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After, it’s weird. It’s awkward. It’s the memories of you before, during, and after the rage crystals simultaneously trying to take up space in your brain.
It’s coming to terms with everything you’ve done.
It’s coming to terms with everything you’ve done to each other.
It’s laying in the dark at night trying to sleep, but being too scared to close your eyes. Scared that you’re going to see things. That you’re going to see Porter, or Jace, or the corrupted form of Ankarna, and when you look down there will be that all too familiar red glow coming from your chest. That you’ll feel that burning sensation coming from it that’s almost normal now, almost comforting. One of the only constants in your life, one of the only things you held onto in those long months of waiting.
But then you look down, and there’s nothing in your chest. And everything’s quiet. And you don’t know if that makes you feel better or worse.
You’re not sure how to interact with everyone, let alone your friends. If you’re supposed to pretend that everything is fine now or spend the next few months trying to repent for your sins. Trying to get people to trust you again, trying to get to a place where people don’t feel on edge when you walk into a room. You don’t know how to talk to your friends about it because you’re still too scared to really talk about it. But if you don’t talk about it, everything will remain in your head, a cacophony of noise that threatens to drown you. So you have to take a deep breath and jump into the deep end, hoping that your friends will be your lifeboat.
***
When Ankarna, the real Ankarna, had brought them all back, they found themselves often huddled up in Ivy’s basement, finding safety there when everything else seemed so unstable. Porter was dead, Jace was dead, but suddenly everyone became untrustworthy. Their teachers. Their parents. The people they would pass on the street. They had trusted Porter, but more importantly, Kipperlilly had trusted Porter.
She was the one that talked the least.
Some nights no one would talk at all, but some nights the words flowed out of them and couldn’t stop—they’d talk about what they remembered, what they seemed to have forgotten, and what the fuck they were supposed to do next. But Kipperlilly only piped in occasionally, instead choosing to sit huddled in a ball on one edge of the couch, almost removing herself from her friends.
No one talked about the colossal elephant in the room. No one mentioned that one of the crystal clear memories they had was of killing Lucy in the woods on an unseasonably cool day last spring. Everyone could remember trying to pull Kipperlilly away from her body, they could remember burying Lucy beneath a large and twisted tree. They all remembered the numbness that they felt afterward.
The weirdest part, perhaps, was that they had seen her since coming back. They hadn’t talked to her, but it was almost impossible to not catch glimpses of her walking around arm-in-arm with Kristen, or laughing about something in the courtyard with Adaine.
They tried not to let it bother them that she seemed to be so quickly adopted into the Bad Kids. Not that it should be that surprising. None of them thought that she’d welcome them back with open arms, and the Bad Kids had been the ones to revive her, but god damn it, it hurt seeing her laughing with another group when she still wouldn’t look at them.
They didn’t know if she wanted to avoid them with a 50 foot poll, or yell at them, or pretend they didn’t exist. She seemed happy enough without them, so part of them thought that they should just let her go on with her life.
But the other, potentially more selfish part of them wanted to yell and cry and hug her and tell her that they were sorry. Plead for her forgiveness until they could all squish into their old lunch table like normal, making fun of each other and saying stupid shit to try and get someone to accidentally squirt milk out of their nose. It was usually Ruben.
They tried to avoid her name around Kipperlilly like the plague. It was a touchy subject to all of them, but since she was the one who had actually held the dagger they were hesitant to bring her up. They were all slowly healing, and none of them wanted her to spiral again.
But one day they were all at the Elmville Mall, pulling themselves out of Ivy’s basement for the first time in three days and forcing themselves to actually go and do something, they were suddenly face-to-face with her.
Well, across the food court from her.
Lucy stared at them with wide eyes, Kristen sitting beside her looking equally shocked. It’s not like it was abnormal to run into someone you knew at the mall, it was just that none of the seven of them were expecting to run into each other. They weren’t sure if they were just supposed to turn around and pretend like nothing had happened, or finally face their biggest fear and talk to her.
The cleric seemingly made that decision for them. She turned over and whispered something to Kristen, and after a moment of back and forth Kristen stood up to leave, quickly squeezing Lucy’s shoulder in reassurance. She gave them their space, but was still at a table fairly close by in case shit hit the fan. They saw her type something out on her crystal, most likely alerting her friends that something was about to happen. It’s just that none of them actually knew what it was.
Lucy didn’t approach them. Instead, she jerked her head over for them to come over to her—if they wanted to talk to her, they would come to her. She wasn’t going to waste her time seeking them out.
The six of them traveled as a group, a pack, none of them wanting to be left out in the open, defenseless without the others.
Before, they had never had this problem. But now they were in some weird space in between nobodies and somebodies. They were also just scared that if they went somewhere alone another rage star would be stabbed in their chest. At least together, there was power in numbers. Even if that number was one lower than it should be.
Lucy had a polite and tense smile on her face. It wasn’t the real smile that the five of them knew—that smile was one they hadn’t seen in over a year. One they hadn’t seen since they killed her in the woods, the stars in their chests burning brightly.
It was Ivy that spoke first. “Hey,”
“What do you guys want?” Lucy asked quietly, not quite looking them in the eyes.
Oisin sighed. “I don’t know, to talk to you? More than an uncomfortable and forced half-smile in the hallways before we quickly turn and walk the other way?”
“I’m not sure what there is to talk about, exactly,”
No one knew quite what to say. Ivy pushed down the urge to yell, to tell her that they didn’t know how to fix things, but she’s just as much a part of the group as they are and they missed her. Although maybe that would actually be a good thing to say, but yelling this at her didn’t seem smart.
“Listen,” Oisin started, clearing his throat. “We’re not sure what we’re supposed to do now, but the only thing that we know right now is that we aren’t a complete group. There’s a rift between us and we don’t know how to close it, and I really miss being normal fucking teenagers with all of you,”
Lucy chewed on her lip. She looked at them all, a mix of sorrow and anger in her eyes. “You guys think that you can tell me that you’re sorry, and everything will be okay again?”
“No, not exactly,” Ruben said, cringing. “We just…don’t know what to say.”
“Neither do I,” Lucy said with a calm expression. “I’ve never had my best friends murder me before,”
Kipperlilly looked up then, making direct eye contact with Lucy.
Ivy groaned. “Luce, I don’t know how the fuck we’re supposed to fix this. Everything fucking sucks, and we just…” she sighed. “We miss you,”
Mary Ann nodded, her attention for once focused on the group. “We do,” she said flatly, although they could tell there was emotion in her voice.
Lucy sniffed. She looked at all of them then—at Ivy’s frustrated but helpless expression, Mary Ann’s sad frown, Oisin’s pleading look, Buddy’s uncomfortable expression, Ruben’s guilty face, and at Kipperlilly’s bloodshot eyes. She looked down briefly when she noticed Kipperlilly fiddling with her watch band.
And in that moment she couldn’t help but think about how incredibly familiar they all were.
“Look, I can’t—” she sighed and squeezed her eyes shut. “I don’t know what to do right now, okay? This is just really fucking hard. How am I supposed to know if I can trust you guys again? How am I supposed to be in the same room with you and not be scared that something bad is going to happen?”
Kipperlilly dug her nails into the palms of her hands. It was her fault that this had all happened—it was her fault that Lucy was scared of them, her fault that Lucy was no longer their friend in the first place. It was her fault that Lucy had to be revived.
“I don’t know if you can,” Kipperlilly said before she could stop herself. “I think that we’re all just going to have to learn how to trust each other again.”
When they all glanced at each other, hesitantly, Kipperlilly sighed. “I think that you’re all going to have to learn to trust me again, and we’re all going to have to learn to trust each other. And Lucy’s going to have to learn to trust us.”
Ivy hummed in agreement. “Basically, it’s fucking complicated,”
Lucy snorted. “That’s one way of putting it,”
“So…what now?” Ruben asked. He was never one for subtlety.
Lucy chewed on her lip again, thinking for a moment. She didn’t really know what the next step was in trying to become friends again with her former-best friends who had most recently murdered her. That’s not a problem she had had before. “We can do something, but only if it’s somewhere that has a lot of other people around. Okay? Not going to someone’s house, or the woods, or a car, or anywhere with no one else there.”
The six of them nodded. It was understandable—the last time Lucy had been alone with them they had killed her. Obviously she would want to be in places that had, well, witnesses.
“Deal,” Oisin said, a small but determined smile on his face. “Do you wanna, uh, meet at Krom’s tomorrow? Maybe at like, two?”
Lucy nodded. “Fine,” she gave them another hesitant once over before turning around and walking back to where Kristen was sitting. They knew that she was immediately going to tell her everything—she, of course, trusted the other cleric more than any of them. Naturally.
It just still hurt a little bit.