I hadn't even intended to end up in another world this time around. We were dealing with more of Nathaniel's enemies from his past life - I was starting to lose track of them all at this point - when one of them used their power. The next thing I knew, I was in a street that was giving me flashbacks to my childhood.
And, considering how my childhood had ended, I wasn't exactly thrilled by that realization.
There was also the slight problem of me being injured. It was actually a major problem - my body was aching and bleeding. It was only a matter of time before I passed out, and I knew it was practically suicide to be open out on the streets. But I had no money on me, looked odd by the standards of the people walking by on the street outside the alleyway I was in, and had no idea where I could go.
So I wandered deeper into the alleyway.
I stumbled a few more feet in and had to lean up against the wall. It was while I was peering into the darkness that I noticed a forgotten body sprawled across the ground. Dead bodies weren't anything new to me. No one ever got the reason why. It wasn't because there was something wrong with me. I had grown up seeing them in the streets.
I staggered over to her.
Dropping down to my knees at her side, I looked over her body for any signs of her being alive. She wasn't. She was cold to the touch, and her eyes had that vacant look to them. There was also the matter of her not breathing, but that was just the final bit of proof.
"I'm sorry," I softly said, "but I need that body of yours a little more than you need it right now."
I grabbed onto her hand with my own and concentrated. A second later, I was looking at the world through her eyes - and my body had fallen to the ground beside me. I sat up and tried to readjust to her body and my surroundings. Now that I wasn't suffering from blood loss, everything was becoming a bit clearer. This girl - whoever she was - must have had some place she stayed at. Her clothes were too nice not to have one.
She did have some papers on her, thankfully. And one of them was a letter with her address. It would take some time to find where that address was, but I was one step closer to get my body back on its feet.
xXx
When I got to her home, I discovered it was a fairly small apartment. I took comfort in that. It was bigger than any place I had ever lived, and was thankfully a place only she seemed to live in. I dragged my body over to her bed and tried my best to patch up my wounds, but it was difficult with the supplies she had. I'd have to let my body rest for now.
In the meantime, there was my new body to get a little more familiar with. I knew her name - Rosemary - but I hadn't even figured out how she had died. Her appearance didn't give it away. There wasn't any obvious injuries; it didn't even seem like she had been dead for long. Looking in the sole mirror she had in the room, it was pretty clear that Rosemary had been a somewhat ordinary girl. The dress she had been wearing when she died was simple but decent, and her blond hair had been up in a slightly more complicated array than you'd expect with the dress. But whatever had happened to her involved some of her hair coming loose, and a few strands dangled in front of hazel eyes.
"Scram, kid." The words barely served to hide their true meaning. Get out before I hit you. The adults are talking.
Bobby was gone before the last syllable could squeeze out from between those gritted teeth.
The streets were cold tonight. Wind whistling between the alley's as dark clouds rolled above. A storm. Bobby shivered. He couldn't get a cold, not now.
He rushed, as always, running unseen. Not that he would have been noticed for more than a moment, anyway. Just as the city didn't see the diseased rats scurrying in the shadows, it didn't bother to look at the dirty little brats blending into the landscape. Invisible people. Just a pile of discarded waste, nothing to look at, someone else's problem.
He came to a halt in a similarly musty alley to everywhere else in this part of the city, looking up at the cracked and dirty bricks, dotted here and there with carved initials and a steady pattern of evenly spaced windows. Five floors. Bobby needed the third.
He scaled the drainpipe as he always did, hand over hand, clinging to the metal and praying it wouldn't be too slippery or that the bolts holding it to the brick would hold. He didn't make a sound beyond the quiet puff of his breaths, and even that felt too loud. everything was always deafening when hew as trying to be quiet.
He reached the third floor and reached over, holding as tightly as he could with his legs and one arm as he used the other to inch open the unlocked window. Rosemary never locked her window.
He got it about a third of the way open before grabbing hold of the windowsill and letting go of the drainpipe. His other hand caught the sill as well and he clambered up into the room, landing in an ungraceful heap on the floor after he tumbled through headfirst.
He looked up to see Rosemary looking in her mirror. She had an odd look on her face, and something was wrong. She was standing all wrong, her posture a far cry from the perfectly straight back and perpetually clasped hands she'd always held in front of Bobby.
I had already had the sneaking suspicion that someone was coming up to the window, but the noise was the final confirmation - and the glimpse of the intruder that I had gotten in the mirror.
I finally tore my gaze away from the mirror. The intruder had backed up to the window. The boy looked familiar, but I couldn't put my finger on why. And I might have been a little more preoccupied by that, if it wasn't for the fact that he had definitely seen my body over on the bed.
There was a lot of words I could say in a situation like this, but only one came to mind.
"Fuck," I said.
The air dropped a few degrees. I knew I had to keep my powers in check, or else I'd get kicked out of this body and be in even more trouble than before.
What was I supposed to do in a situation like this? The kid was probably going to rat me out to someone, but it wasn't like I could hurt him. Well, I could, but the same part of me that thought he was familiar didn't want to do that.
Which was weird, seeing that I didn't usually feel that way about people.
What other thing could I-
I darted over to the boy's side before he even had a chance to move. The power I had gotten after ending up on that other world had its perks - it was the perfect way of keeping someone from going.
I tapped the boy on the shoulder.
A second later, Rosemary's body fell to the ground.
What followed was something I wasn't really expecting: the boy had a tightness around his chest, and felt...different than how I was expecting. It took all of a minute for realization to dawn on me. Either the guy wasn't born a guy, or he wasn't a guy at all.
Bobby couldn't move. It wasn't fear that froze him this time, or anything else he knew, he just couldn't move. And then he was moving. Looking down at himself, then back up, but he wasn't the one who ordered it. He didn't want to be moving except out the window.
Then he saw Rosemary, and his heart sank, then fluttered with panic. A puncture, right there on the back of her neck, all bruised and ugly just like all the ones like it he'd seen before. Her chest didn't rise or fall. She didn't so much as twitch.
She was dead.
Bobby wanted to scream. to run. The get away from the horrific scene before him and vanish just like he always did into the buzzing hustle of the city.
Let me go, let me go, let me go, he was desperately trying to say, Please let me go.
The voice that was talking inside my head finally made all the familiarity click.
"Bobby?" I managed to get out in disbelief. It took me a minute before I realized the implications of what I had just done. Bobby had been so scared the last time we met - I knew he had to be scared now, too. And I had promised that I'd protect him the first time we ran into each other. He had to be terrified at what was going on.
I couldn't go back to my body. I'd just pass out. I had to use Rosemary's again, and hope that the needle mark on her neck and her lack of breathing didn't freak him out as much as I thought it would.
I touched Rosemary's body with my toe.
A second later, I was sitting back up and looking up at Bobby with Rosemary's eyes - and rubbing the back of my head in pain. I probably should have been a little more careful with her body earlier.
I hopped to my feet and held up my hands in mock surrender.
"Don't freak out," I said. Why was I so sure he would anyways? "It's Skull. From the mansion. Remember? I can possess people and things - my actual body is the one on the bed. I'll stay right here if you want to go over and check it out."
Bobby had wanted to run so badly, but now all he found himself able to do was huddle against the wall under the window, trembling and trying not to show how hard it was to breathe right. Skull.
Skull was okay. A good person sometimes. He didn't hurt Bobby before, so he probably wouldn't hurt Bobby now.
But that didn't make any of this less terrifying.
Slowly, Bobby dragged himself to his feet and inched over to where Skull's body lay on the bed. He gave Rosemary - Skull - a wide birth as he went over to the unconscious figure and looked him over.
He was shaking too badly to touch the body without showing it, so he just stood beside it and looked at the face. The familiar face.
"You..." Bobby looked between the body on the bed and Rosemary. Rosemary's corpse. Which was Skull. He couldn't form more words than that.
"My body's injured," I said. I didn't make a move towards him. "If I went back into it right now, I'd pass out. I couldn't risk being left in the open, and R-"
I faltered. Saying her name made this somehow feel even worse. I normally didn't feel guilty over who I possessed, but this was different. If I wanted to make sure Bobby didn't freak out, I had to have some empathy.
"-her body was the first thing I found," I said. "I found her address, and I came here so I could take care of my injuries."
Bobby could feel tears pricking the backs of his eyes. He shoved them down as best he could and stuttered, "Di-did you..." he trailed off. He didn't want to ask.
He said he found her body, but it was so wrong. Seeing her, hearing her, but it being someone else. Everything was backwards, and Bobby didn't know what was what anymore, or what anyone would do. Not in this city. Not someone he barely knew.
His eyes went wide as a realization hit him. Skull had just possessed him. Did that mean he knew...that he could feel...Bobby's hands went to her chest, feeling the edge of the binder through her shirt as she stared wide-eyed at Skull.
This wasn't going how I had wanted it to go at all.
Part of me had known Bobby was going to panic about, well, everything. But the part of me hadn't expected the question that was asked. It didn't need to be finished for me to get it.
"I didn't kill her," I said. I started to say I would have done it differently if I had, but Bobby didn't need my dramatics. "She was already dead. I'm...I'm sorry."
The words felt strange coming out of my mouth, and it wasn't just because I was using Rosemary's voice.
I glanced down at where Bobby was grasping for the briefest of seconds.
"...And I could feel that." I looked away. "I wasn't going to say anything, but I have the sneaking suspicion that not saying anything would be worse right now."
Bobby's mouth opened, then closed. Breathing. Just breathing was what mattered right now.
"I..." need to go. Those were the words that wouldn't leave their mouth. And they did. They had to get out of there right away. Because this was wrong and Rosemary...she was dead. Just another body tossed in the streets. Just a bit more rot in the lungs of the city.
Bobby took a shaky breath. Glanced at the window, still half-open.
"I'm sorry," I said again, my voice quiet. It was like that time I got turned into Toga by the League of Villains. I didn't just give out apologies. It was supposed to mean something.
But the words were getting twisted by the voice that was saying them, and I knew Bobby had no way of knowing just how much they meant coming from me.
I hesitated, an idea coming to me.
I took a deep breath.
"...Would you feel better if I possessed you?" I asked. "I can give you all the control you want - instead of you being the voice in the back of my head, I'll be the voice in the back of yours. I'll do my best to explain everything. And then..."
I faltered. What was there to explain? Bobby already knew the most of it, and I didn't even know what we could do after I told Bobby everything.
Bobby thought about it. At first, she was horrified at the idea. She hated that feeling. Not being in control of her own body, being someone else's puppet to do with as they pleased. Having her big secret exposed like that.
He said I would be in control, she reminded herself, He hasn't lied to me before.
Then I grabbed a chair and dragged it over to where Bobby was standing. I didn't want Rosemary's body to go crashing to the floor again - partially because I still needed it, and partially because I didn't want to freak Bobby out more.
I sat down in the chair, relaxed my body, and grabbed onto Bobby's hand.
Then I was looking at Rosemary's unmoving body. Like I had promised, I didn't take the slightest bit of control over Bobby's body.
It felt weird. Bobby could feel Skull in his head, there, present, but separate.
Suddenly, there was a knock at the door. Another.
"Rosemary?" a man's voice called, "Is everything alright in there?"
Bobby remembered the thumping, bodies hitting the floor, voices. The walls couldn't be that thick here. The niehgbors wouldn't believe the truth if he told it.
Before the voice could say another word, Bobby was out the window, shimmying down the drainpipe. It was only after he reached the ground that he realized that he should have closed the window.
Gender:
Points: 1234
Reviews: 590