in a never ending assembly line, like the strudel portal at Adaine’s job.
Hey, I should ask Adaine if she still has a job, Gorgug thinks, or if your workplace blowing up and turning into a time loop automatically means you’ve been let go.
He never did get to try any of that strudel, in the end.
At this point he tunes back into the lyrics, which is quite serendipitous because Cassandra going on about an endless portal of strudel and an endless portal of grief. And Gorgug thinks, Damn, maybe she never got to try any in the end, either.
Gorgug, as previously mentioned, really does not know anything about slam poetry or spoken word or any of the other things someone smarter than him would call this—but it sounds and looks, like, kind of… goofy?
“She asks, if I want sauce, and I say: who doesn’t? Who doesn’t need some. Thing. Something warm— warm— who doesn’t need something, one thing… She asks if I want sauce and I say: If I am the strudel and she is the sauce and no one wants a strudel without sauce—warm sauce! Then who am I to be anything but lost? If sauce is at a loss or simply an afterthought then will I just be tossed into some soph…more memory album?”
“Woah,” Fig breathes. And, okay. Maybe not goofy? Maybe he just doesn’t get it, or whatever.
“No,” Cassandra continues in a rush of breath and, okay, maybe Gorgug feels something there. Her arms fly into the air as she spits, “If the sauce is lost in an afterthought after crisscross from god to god but never giving any thought to all of her knockoffs, now that is not. A ladle of sauce that merits applause. Not from this god.”
Okay, maybe Gorgug gets it, now. Fig begins to snap between notes and Gorgug can only follow in her lead, completely abandoning one drumstick to snap. He looks over to Fig and she gives him a look like, Right? All he can do is nod.
Cassandra shimmies her shoulders, rolling her neck as she brings the tempo of it back down, hands rigid up in front of her, moving as they speak. “This god won’t be tossed—in the trash— like those before her that have been reduced to ash. Yes! Yes! I said Yes! when she asked, not knowing her old gods were just aftermath and flashbacks, no comebacks once you’re—newsflash! Whims of the past.”
They turn then, eyes closed as she spins around in a circle, rogue strings of friendship bracelets flying out as she twirls, carefree and careless. Teetering on the edge of something worse, something a little more self-destructive. It’s the most familiar thing Gorgug has seen all afternoon, and it nearly knocks the air out of him when he realizes that exact expression, this exact flow and weight of movement—not even anything specific he can name or point out, just a feeling coming off of Cassandra that’s so potently poignant and so much of an earlier Kristen, a little more lost and a little less loved.
It reaches out and holds him, breaks his heart into three perfect pieces: one for Kristen then, one for Kristen now, and one for Cassandra, straddling both directions in an ever-expanding throughline of doubt.
“Doubt,” they spit, arriving back at the microphone in a dizzying stop, “Doubt is out, it seems. Seems like she’s sure she’ll endure every obscure brochure until there’s a cure for the allure and— cure. Let’s talk about that, cure. Has she considered. The cure? A portal closed on a god demure? Maybe premature, but if the sauce is lost and I am tossed then there must be a cost.”
Another round of snaps, Fig twanging low and looming on her bass. “There must be a cost and I do what I can but is there an end? To what end? Strudel and portal and god she constantly tries to amend, the three bathed in mystery. Mystery can be slippery. See, all I ask for is consistency. Consistency—but the sauce must be reordered and no one’s made the call, forgotten in the mall we distend and mend and I comprehend. I comprehend that there must be and end. I don’t pretend. I won’t pretend.”
Gorgug might be crying now, too. He might ask Fig if she’s open to adding a third member to the band. He might call Kristen and beg her to start mending instead of distending. He might go to the hospital for an exhaustion related injury. There are a lot of possibilities, here, but there’s only one poem and it’s coming to a close:
Cassandra inhales, exhales, and says, “The cost is $4.95, nothing extra for sauce. Nothing extra for sauce, so nothing is lost.”
Her words echo in the garage and then it is done. Gorgug wasn’t even aware he stopped playing, but his hands are resting idly on his thighs as he just takes in the power of slam-spoken-poetry-word or whatever the fuck. He knows that Cassandra is literally a god, but he’s never been more sure of something as he’s sure that this qualifies as a religious experience.
That, and that jazz actually sort of rules.