Chapter Text
Once upon a time in the days before,
When people lived fresh out of legend and folklore,
A unicorn existed in a forgotten bayou,
Living unseen bar by the few.
When humans scattered across the land,
Living anywhere from forest to sand,
The unicorn saw the future in the breeze
And moved from her home to make a leave.
But when the beast moved from bank to blackwater,
The unicorn forgot about the weight that wrought her,
And as the people searched shore to shore,
They realised the unicorn was no more.
.
Sweat dripped down his back in long lines, seeping into his shirt and then into the car seat.
Far from home, George skirted the edge of the bayou and tried not to think of the black waters not three inches below him, nor of the mirror image presented to him that seemed too good to be true. The mirror didn't ripple or waver when the edge of the wheels dipped a little too far off the thin gravel road, but he didn't let himself get distracted by the thoughts, since what he was looking for was easily missed, hidden by underbrush and water alike. He was the only one who could do this, apparently, and the camcorder that his editor had given him proved it.
George was alone in his task to get a story, and he knew that this was it; his plan that could not fail.
When he had been assigned the impossible-sounding task of getting a story out of Fenborne, he had expected some of the things he had seen already – the Spanish moss, the willows and the sluggish movement they made without wind, and even the dragonflies the size of birds hadn't dissuade him from going further into the swamp. But now that he was here, the deep marsh water and stench of rotting vegetation was as much a warning to turn back as anything else could be. But it was just foliage. It was just a reminder of being away from home, and that was sometimes all it took to remind him that he was a fish out of water here, out of his depth.
It was around noon, but the thick jungle-like mist that hung over the bayou obscured almost all of the sky, making the area feel like wandering through honey, simultaneously slow going and a warning to stop. George let the car creep around the corner of the unmarked gravel road, the steep Cypress trees disguising the turns further up the road, but when he saw the figure walking along the road he pulled the car to a stop and rolled down the window. With the air conditioning broken, he didn't feel bad about doing it, and the person with the hoodie looked at him.
“Hey,” he said, “is this the right way to Fenborne?”
The stranger seemed startled to be approached like this, and he (facial hair, so probably he) took his hands out of the pockets of the hoodie. It was definitely homemade, but at least it made George feel less out of place with his own wrapped around his waist. How the other man could stand to wear it in the humidity was a mystery.
“You want to go there?”
Their accent was American but not the Louisiana twang he’d expected, and George leaned slightly further into his car at the realisation that apparently not everyone in the town was from around there. He stayed to the point though and spoke up again.
“Yeah, I’m meeting someone. He said people call him Ranboo?”
“Ah,” the guy said, nodding as if George was stating something grave but obvious, “The new drydock keeper. He contacted you?”
“I contacted him,” George said, “So is this the right road?”
“Yeah,” the guy pointed down the road, “You’ll reach a bit where the road cuts off and there should be a few cars or whatever there already, but after that you’ll need to walk. It’s past the old church, then along the water edge, and eventually you’ll see it. The guy painted one side of it purple. You’ll see it.”
George looked to where the other guy was pointing, and when he turned back to ask a different question, the man was already walking back along the gravel that George had just travelled along, not sparing a second glance. He huffed to himself, thinking twice about calling the guy over again, even if he had been friendly enough, because if he was from Fenborne then there was always a chance that the guy could be a nutcase. He shouldn't think like that, and he knew it too, but sometimes you just had those pre-existing impressions of things and places that stuck with you.
He continued the drive. Fenborne had been known in the media five or so years ago for the murder of some kid, the ‘blonde, blue eyes’ type, and while the killer had been found and imprisoned, the town still stayed in infamy. The kid was still missing, and since her family lived closer to Dulac than Fenborne, it brought the question of abduction to light. Messy stuff, and hardly the type of thing George would usually be looking into, but some leads made his editor interested. He was there for four days, three nights, and he had a simple objective – interview as many people as possible, figure out of the murderer’s friend had anything to do with it (hopefully with an interview with the man himself, if it could be helped, but he didn't have high hopes), and get some semblance of a story at the end of the day.
The outer world saw them as a backwards, closed minded community, but from what he had seen of the old interview tapes, they were just country folk making ends meet. The guy's friend had never been interviewed though, refusing contact with anyone from the media and making people suspect something more nefarious of him than there perhaps was, but without a character profile of him, there was not much to go off. The police tapes made him sound hysterical, in disbelief, as if he was willing to end it all just to get the lights off him.
He didn't necessarily have sympathy for the guy, per say, but an understanding. Guilty or not, being pressured by the media like that wasn't pleasant, and when George reached the end of the gravel road, only seeing two vehicles and a rocky path further into the swamp, he had to remind himself that these were just people. Guilty or not, they were people.