Chapter Text
“How long have you been waiting?”
The Palace’s doors are shut now, and no one is standing upon any kind of stage. There are no spotlights, nor movie fragments here; only a half-deserted parking lot and the people who are waiting there.
An old woman spreads a crossword puzzle across the steering wheel of her old punch buggy. A thin man - younger without being young, his hair gray - stands near her rolled-down window, a cigar clenched between nicotine-stained teeth. These are the ones who do not have stories to tell; they are merely characters in another’s tale.
The woman, the grandmother from Herne’s story, looks up when one man from the Page’s addresses her in his raspy voice. “Oh,” she says, “I never leave.”
The man cocks an eyebrow. “You wait out here the whole time?”
“Yes, well, I live outside of town. The drive is long even without traffic, and it just isn’t worth going home and coming right back again. I’d have found something closer, but…” She swallows, and her hands clench around the steering wheel.
“Know what you mean. You have no idea how far we’ve had to come to get here.”
“It’s worth it,” the old woman says. “I’d drive a million miles if I thought it could help with anything.”
“Wouldn’t we all.”
There is silence between them, and then:
“If you don’t mind me asking, who is it that you’re waiting for?” It is her who breaks the shell of quiet between them.
He blanches at that. “Names are classified in there, aren’t they?”
“I mean to you. Who is it, a sibling, a friend, your partner?” Something flashes over her as she says that, but it does not stay for very long.
The gray-haired man takes a drag from his cigar, a ring of smoke blowing out from his lips. “I wouldn’t know. He’s my… friend, I suppose.”
Red blood leaking onto white fabric, hissing, shouting, scratching…
The woman chuckles softly. “I won’t judge if it’s more than that, you know. I may be a little past my prime, but I’m certainly not about to lecture you on sexual immorality or whatever it is that they’re calling it now.”
“Good to know.” His laughter is painful-sounding, but genuine. “To tell you the truth ‘m not sure what to call him, not now. I didn’t know before either… but everything’s so… muddled.”
“I wish I could offer some advice, but I’m as lost as you are, I’m afraid.”
“Who’re you here for?” the man asks.
The woman’s eyes drift to the passenger seat, wandering to the glove box where a few muddy boot-prints can be made out against the beige plastic. “My grandson,” she says quietly. “I’m here for him.”
A phone ringing, an unknown caller and a familiar voice at the other end…
“How’d you find out about…?” The question is unfinished but fully understood.
“About it, you mean? He… he called me.”
“Gran? Gran, it’s me! Look - I know, I’m sorry - just please… please listen to me! Something happened to me… something really bad…”
“It was from another number, one I didn’t recognize. I don’t normally answer calls like that, telemarketers you know, but he’d been gone since the night before and I was near frantic.”
The sound of sobbing is fuzzy through the old telephone, and the rural lines make every word sound garbled, almost alien; but what leaves her grandson’s mouth may as well have been shouted in an empty cathedral for, in her head, it sounds as clear as can be. “Please… please come get me… I need you… Please! I need you!”
“Someone hurt him while he was out with a friend of his.” She presses her lips together, forming one pale-white line.
“From the way you say that, sounds like he wasn’t much of one.”
“I can’t say he was.” The reply is curt, the tone is bitter.
“He’s not-”
“No, he wasn’t. My grandson… he said it was a stranger who did it.”
“You believe that?”
Herne the Hunted lies asleep on the sofa, his face swollen, nose broken and body hidden beneath an old quilt. His grandmother stands nearby, speaking with a round-faced woman in a tone of quiet urgency. “Who did this?” she rages to the woman who cannot calm her. “He went out with Copper Slade last night, if he had anything to do with this I swear-”
“Mama,” the younger woman says, “one of the Slades was hit by a car last night, they haven’t left the hospital since then.”
“Absolutely,” the old woman answers, and looks the stranger dead in the eyes. “What about your friend then? How did you hear about it?”
The man blows a puff of smoke from his lips and absently pats the pocket of one pant leg. “There isn’t much to say about it, really…”
The man wears a coat that is not his, wanders through the halls of a place he is not meant to be. He is looking for someone, the type of person that this place was made to keep inside.
“He told us too, but it wasn’t really needed. We knew what happened straight off… it was pretty obvious from how we found him.”
A key slips into the lock of a padded cell, and the light from the hall illuminates a man on the floor. He wears formless hospital garb, all of it a uniform, colorless, white - except for the places where there is red. The patient on the floor cries out, but not for the sake of pain. “You came back for me!”
“There was blood,” the man says around his cigar. “It was a real ugly thing to see.”
“I can’t imagine what that must have been like.”
“This is the part where I should say I wouldn’t wish the feeling on my worst enemy, but I’m an honest man, and not a very good one, so I won’t.”
The woman’s hands bend in a peculiar way, as if pulling some invisible trigger. “I think that perhaps there are some people that deserve to suffer.”
“You know, you’re awful intense for an old broad.”
“My point still stands, doesn’t it?”
Two men walk side by side down the center of a hospital corridor, the arms of another slung around their left and right shoulders, a third man suspended between them. “We can kill him together!” he giggles. “How many pieces do you think we can cut out of him before he stops screaming?” He is laughing, but both men can hear the shrillness of pain just underneath his fluttery tone. Their eyes lock where he cannot see them, and there is more pain - more vulnerability - in that one look than either of them will ever admit to.
“I don’t think,” the man coughs, “that I said you were wrong.”
“Are they still in there?” This voice comes from a young woman, whom Pua Mae greatly resembles.
“It seems so, dear,” Herne’s grandmother says, “are you in much of a hurry?”
“What? Oh, no, I mean not really, I just expected her to be ready by now, and I’m a little-”
“Nervous?” the man remarks dryly. “Trust me, sweetheart, we can tell.”
“You be kind.” The older woman slips into the tone of a stern parent.
“It’s fine… and he’s not wrong.”
“That’s no excuse for him not to be minding his manners, especially around a lady.”
Both the man and young woman let out an amused snort at that, but the woman who is someone else’s grandmother continues talking.
“Now what has you so worked up, my dear?”
“Oh… it’s just getting really late, and I was hoping to get her to bed soon. She’s been having trouble sleeping as is.”
The two others nod. They don’t need to ask any more. “Is it your daughter, then?” the grandmother asks.
“My sister,” the young woman says. “Our parents are… no longer with us.”
The older woman nods in sympathy. “That’s too bad. And then having to come to this on top of that…”
The young woman nods, and thinks back.
She comes home, and is stopped by her aunt and uncle. “Nani? We have something to tell you,” her aunt says, guiding her to the couch.
“Something bad?”
“… You’re going to want to sit down…” she says, gently sitting her on the couch. Her aunt and uncle sit on chairs in front of her.
“What is it? What’s wrong? Is it about Lilo?”
The aunt and uncle look at each other, and then back at her. “Yes.”
“Is she hurt?”
Silence for a moment. Then, her aunt speaks up. “It seems there was an incident at halau…”
“Have you gone to the authorities?”
The young woman snaps back to the present. “… I’m not sure we can.”
“… Another little girl?” Nani chokes out. “She told you this?”
Her uncle waves his hand in a “so-so” motion. “You know how she tells stories.”
“Well, what should we do?”
Her uncle hesitates. “I… I really don’t know.” He leans forward. “But a little girl couldn’t have come up with it on her own. She… had to get the idea from… somewhere else.” The unspoken implication hangs in the air like a sword.
“Our situation is a little more complicated than most,” she admits.
“What is there to complicate matters?”
“Oh, you’d be surprised…”
The man takes another puff of his cigar. Another car pulls up. A woman steps out, her hair the same color as the Bard’s. “I’m suppose they’re still not out yet?”
The three others shake their heads.
“I see. Well, my husband can watch the children a little while longer.”
“So, who are you waiting for?” the man asks.
“My daughter,” the woman responds.
“Oh, dear,” the older woman sighs.
The brown-haired woman hesitates. “She’s… she’s not exactly there because something happened to her…”
“Mother? Father? I have something to tell you.”
“What is it, Wendy?” The mother stops smoothing the sheets for a bit, giving her full attention. Her daughter takes a deep breath.
“It… it was someone else who was hurt,” says the woman. “A friend of hers, neighbor of ours… his father, well, he was the sort of man we warn our children about, and that poor boy was living with him.”
“I just- I… I can’t believe it. All this time… right under our noses…”
“I’m going to kill him,” her husband growls.
“George…”
“She’s here to support him, then?” Pua Mae’s sister asks.
A girl and boy lock their fingers together and stare at one another as stone-cold solemn as anyone their age can ever be; the children’s version of a blood oath if ever there was one. The woman with brown hair watches from a doorway, careful so as not to make a sound lest they be disturbed.
“In a way…” the woman tapers off.
Herne’s grandmother’s hands worry at the edges of her crossword puzzle. “Well, for whatever it’s worth, your daughter sounds like she’s growing up to be a wonderful young lady.”
That brings a slight smile to the mother’s face. “I think you’re right.”
There are a few more words, all of it small talk, a few more minutes, and then another car turns into the not-so desolate lot.
“They’re still inside,” the man grunts just as the driver side door begins to crack open.
“I thought they might be.” A small man with dark hair slicked all the way back; the Mouse’s partner. “She likes me to wait out front for her… it seems that cars make her nervous now.”
“Oh?” The woman with brown hair looks at him, her eyes raising a silent question.
“My, uh, fiancée.” He blushes. “I’m here because of her.”
Like the old woman there is a phone call from an unknown number, but there is no familiar voice from the other end.
“What’s the story with that then?” The gray-haired man inhales burning tobacco and coughs it back out.
Herne’s grandmother glares at the Page’s accomplice, but can say nothing before his question is answered.
“She wasn’t hurt, not in the way most people here are, but someone did try.”
An emergency room with almost fifty people crammed together; but the little man has eyes only for a woman wrapped up in a shock blanket, with hair as dark as his own.
“The police are the ones who called me about it, apparently an ex of hers decided to buy himself a gun and jumped into her car while she stopped at a red light.”
The oldest two of the group’s three female members put hands to their mouths.
“Oh my…” The grandmother struggles for words.
“She… fought him off.”
The chainsmoker picks his teeth with the long, and rather dirty, nail of one finger. “Lucky girl.”
“Mickey!” A name, an embrace and many, many tears. “I thought… I thought that I’d never see you again!”
“I don’t know if I’d call it that.”
The doors open after a few more minutes of waiting, but nothing more of note is said tonight. The grandmother, the mother and the sister, the partner and the friend, they go their separate ways.
A young man with mud-encrusted boots hurries across the gravel to climb into the passenger seat of the old woman’s Bug.
“Gran, there was this guy, he-”
A man with wild eyes and hair tears from the building and grabs the sleeve of the smoker’s shirt. “Did you bring it?”
“That doctor, he’s the one who-”
A little girl with a stuffed green doll runs up to grab the leg of her sister.
“Nani, we think Lilo was-”
Another, slightly older, child makes her way over to the disbanding group and takes her mother’s hand. “How is he?” she asks, looking up at the woman.
“I saw Peter’s father-”
A woman with dark hair bounds up to the remaining man and plants a quick kiss on his cheek.
“It was Mortimer, he had a gun, I think he wanted to-”
Within moments the parking lot of the Palace is empty. The conversation is not forgotten yet, but it will be someday; nothing of note has been said after all.
They are not the ones with a story to tell.