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It’s a trap.
Musa’s mind may be fuzzy with drink and the roiling emotions of a bar full of teenagers, but she’s not an idiot. She is pissed, though, more than a little bit. Bloom is being her usual hypocritical self, and the others are pissed at her for it. Their anger mixes with Musa’s and she can barely hold it, cursing herself for not bringing her headphones. It’s not just their anger - Bloom’s guilt and uncertainty is as fiery as she is, Flora’s creeping frustration is an unfamiliar itch and Terra’s indignation feels like rocks under Musa’s skin. It’s so much, it’s too much, and Musa lets Bloom lead them out of the pub.
Sky and Riven are in the parking lot, already pulling equipment out of the car. It seems pretty obvious they’ve been updated on what’s going on, but Musa decides to find a way to go with them, even if it’s for something completely unrelated. Anything to get away from the sea of feelings that threatens to swallow her. Bloom rushes past Riven to Sky, and the force of their emotions may as well be a wall, preventing Musa from getting any closer.
“What’s going on?” Terra asks Riven.
“Stella filled us in,” he explains, pulling on his armour. The anger he always seems to hold is still there, but muffled under a blanket of determination. Musa lets herself take a moment to feel that, to let it smother all the other emotions clouding her mind. He isn’t Sam’s peace, but Sam hadn’t been that either for months, and the guilt feels like a punch to the gut.
“... while mind fairies protect us from Blood Witch magic,” Sky is telling Bloom, and Musa looks over.
“Mind fairies? Good for something?” she says, stepping away from Riven and raising a hand. “Present. I’m in.”
“Wait, so we’re going? Terra asks.
“No,” Bloom says, giving up on Sky and walking towards her friends. “We are not going. Guys, we can’t go anywhere near that lodge. It’s not safe for fairies. Any fairies,” she adds, giving Musa a pointed look. “We’re gonna go back to Alfea and-”
“Bloom. I’m going.” Musa can feel Terra’s eyes on her but keeps her focus on Bloom. “For once my magic’s useful. I need this.”
“We got this,” Sky says, cutting off Bloom’s retort before she starts. “Call Silva. Get everyone back to Alfea. I’ll text you when we have Beatrix.”
Bloom is ready to keep arguing, frustration rolling off her as she looks from one face to another, then furrows her brow. “Wait, has anyone seen Aisha?”
Musa thinks back, trying to remember the last time she felt Aisha’s presence. It is too hard to pick out a single person from the chaos of the party, however, and she shakes her head.
“Great,” Bloom snarks, “the only one who would be able to get the rest of you to see this for the obvious trap that it is, and she’s gone.”
“We’re not idiots, of course it’s a trap,” Riven snaps.
“It’s Aisha, I’m sure she’s fine,” Terra soothes. “She’s probably already back at Alfea.”
“If you know it’s a trap why are you going?”
“Because Bea might be a bitch but she doesn’t deserve whatever’s happening to her.”
“Everyone just shut up!” Musa says, hands reaching habitually for her headphones. Everyone stops bickering to stare at her, and she lets out a forced breath. “Look, this isn’t solving anything. You three can do what you want, the boys and I are going after Beatrix.”
Without waiting for a response, she pushes past the others and climbs in the backseat of the car. She slams the door, savouring the way it seems to shut the others and their emotions out. It isn’t as calmingly isolating as her headphones, but it is the closest she’s had all night. After a few seconds, Sky climbs in the driver’s seat and Riven into the passenger.
Musa closes her eyes and leans her head back, but she can still feel Riven looking back at her as Sky starts the car.
“Do you want to talk about…?” Riven starts, but Musa cuts him off.
“Nope.”
“Right,” Riven says, the leather of the seat squeaking as he turns back to face the front. “May as well get some rest then, sober up a bit. It’s a few hours drive.”
“There’s water in the door,” Sky offers. Musa reaches blindly and takes a swig, before deciding to follow Riven’s advice.
It doesn’t work. The boys are better at hiding their emotions than her friends, but that doesn’t mean they don’t feel things. It’s always hard to sleep when others are awake, and she isn’t really tired to begin with. She gives up after half an hour but keeps pretending, if only to avoid talking.
Sky and Riven alternate between silence and strategy talk, but there isn’t much to plan when they don’t know what they’re heading for. After a while, Riven manages to doze off, his emotions dulling to a quiet lull. With only Sky’s storm of well-buried feelings, Musa finds herself able to fall asleep herself.
It’s full dark when Musa wakes, the rumble of the car’s engine slowing to a stop. She’s wide awake in an instant, out of the car before either of the boys. They both act calm, but Musa can feel their prickling uncertainty. She bounces on her feet as they pull out bows and quivers, letting them flank her as they approach the lodge in the darkness.
“Just for once, couldn’t we break into a playground or something cute?” she asks, trying to break the tension.
“A playground would be less creepy?” Sky quips back. Riven places his hand on Musa’s wrist, gently holding her back.
“Are you sure you wanna do this?” he asks softly. She hesitates, just for a second, then nods. Riven says nothing, just grabs an arrow and notches it, taking the lead. Musa follows a few steps behind and Sky brings up the rear.
They move slowly, as quietly as they can in the echoing old building. Riven pushes a door open with a hollow thud, revealing a stairwell. Musa reaches out with her magic, feeling for Beatrix.
“Upstairs. I can feel her.” She feels… off, but Musa keeps that to herself. Beatrix has always been more closed off than any other students, and she is now, too, but it feels like she’s missing something. Riven doesn’t hesitate, heading up the stairs as soon as Musa finishes speaking. Musa and Sky follow.
The room at the top of the stairs is cold and open, lit only by the moonlight filtering in through the damaged roof. Musa sees Beatrix right away, running over to her and calling her name.
“She’s… she’s still alive,” Musa says hesitantly, looking up at Sky and Riven. Beatrix is in bad shape, laying on her back and barely breathing. There’s an ugly bite mark of some sort on her collarbone, and she’s out cold.
“Let’s get her and go,” Riven says. Sky agrees but Musa hesitates.
“If she’s unconscious, how did she text Stella?” she asks. This isn’t a recently-passed-out unconscious, the emptiness where her emotions should be only comes from hours without thought. There’s a moment of tense silence, during which Musa can feel everyone’s stomach drop. Then the skittering starts.
Well. It’s not like they didn’t know it was a trap.
Riven and Sky pull back their arrows, but there’s nothing to fire at.
“Scrapers,” Riven says, pointing out the obvious.
“How many are there?” Sky asks.
Musa says nothing, standing up and looking around. There’s a fluttering in her stomach, something other than pure fear that she can’t place. There’s no time to examine it, however, as an arrow shot by neither Sky nor Riven flys through the air with a flash of blue.
“Andreas?” Sky asks the question on all of their lips. “What the fuck?”
“There’s something wrong with him,” Musa says. His wrongness feels similar to Beatrix’s, but different. They both feel like they’ve had something scooped out of them, but something has been forced into the empty space in Andreas. Something running on pure anger. “He’s not Andreas.”
The man throws his bow down, staring hard at the three of them.
“Run,” Riven says, and Musa may be a coward but she plans to be a live one.
She ducks down and skirts past Andreas, who ignores her completely. The danger in the air is clear, but that’s not the only thing she’s running from. The swell of Sky’s emotions threatens to overwhelm her, a tsunami that follows her out the room and down the stairs, until she reaches the bottom and runs almost face-first into a scraper, and is reminded that that is the real danger.
She throws herself to the side, through a different door, flattening herself against the wall. The creature follows her, skittering up the wall and onto the ceiling, shrieking down at her. It drops to the ground as she sees a broken bottle. Musa flips past the scraper, half-forgotten dance moves coming back to her in a panic. She wields the glass, thrusting it forward, trying to keep the scraper at bay but it’s too fast, launching at her and wrapping itself around her arm. She stabs at it again but it dodges past her, latching onto her upper arm with its teeth. It’s only for a second, but she can see it sucking her magic out before she stabs again, hitting it this time.
The scraper squeals, falling to the floor and giving Musa a chance to run again, back through one of the few standing doors, slamming it behind her as she drops against it.
The pain hits then, in that moment of stillness as the creature bashes against the door behind her. Blood seeps from the wound but worse than that is the pulsing of her magic, making it harder and harder to think, to focus on herself and not the hurricane of emotions above her. Musa’s hands shake as she pulls out her phone, and Bloom picks up before the first ring.
“Are you okay?”
“We found Beatrix,” Musa gasps, keeping the phone on speaker so she can use its light to look at her arm. “But you were right. It was a trap.”
“What? Are you hurt?” Terra’s anxieties are usually so clear, even over a phone, but they fade in and out.
“There were scrapers. I got bitten.” The pounding in her chest is slowing now, and she forces herself to be quiet. She has gotten good at swallowing her feelings, of not letting others notice them to avoid an emotional feedback loop. “Only for a second, but…” Musa trails off, not sure how to describe the feeling. “There’s something wrong with my magic.”
“Your magic is going to falter,” Flora says, her voice calm and sure. “If it only bit you for a second, it’ll be temporary. Scrapers need to completely drain you for the effect to be permanent.”
Permanent. The word echoes through Musa’s mind, and there’s that feeling again, the one she can’t place, the one she won’t.
“It’ll go back to normal?”
“Yes. I’ve been studying them.”
“What about Sky and Riven?” Bloom asks, and Musa feels a wave of relief as the topic slides off of her.
“I don’t know. Andreas came out of nowhere and started fighting them. But I don’t think it’s him, or at least not just him.” Musa isn’t sure how to describe what she felt, but she takes a shot at it. “I could feel somebody else in his mind.”
“A Blood Witch,” Bloom offers, and it’s as good an answer as any. “We need to break the connection, Musa. What else could you feel?”
“Anger.” Even with her magic faltering, even just thinking about it, the force of the emotion threatens to overwhelm her. “Years and years of anger. A grudge, like whoever’s controlling Andreas knows him.”
“O-okay. Just, just stay where you are. Don’t move. Silva’s on his way.”
“Okay,” Musa breathes, but Bloom has already hung up.
Musa pulls herself close, trying to breathe, trying to calm herself. There’s shouting upstairs, she recognizes Silva’s voice but can’t make out his words, and her magic isn’t just faltering, it’s fluctuating, pulsing strongly then fading away, waxing and waning like the moon. She tries to focus on her arm, to let the pain ground her, but her magic swells and it’s all she can do to keep from crying out.
Then, suddenly, completely, it stops. Gone. Leaving her in silence.
Musa knows how she should feel. Fear is one of the hardest emotions for people to fully stamp down, she’s felt it a thousand times from a thousand different people. She should feel afraid.
Instead, she only feels calm.
The moment stretches out, and she realises that this must be what everyone else feels like, all the time. No sense of where others are, no fight to pick out her own emotions from a swath of others, just her. Just Musa, and Musa alone.
A smile crosses her lips, one that’s small but fully hers, for the first time in years, an emotion untainted by external influence. She almost laughs from the sheer purity from it, when her magic slams back into her with the force of a train, knocking the breath from her and stopping her from even screaming.
It’s bearable, it’s almost bearable if she focuses on her arm, on her own blood pulsing, on her hand as she bites on it to keep from screaming, she can handle this, she can, she has to, she has to.
Then her magic flares again, more powerful than ever, and she knows exactly what’s going on above her head. She feels all of it.
Sky’s fear and anguish, fighting his father and trying to save his adoptive dad, knowing he isn’t strong enough to win, unsure if he even wants to, if it’s a price he’s willing to pay.
Silva’s desperation and regret, his guilt from the first time he thought he killed Andreas and the realisation that he can’t go through that, not again, swept away by fear of dying and worry for Sky.
Andreas is the worst of it, that strange wrongness about him slipping away for a second and flooding Musa with his hope, his pride, his regret. His acceptance. Then the wrongness is back, and Musa can feel a pained determination from Sky and a sword in a gut that may as well be hers for all it hurts.
Musa isn’t numb as she stands, isn’t hollow or empty. Rather, it seems like she’s too full to feel anything, as if all the something inside of her combined to create an identical version of herself, a mirror image ready to burst from all it holds. The pressure alone keeps her whole as she unsteadily raises herself to her feet and faces the old, wooden door. Sky’s sobs echo in her ears, drowning out the skittering of the scrapers. The banging has stopped, but she knows the creatures are still there. They have to be. Her hand trembles as she opens the door, carefully stepping out and closing it behind her.
There’s still time to hide, the scrapers haven’t seen her yet, she doesn’t have to go through with this, but all she can hear is Sky’s pain above her, swallowing her own feelings and she knows she does. She’s just so tired of living other people’s lives.
Musa closes her eyes and holds out her arms, shaking with emotions that aren’t hers.
She gasps as she feels something land on her, flinching back on instinct, but manages to stay otherwise still. Her eyes squeezed shut, she lets go of her magic, letting the scraper pull it out of her.
It’s the most excruciating bliss of her life and a scream wrenches itself from her lips as she drops to her knees. Through it, she forces herself to let it happen, to not fight back, every part of her resisting her choice. Finally, finally, she feels the last of her magic get sucked out of her, and the last thing Musa feels before surrendering to the warm embrace of unconsciousness is a sweet, calm relief that belongs entirely to her, and her alone.
Musa has no way of knowing, but she is still smiling when Riven reaches her.