That wasn’t me. Not how I wanted to operate, to be.
Revenants were, I knew, something between a zombie and a bogeyman. They came back from the dead, usually with a mission in mind, and a specific timeframe or pattern they needed to follow. Most didn’t know enough to keep themselves going after they achieved their success or failure.
The revenant, I knew, could sometimes get away with being a hero, insofar as a vigilante was a hero. They weren’t the types to turn a criminal in for the cops to prosecute, after all, but when a gang killed enough people in horrible ways, the revenant could rise and eliminate them. Another example I’d read had been a soldier that had surrendered, along with his comrades, only to watch each be tortured to near-death and then brutally executed, with him last. He’d returned a year to the day to hunt down the enemy soldiers and deliver punishments that were worse. In certain circles, he’d been seen as a hero. A benevolent spirit.
Not so common for bogeymen. If I even was a bogeyman.
Rose had alluded to the idea that she knew what I was. That there was something I hadn’t caught onto, dangerous knowledge that made me too dangerous to be allowed to walk free.
I spent some time dwelling on that too. It gnawed at me.
Where it gnawed at me, I changed. The branches finding just a little bit more ground.
I looked at the pale sparrows that hid in the branches that had climbed over my entire body. Minor damage became tattoo, and became more physical branch where there was already tattoo. Serious damage allowed for larger spirits to find their way inside, and they took the form of the birds.
I traced lines of branches and felt the raised portions.
“Don’t suppose you guys could poke your heads out and help me?” I asked.
I blinked. The birds had moved closer to my hands, peering at the mirror. Some looked more like sketches than real birds, their eyes just circles with shaky lines circling them a few times.
I extended my hands closer, touching the surface, looking away, waiting.
When I looked again, they’d moved closer, clustering at my arms. Where I’d had branches around my hands, a feather or two stuck out.
When I looked again, they’d retreated to their hiding spots.
“Thanks for trying,” I said.
I dropped my hands to my sides.
“I’m going to go crazy if I only have my thoughts to occupy myself with,” I said. “I hope you don’t mind if I voice my thoughts aloud. Bit of a one-sided conversation.”
None of them moved, except for one on my forearm. It might have been one of the originals, taking the spot of one of the birds that had been tattooed on. He was one of the most realistic, and he was the only one who was looking at my face.
“Well, you listened,” I said. “I like you. I’ll call you Lefty.”
Was talking to yourself a sign of impending madness if you were a frankenstein hodgepodge of reflection, drainstuff and spirits?
I shut my eyes, resting my head on the wall, facing the nonexistent ceiling above me. “Well, Lefty, I’ve got to talk to someone, to distract myself from the fact that I’ve been stuck in solitary by the people I tried to save. It isn’t helping any. It’s sort of killing me, even.”
Lefty had his head cocked when I next looked down.
“Maybe that’s a bit of a fib,” I said. “It’s not destroying… all this. But it is killing the Blake in me. I’m not sure what happens, if this takes over. If you take over. I haven’t changed quite enough to see if my emotions or mindset change.”
I looked at my hands, turning them over, left hand first, then right. When I looked back at my left hand, Lefty had moved around the circumference of my arm.
I clenched my fists. “Which isn’t to say I’m not really upset. If Rose is telling the truth, and she doesn’t have Conquest as an excuse to be doing what she’s doing, then that makes me ten times as pissed off… and it also means that doing anything to her is off the table.”
I placed my arms over my knees, thumbs tracing the lines of tattoos, the raised lines of branches that reached under the tattoos, as though I’d stuck something just beneath the surface of the tattoos, and I felt the actual branches, which were standalone.
I was glad I hadn’t picked anything else.
“What’s the worst thing I could have picked for tattoos?” I asked Lefty. “I liked some pretty dumb cartoons as a kid. If I was the sort of person who held onto nostalgia, instead of loathing my past, maybe you’d be a pastel-colored bug with a symbol on its back. What do you think?”
Lefty remained silent.
I took my time, doing an inventory of my physical condition.
My right ribs and the bone of my pelvis at my waistline were the worst spots, branch mingling with bone, I’d fallen hard when fighting the temple guardians, Tweedle Dee, Dum and whatever the third one was called.
There was a gap in the branches and bones. I put my finger in there.
I felt one of the bird spirits brush past it, and the hand came out as fast as if I’d touched a hot stove.
I stood, because sitting wasn’t any more or less comfortable than standing, and sitting prompted a little too much thinking. I paced, and parts of me snapped and popped with the movement, suggesting I’d been sitting for at least an hour in total.
It hadn’t felt like an hour.
Still, it was better than the alternative, the time yawning on for what felt like hours, when only minutes had passed.
If sitting made me think, then moving made my emotions stir up.
Something had happened to Mags. My friends weren’t in a better position than before. Rose was…
I didn’t want to think about Rose.
“What’s the solution, Lefty?” I asked. “How do we fix all this? If it’s a monster that needs killing, that’s a whole lot easier. But this is a flawed dynamic. I can’t set it on fire or trap it in a binding circle.”
Lefty only looked up at me with beady black eyes, no expression on its face.
“Do I take a cue from the vigilante revenant, and carry out the sort of task that a bogeyman is supposed to, only with an acceptable target? Or do I take the Blake route?”
I continued pacing.
“I could have handled that last bit better. I was a little inebriated.”
I heard the door open, and turned, though I couldn’t hope to see it.
“Hello?” I asked.
“Hey,” I heard Ty’s voice.
He stepped into view in the long mirror, visible from head to shin. He wore a sleeveless t-shirt and pyjama pants, and had Evan perched on his shoulder.
“You look a bit like a swashbuckling pirate,” I commented.
“Yarr,” Evan said.
“I meant Ty.”
“Yarr,” Ty said, smiling a little. He plucked at his pyjama pants. “Reaching a bit, but I think we’re all tired enough to buy into it.
“I’d say ‘Evan want a cracker’, but I don’t, so I won’t,” Evan said.
“Good call,” I said.
More seriously, Ty said, “Sorry we didn’t stop in earlier.”
“Would’ve been nice,” I said.
“If I thought you needed water or food or something else, I would’ve found the excuse to come to you, but as it was…”
“I was musing on the subject earlier, but I think I’m still degrading, like this,” I said.