| Eerie fic for the prompt fest: Pay Attention, part 3 |
[Aug. 31st, 2015|01:39 am]
eerie_indiana
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Sara Sue has been a hero and a villain. She has raised peasants to kinghood and trampled nations beneath her feet, birthed thousands and then killed them, just to see how it felt. In a forest glade, she danced naked in the moonlight, and when she stubbed her bare toe on a jagged stone, tore the entire forest to pieces out of rage.
Over and over again, she has attempted to draw her mother to her. Over and over again, women wearing Marilyn Teller's face have held her, stroked her hair, told her she is good and clever and beautiful and perfect, promised her everything in the world. She burned them all, sooner or later.
The Eerie Number 2 pencil had worn quickly to almost nothing, in those first few months spent hunting her new mother through the streets of Paris. Now barely an inch remains, and she keeps it close to her, always. Like Dumbo's feather, she knows it holds no power of it's own, but she's reluctant to fly without it, just in case.
Sara Sue has been worshipped as a god and reviled as a devil, and none of it, not a single moment, was real. So she came back to Eerie, because as miserable as life here had been, it had still been hers, and besides, there was a reason so many of the screaming, fleeing paper peasants resembled her father and brothers. Then a teenage boy, with dirty blond hair and the slightly pinched look of someone whose childhood had been one long stretch of not getting enough to eat, had walked up to her on the street, and told her he needed her for his mission.
And Sara Sue, who has taken a hundred heroes on a hundred journeys, and not once been surprised by anything that happened, is shocked into silence.
"I have gone mad," she thought, not particularly alarmed at the prospect. "And now I cannot tell if this is real, or just another story I am telling myself." But she takes his hand in hers, and feels for the stump of pencil around her neck. If she wakes tomorrow in the laundry room of her father's house, she will have a dream to cling to while she washes the floors and makes sandwiches.
The garbage men spot them while she is lurking at the mouth of an alley, trying to draw the exterior of City Hall. Harley pulls at her arm, whispering to her that they need to hide, and quickly, but Sara Sue shrugs him off, scrawls a hasty signature on the bottom of the page, and rips her sketch in two.
City Hall explodes outwards, the pseudo-Greek columns and marble fascia reduced in an instant to powder and rubble. Harley lets out a barely audible "Holy Corn", and Sara Sue smiles, remembering when his brother was similarly awed by her talents.
Now the insides of City Hall are exposed, and Sara Sue nearly drops her pencils in shock, because instead of raw brickwork and damaged pipes, she can see red, wet meat, pulsating organs and gleaming white bone. The smell coming from the wounded structure makes her head spin, and then, it begins to scream.
Garbage men swarm towards them, and when the first one reaches out to touch her, Sara Sue plunges her pencil, point-first, through his sunglasses and into his eye. The mirrored lens cracks and shatters, the wood and graphite tip pierces the soft jelly beneath, and as the garbage man shrieks in fear and rage and agony, Sara Sue sets her legs apart and pushes forward and down, forcing him to the ground, and brings all her weight to bear as she forces the pencil into his brain. His screams get higher and more frantic the deeper she goes, and when the pencil hits the back of his skull and snaps under the strain, he spasms and falls silent.
When she looks up, the garbage men have gathered before her, blocking the alleyway completely, silent and watchful and keeping a safe distance.
Sara Sue wishes she had been a baton twirler in her school's marching band. She would like to pull two more pencils from her figure-enhancing utility belt with a flourish, spin them around on the tips of her fingers, then snatch them from mid-air to strike a dramatic pose and say something witty to her enemies before charging them. Instead, she fumbles a biro from her jeans pocket, scribbles a hasty cartoon version of a .50mm machine gun on the inside of her forearm, then drops to the ground atop the dead garbage man and reduces all his co-workers to a red, white and grey pulp that will stain the Eerie sidewalks for years to come.
When she's done, she wipes her arm clean with spit and the palm of her other hand, and turns to see Harley staring at her, white-faced and trembling.
Sara Sue has been both a hero and a villain, and what she has learned, if she learned anything at all, was that if you wanted to have any fun with it, you go big or go home.
Well, she's home now. And tonight, she feels like going big. |
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