(Episode IX) (Act 2)

Stark looked directly at it, as it whipped by, and continued to look at it as it gently sailed to the floor with little ruckus caused.

“C’mon…!” Maddie struggled to growl out. Only her arm and head were exposed, the rest under the covers. “You know you can… Crush shit or something…!”

“I mean,” Stark turned back to her. “Not really… My abilities can’t really uh, do the whole crush and destroy thing.” She sighed. “Kinda hate how we live in an age of information and all the info told by people who don’t know things. Tabby’s cool. I like Tabby…”

Stark quickly shook her head, “Right, no, lost the thread again—let’s be calm about all of this, we’ve been through the whole ‘yes Stark Terri has you in her basement thing’, you’re fine in thinking it’s creepy—but I’m trying to help.” Stark looked to Jackie, “Tell her!”

Jackie remained silent. Had to prove it wasn’t just words, after all.

“D-don’t care…” Maddie struggled. “Doesn’t… Change the fact that Stark Terri is front of me…”

“That I am,” Stark answered.

"A Trend… Along with your family… And unlike the Original ones, we don’t know where y’all lie… Making y’all scarier than them—”

“I mean, again, people tend to, uh, forget that we’ve been inactive for years and have no plans to do anything—especially now, so uh—”

“And,” Maddie cutting her off. “And… You’re the siVictim everyone’s worried about… Most of all. You were born with this shit.”

“True!” Stark stammered about despite having the most power in the room. “I know, trust me, I’m me—again, don’t need to trust me or anything—just rest please, I don’t want—”

“wha—what’s happening--?” Tracy’s voice, weak and small, piped up.

“This is it, that’s what’s up—” Maddie told her.

Jackie sighed, “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves—”

“Jackson, if you fucking start doing your usual shit right now…” Maddie strained herself to speak.

“Are we stuck somewhere--?” Tracy asked, pleaded.

“I’m not blind to any potential threat, it’s that—” Jackie got cut off.

“I think we’re at the Terri’s,” Aiko’s voice suddenly came up.

“Sho--?!” Tracy tried to ask in desperation, to confirm if Aiko was kidding or not, but choked back on her saliva, promptly coughing in a fit.

Jackie felt her veins pump furiously and her head pounding, “Please girls, I’m trying to—Look, Stark’s rap sheet looks bad, I am keeping that in mind, but so far I just can’t see her doing anything—”

“All of what we went through shouldn’t have fucked us up like it has; look at us now!” Maddie argued.

“It’s not like we can just leave!” Jackie yelled over the noise—internal and external.

“Yeah, why can’t we move…?” Aiko said, her voice carrying this air of being far removed from this scene.

“We’re underestimating a chick with possible gravity powers!” Maddie spat venomously. “And given her skills, she could be fucking holding us down as she’s upstairs!”

Jackie looked her head towards where Stark was, gone from the stairs.

“If it’s not her, it’s her family—” Maddie continued. “So, this is it, we’re fucked—for good this time and I hope you’re happy.”

That last dig got to Jackie.

“Where the hell do you get off--?!” she forced herself, ordered herself to sit up—her fuel purely being rage.

She flung the covers as well, just to prove her point and to look at Maddie directly.

She wished that she hadn’t.

Jackie, along with everyone else, was busted wide open.

A pile, a mess, an amalgamation of siVis injury, warped clothing, and illustrated workings of inner body. The comical flaps left behind due to the bursting, the crossing of veins over exposed but exaggerated bone, their musculoskeletal system stopping, starting, with gaps in between followed by strays in structure turning into siVis damage. The fact that their respective limbs were still connected to ruined bodies was a miracle.

But it didn’t matter.

None of this shit did anymore.

“I hope you all are happy, now,” Jackie bitterly noted.

“Wow, that doesn’t sound like Ms. ‘I’m Gonna Get You Guys Out of Here’-“

“Y’KNOW WHAT,” Jackie mustered everything in her body to scream, “FUCK YOU, YOU—YOU INSENSITIVE, NIHILISTIC--!”

“And now she’s screaming again. Tell you what, Jackson. You go lose it over someone telling you that you’re a fucking mess again, and I’ll lay here, continuing to make fucking fun of you—”

“WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?!”

“I FUCKING SAID ALREADY, YOU FUCKING CLOWN!”

“I really wish I could use my siVis about now…” Aiko openly lamented. “I rather be a pole or the floor rather being a part of this…”

“Wow!” Maddie mocked. “I never knew that you were capable of actual thought! Seriously, you basically admitting that you’re just as good as a stick is just brilliance on your part—”

“At least I don’t have to be as bitter and hideous as you,” Aiko bluntly stated. “I want to do the things I do because I would rather be a no one versus sad, cowardly people like you.”

“…The fuck do you mean, ‘cowardly’?” Maddie’s voice wasn’t any higher or louder than a hum.

“You’re a nihilistic twerp that gives into hatred and cynicism so that you can ‘joke around’ and always be right. If anything, that’s amazingly on point,” Jackie spat at.

“I wasn’t talking to you, I was talking to her. Again, how about learning to protect and get your own self together before making shit worse for other people.”

Jackie was again fighting back tears, her face red. “If I had any strength left—”

“You’d do what?!” Maddie snapped. It was clear her façade was cracking, she too was getting visibly angry. “Nothing! You can’t do shit to begin with! You never accomplished any meaningful shit then, and you never fucking will! Now fucking stew in that, I’m actually going to get shit done here!”

That took the wind out of her sails. Jackie just laid there, drowning within the pain surging throughout her ruined body.

“So answer me!” Maddie tried to shout at Aiko, the strain of her vocal chords catching up to her. She stifled a cough, tried to solider through, but continued to cough, but cough loudly.

It soon grew into uncontrollable, practically yacking. She wasn’t helping herself by fighting the reflexes, trying to provoke Aiko into finishing her thought, her oh so slight.

Maddie tried to yell, tried to speak, and her voice clearly gave out. Only capable of producing small, insignificant meeps.

“Finally,” the voice of River from Jackie’s side revealed itself—herself. “Now we can rot in peace for once.”

“YOU’RE ALL PATHETIC ASSHOLES!” Tracy cried out in hysterics. “Look at you! After all your respective… Bolstering, you’re all nothing but unhappy—unhappy mopers! No-hopers! Children! My god, what these disgusting back and forths finally illuminates how I was right to be nervous around you all: reality falling into shit as humanity’s dying out has a more dignified breakdown!”

Silence fell, which somehow echoed Tracy’s desperate, unsettling fit of laughter after the rant.

“but that’s what I get,” she mumbled to herself more than anyone at that point. “truly, this is what I deserved. put into a barrel, with fellow mentally broken rats; all with the taste of the foolish flesh on their tongues. too pathetic… to even eat each other…”

“Y-y’know, my arms are super long!” a Stark that returned to the stairs, and equally out of place.

The girls said nothing in return, all equally staring at her.

Stark gulped, even rubbing together her hands, as she continued on. “Even with—Like, my doctors always say this—say or said, maybe I’m loosing—crap, LOSING the thread—bur they always told me that they were always meant to be so long? But they’re so long that they’re suuuuper brittle. As a result, y’know. So I can’t ever use my ability with them—like directly, because while they have an advantage of reach… I might as well use Baros to keep them from sagging out of my sockets and stuff. So I used my legs; because they’re chunky!”

The girls continued to stare at her.

“So I broke my arms a lot… As, y’know, as a kid,” she tried to lower her tone—as if this was her final resort in trying to communicate with them. “9/10, it was siVis related, due to my… Predicament. There’s… Admittedly, a ton of times in my life that was wracked with misery. I don’t like thinking about my childhood a lot because of it, it was… Nothing but that. And even worse stuff than what I couldn’t…Um, the word… Get? Comprehend? At the time? But me breaking my freakishly long arms was a special kind of grief. I don’t know why, to this day.”

Stark leaned against her wall, petting her own head, raking her fingers over her puffy, messy, auburn hair. “I’m not saying this to rub it in—Genuinely, I’m… Trying to communicate. To help you. To… Help you not be like me, and… Be so mad and angry that I couldn’t see what was around me.”

Jackie glanced down to the white tomb that was still at the base of the pull out mattress.

Stark tried to hide her giddy at that but couldn’t. Her suppressed smile was uncanny, stretched in places but crumpled together in others. And the following words, while kind in theory, put this unease into sound.

“The cruel beauty of this life… Is that we can—be trapped within it all, yet it still goes on around is.”

Jackie realized that despair jailed her. She looked at the Anatomy book again, and realized what Stark was trying and failing to put down.

But her unfailing kindness, was her key.

Stark rushed down the stairs, the pattering of her footsteps hit her floor. She jumped, crossed her legs midjump, and hovered down before the girls. She got the book, bring up one of the sticky-note bookmark it has, and turned to the page she wanted so badly to show. Resting it on her lap opened, the section was about the musculoskeletal system.

Jackie strained her sight, trying to read the blurbs that made up the walls of text on the two pages. They were a wall, and each blurb was brick to climb.

It’s ability to allow motion, provide protection to the vital organs. Tendons, joints, cartilage—how they all mattered, and feeling out each of her own.

And most importantly, how they all were connected.

With grunts, squirming, and anguished pains—Jackie found the will to put herself back together again.