Chapter Text
“Good luck, John. I do hope you win. But I also hope it hurts.”
[CLICK]
Melanie hit the stop button on the tape recorder and considered it with disdain.
She faintly remembered John once saying that speaking into it felt cathartic for many people. Helped them to find closure for those terrible, life-altering events that could never be rationally explained. What a load of nonsense. From the day she had first set foot in this place, every word spoken into that idiotic thing felt like cutting the wounds back open. John was lucky she didn't decide to smash it, but she supposed she could humor him just this once. So for now, she restrained her worse impulses and placed it on Martin's unoccupied desk so that he could say his piece later.
It was almost midnight. Melanie was alone at the Institute, though it certainly didn't feel that way. The old building was silent except for the hum of her computer fan and the sounds of traffic outside, and yet she could feel that thing's invisible eyes everywhere, scrutinizing her.
She should have left hours ago, but instead she had spent the evening stationed at her desk with her jaw clenched, waiting. Exhaustion clouded her mind, but she knew she wouldn't be able to sleep tonight. It had been hard enough since learning the truth about her father's death, but it was impossible now that she knew she might wake to find the world replaced by an uncanny nightmare realm of dolls and clowns and skin.
Her foot tapped impatiently. She knew she couldn't wait here all night. The bullet in her leg screamed at her to get up and do something, anything.
The view of the lamp-lit street below offered the promise of movement and fresh air. A night out on the town, then? Why not? It could be her last. With a grunt, she shrugged on her denim jacket, made herself one last cup of coffee in the break room, then left the archives with the door locked behind her.
Melanie spent as little time as possible escaping the obnoxiously posh streets of Chelsea. She hated working here. The crowds passed through the warm summer night wearing tailored suits and designer handbags, holding their noses in the air like they were important. None of them had the faintest idea that their fates would be decided over the next few days in the basement of a wax museum.
She caught the first bus going across the bridge and got off in Brixton. A quick Google search told her that she would be able to catch the last few hours of a hardcore punk show at a nearby venue. Exactly what Melanie needed. She had a lot of pent-up aggression to let out before shit hit the fan tomorrow.
Most of the people at the venue were already drunk or high when she stepped through the door, including the band. They were a three-piece act led by a short, geeky-looking guy with bleached hair. She didn't recognize them, but then again, she hadn't really been keeping up with the scene lately. The music was noisy and aggressive though, which was all that mattered right now.
It was as she stood in the long queue for the bar, scanning the room for an empty spot at a table, that her eyes landed on a familiar head of dyed black hair bobbing in the crowd behind the pit. She wasn't sure at first, but the more she watched from across the dimly lit room, the more convinced she became that she recognized them. Another fresh prick of cold anger shot through her.
The rational part of Melanie's mind warned her to let it go, just order her drink and pretend she hadn't noticed. But then there was that other part, the one that started at her right knee and pumped liquid hatred through every inch of her.
Her emotions prevailed, and she found herself ditching the queue and pushing her way through the crowd towards the figure. She had to yell at the back of her head to get her attention over the music.
"Toni!"
Antonia Farron, the long-time videographer for Ghost Hunt UK, idly spun around to face Melanie, then jumped as if she had seen... well, a ghost. It was hard to tell in the dim light, but her delayed reaction made Melanie suspect that she was more than a little stoned.
"Oh, hi!" Toni yelled back, her eyes not meeting Melanie's intense gaze. "Haven't seen you since... I don't know!"
"March of last year!" said Melanie. "I thought you moved to Bristol!"
Toni shrank. "Oh yeah... I think I remember telling Pete about that! But, uh, plans fell through!"
Toni had been the first member of the team to bail after Aldershot. The others had followed shortly after, putting a swift end to the project that Melanie had spent the past few years of her life desperately trying to hold together. Melanie always thought their excuses had seemed awfully convenient, but learning that Toni had been right here in London, avoiding her all this time, stung a lot. Compared to the rapid approach of the Unknowing and the upcoming confrontation with Elias, it was a tiny thing, but it was just another reminder of what a flaming cesspit her life had become over the past year and a half.
"What have you been up to?" Toni asked, trying to fill the silence that had settled between them.
"Plenty!" Melanie shouted, pulling down her jacket and sweater to reveal the angry red scar on her shoulder. "I got stabbed! Though I'm sure you already knew that thanks to that video of me making a scene in public!"
Toni's guilty expression said that she most certainly had seen that specific video.
"Then I went on a lovely trip to India! Got shot in the leg!" She chose not to mention that she was currently employed at the Magnus Institute, lest she shred any remaining credibility attached to her name within the paranormal community.
Melanie watched Toni's inebriated mind try to puzzle out an appropriate response. It seemed to be struggling. "How was that?" she finally blurted out.
"Bad!"
Toni was looking increasingly uncomfortable. "I'm gonna go to the toilet," she said hastily. "Bye! Nice to see you, Mel!"
She slipped away before Melanie could protest, leaving her standing alone to stew in her own bitterness. When had her own friends started looking at her like she was an embarrassment? Even Andy, her co-host and closest friend, seemed to have moved on without her. She missed the old days of Ghost Hunt, when the scariest things she dealt with were objects falling off shelves and creepy faces peering through windows. The supernatural had seemed fun and mysterious then. What even were those presences? Were they really the spirits of the dead, or were they just stray strands of some dark god, like everything else?
Melanie shook herself out of her thoughts. She wasn't here to think, she was here to get punched. So she abandoned the bar entirely and shouldered her way towards the stage. She would feel it more if she was sober anyway.
The venue was on the small side, which meant there was less space between her and the blaring speakers. More importantly, it meant a tighter, more chaotic pit. Being relatively lightweight, Melanie was normally content to let herself be swept up and tossed around by the pit like a rag doll. But tonight, she was at her limit with being pushed around. She wanted a fight. So instead of meekly sidling up, she entered by running up to the biggest guy she saw and slamming her shoulder into his back.
It felt like colliding with a tree, and her old scalpel scar screamed in agony, but the guy was taken so off guard that he toppled right into the people in front of him. A hot swell of adrenaline and satisfaction filled her as she watched him collapse, causing a vicious chain reaction of people stumbling and crashing into each other.
While a few people stopped to help him up, Melanie’s momentum carried her deeper into the fray. She shoved the woman beside her with a ferocity that surprised even herself, and was rammed back in return by an angry teenager.
After that, she lost all sense of her surroundings as she was caught up in a tornado of violence. The bigger men in the pit quickly realized that she wasn’t afraid to roughhouse, and lost the restraint they usually showed her when she went to concerts. Some of them even ganged up on her, and soon she was being crushed between several jumping, yelling, elbowing, human pillars. Each impact made her fury burn stronger, and it felt fucking good.
When strangers kept such a healthy distance from each other, it was sometimes easy to forget that everyone was made of flesh, bone, and muscle. But here, there was no such restraint. You felt everyone’s sweat and smelled everyone’s stink.
And when every part of her hurt, she could almost forget about that single, throbbing point of concentrated pain in the middle of her leg. The one that the doctors couldn’t find. The one that whispered to her without words, urging her to rip and stab and bite and smash and kill and put her thumbs in Elias Bouchard’s eyes and rip them out of their sockets, consequences be damned.
Almost.
For a few songs, Melanie was holding her own in the pit better than she ever thought she could. No, not only was she keeping up with the heavyweights, she was winning. It turned out that all she had to do was paste the mental image of her murdering boss’s smug face on everyone around her. All the hate and anger she had been storing up for months filled her with a strength she had no idea she possessed, and soon enough she was nearly keeping her feet rooted to the ground amidst a barrage of punks. By the time the last band of the night was wrapping up their set, it had become a game: see how many people it takes to knock over the pissed off girl with the blue hair.
As it turned out, the answer was four. All at once, colliding with what felt like the impact of a small car. For the first time that night, she completely lost her balance. And when she fell, she landed directly on her right kneecap.
White-hot pain burst from the point of impact and spread through her entire body like a lightning bolt as the old bullet wound flared like the moment it was put there. Her ears rang so loud that the furious sounds of drums and guitars temporarily faded into mere background chatter, and when they returned, each snare sounded like a gunshot, each cymbal like a cannon, and every bellowed lyric like a command to charge.
And distantly, but somehow still audible over the thundering sounds of war, was another, gentler sound. Some kind of soft music, though she couldn’t quite put a finger on the instrument. She barely heard it for a few seconds, but in that brief moment, Melanie somehow felt that it was the most beautiful song she had ever heard.
Then Melanie felt a hand on her shoulder, and the music ceased. Before she had time to think, she reached out, grasped someone’s wrist, and twisted violently. For a single, euphoric moment, there was nothing but the satisfying snap of breaking bone. Then there was a scream so loud that it shocked her back to her senses.
When she looked up, her ears ringing so loudly she thought she might go deaf, she saw a young guy, maybe in his early twenties, collapse onto the floor, clutching a wrist that was bent at a sickening angle. He met her eyes with an expression of pure terror and anguish, and people swarmed to help him up. With a twinge of guilt, Melanie realized that the hand on her shoulder was probably him trying to check if she was okay.
The pain in her leg had faded to a tolerable level once more, and she was once again aware of her surroundings. The band kept playing their loud music, ignoring the commotion below them. Obviously, nobody was offering to help Melanie up now, so it was up to her to pull herself to her feet. She averted her eyes in shame, and yet somehow she didn’t feel as remorseful as she thought she should have. All that anger, all that strength… it felt undeniably good to let it out on someone.
The harsh music was starting to grate on her nerves now, so she left as the band started playing their encore. The crowd gave her a wide berth as she followed the guy to the back doors, hoping that Toni hadn’t been there to see what had happened.
The kid was sitting in the lobby with some of his friends when she found him. Melanie checked to make sure that he had an ambulance on the way, with repeated apologies and offers for future drinks. She learned that his name was Jackie, and once he was convinced that Melanie wasn’t following him to finish the job, he was quick to laugh it off as an accident, though he couldn’t shake the slight quiver in is voice as he spoke to her. He told her he thought she had been “quite the badass in the pit,” and “sorry for sneaking up on you like that,” though it came out as more of a plea for mercy than a real apology. Melanie gave him her phone number in case it ever became a legal or financial thing, and the paramedics were quick to arrive and lift him off.
Resolving the situation should have made her feel some kind of relief. And yet throughout the whole conversation, that smoldering anger never left her for a moment. She practically had to clench her jaw to hide it.
Why didn’t she feel more guilty? Jackie was clearly a good guy trying to help her, and in return he had gotten nothing but broken bones. No wonder nobody wanted to be her friend.
And then there was the other matter nagging at the back of her head. How the hell had she broken clean through someone’s wrist with one hand? Where had that strength come from?
The worst part was, she knew the answer. She had known for a long time, hadn’t she? How long? Weeks? Maybe part of her thought that aligning herself with the Eye was protecting her from the worst of it, but today was solid proof against that. And would the old Melanie have really attempted to assassinate her boss? Was she really changing into something else? Was she no different from John?
The Slaughter, he had called it. A god of war. Was that better or worse than a god of clowns and mannequins, or a god of eyes?
Melanie had been unknowingly seeking it out as she traveled the world, and it had followed her home. Now it was… well, it was another horrible thing she was going to have to just deal with. Because that was her life now.
Her head was swimming too much to consider all the implications. The exertion from the show on top of her already stressful day had made her more exhausted than she thought she had ever been, not to mention bruised and sore, so she quickly made her way home as the show was wrapping up.
It was possible that the world would literally end tomorrow. Rationally, that should be enough to keep her from going to sleep, not to mention the terrible nightmares she had been having lately. But right now, none of that mattered to Melanie. All she wanted was to go to bed.