Chapter Text
Maureen would have you believe that her heart pumped ice and cynicism. Her face always set with stony apathy and disappointment, you’d think she already hated you the moment you locked eyes with her. A glacier living in a tiny desert oasis.
But Michelle saw a side of Maureen that no one else seemed to. It was like nobody else knew how fragile and passionate she could be underneath her protective layers of indifference, negativity, and city-mandated gas mask.
And if Michelle knew one thing, it was that she liked things nobody else knew about.
The way she saw it, keeping her preferences hidden was safer. You can’t deride or shame or publicly ostracize something nobody knows about. Though complete secrets were near impossible to maintain in the town of Night Vale (or anywhere in the world, really), there were still a few enigmas that even the vaguest and most menacing government agencies couldn’t crack. And though the unfathomable intentions of clouds or the contents of the echidna were infamously elusive mysteries, they were nothing compared to what Maureen hid inside herself.
Michelle relished every opportunity to learn new things about Maureen. Each little detail, every tiny preference or aversion was a new thing that only Michelle knew about, and it thrilled her to pry any small bit of information from her girlfr—from her unlabeled and unspecified acquaintance. Maybe sometimes she was too pushy about it, but she thought Maureen could use the pressure to help her vent her feelings now and again.
Because of all this, because of Michelle’s love for Maureen and the puzzles she presented with every encounter and the wonderful process of coaxing secrets from her, the first time Maureen spent the night at Michelle’s was one of the best nights of Michelle’s life. Though she did regret that something awful had to happen to bring Maureen to her doorstep in the first place.
Maureen was dressed for work, worn jeans and purple NVCR shirt for her job as a public radio intern, rubbing sleep out of her eyes. The beagle puppy, the foul thing she’d been forced to babysit for yet another week, was sprawled across the floor and napping in front of the door so that Maureen had to step past him to leave. She tiptoed carefully around the creature, terrified, because she already knew what was about to happen.
Maureen was shrieking silently, in her head, crying out and begging herself to stop, please dear God STOP! But her body was moving as if it weren’t hers, as if she were outside and other instead of trapped within its fleshy confines, watching with dread as her feet came down and met the floor, met the floor, met the floor. And she wanted so badly to look away, but the body that wasn’t hers to command kept moving, kept her eyes trained on the ground as she watched it happen all over again, as she watched herself stumble on something unseen and her feet met the beast’s tail, his back paws, his underbelly.
Immediately Maureen rolled from surprise into a panic and tried to sprint for the door before the puppy caught up to her, even though she knew it was going to be locked and that it would be no use, no use, the demon already had her trapped, it would happen just the same.
The creature snarled, a sound so guttural and primal that even the largest beasts of the vilest worlds couldn’t mimic it, would bow to it. And he rose from the floor, pushing off with his front paws and letting his forelegs dangle at his sides like human arms, his face quickly contorting into something demonic. His maw opened and he huffed out each breath with a brimming fury, drooling over a gray tongue and teeth too big for his muzzle and lurching forward with black claws too big for their paws, and Maureen clawed and the door handle that had always been locked and shrieked, knowing too well, sickeningly well, the powers of the monster and that she didn’t stand a chance without Chad or a sacrifice to curb his rage.
But what followed next was unexpected: the walls of Maureen’s apartment collapsed, falling away to reveal a desert quite unlike the one she lived in but also very much like it. From the desert distances raged a sandstorm, violent and red and sending grit into the air, stones the size of golf balls flying past her. The brightest light she would ever see in her life swallowed the sky and rumbled towards the ground like a perfectly Earth-shaped meteor come to shoulder the planet out of the way with its horrid bulk.
And Maureen screamed and burned, and the rocks flew and cut into her flesh and her intern’s shirt she shouldn’t have been wearing, and her nails dug into the ground as she tried to keep from being swept away, and all around her was barking, snarling, gargling, coming from the earth and the light and the air and herself. The ground glowed with blood and Maureen recognized the symbols carved there, remembered them from every time she’d visited Chad’s house, and it took little to realize that she was the circle’s center, the sacrifice, and she howled like her soul had been blown away without her body. Her eyes saw only red and her mouth tasted only red as she blinked away the wind and coughed up the dust to make room for more, begging for the luxury of a clear breath but out of her nose was dust, through her mouth, dust, over her tongue, dust, dust, dust, mud, blood , BLOOD—
Maureen woke up crying and choking for air, flailing out of bed and curling briefly into a fetal position on the floor as she brought herself back to reality. She felt grime still coating her and panicked, trying to drag herself back to full consciousness as she rubbed grime out of her eyes with shaky hands. The cold of the night dripped down her back as she clawed her way up the side of the bed and stood, confused and blind with tears and sand. She looked at her mud-streaked hands and her vision fuzzed as she doubted reality, and then she realized that her bed and sheets were completely caked with dirt from the deep desert. Furious and terrified and trembling like a leaf, she checked the pillow next to the one she’d been using and groaned. Just as she’d expected: she lifted three long, silver-grey hairs from the creases of the pillowcase and glared at them.
“Old HAG! ” Maureen howled, the sound scraping against her already raw throat. She must have been screaming in her sleep again. “FACELESS OLD HAG! ”
She could almost hear her cabinets being filled with rotten bird teeth or something equally disgusting, but between the sand in her nose and the tears of fear streaming down her face, she cared little about the Faceless Old Woman’s potential wrath.
Maureen angrily tore her sheets from her bed, tossed them in the corner on her pile of dirty laundry, and curled across her bare mattress, shivering and trying to stem the tears and the memories. Her emotions were firing on all cylinders, filling her with directionless dread and regret and self pity and self loathing and pain . It was one of those rare times when all that she had to keep bottled up suddenly overwhelmed her, made her heart feel bloated and sick even though there was nothing she could do, nowhere she could go. Usually she’d take the day off from work and sleep it off until she lapsed back into apathy and mute despondency. But now that she was between jobs, there was nothing to break her cycle, no status quo to return to, and she feared that without any anchor she would simply slip into an anxiety-ridden depressive spiral for days, or worse.
But when she checked her phone to see what time it was—or at least around what time it was, since no clock in town was very trustworthy and they all seemed to run slightly different times anyways—she realized that now she did have somewhere to go. The one and only comforting presence left in Night Vale.
And in this moment of weakness, without thinking it through, she got up and went to look for her shoes.