Young Writers Society

I frowned scathingly at Engel. The gall of him, the absolute gall.
But I did have a little to thank him for, the way he had leaned himself upon my shoulders was very convenient.

I turned my face to Damascus, uncurled my arms from around him, and his from around me, and gently pushed him away. "Sorry, Damashcus, I have to do something."

I grabbed Engel by the collar, and punched him in the face.

Edward stumbled back. Normally he was better about receiving hits - it happened surprisingly often with his current occupation - but he wasn't used to Engel's body. He nearly fell to the floor before he picked himself up, and even then his response was questionable. If he wasn't drunk, and if Engel wasn't drunk, he might have thought things through a bit more and decided that ending the confrontation was the smart thing to do.

But neither him or Engel were remotely sober, so that wasn't going to happen.

He stormed over - intentionally or accidentally, he didn't care - and returned the favor with a punch of his own.

"Vhat the hell, Boris!?" he exclaimed. "I vas trying to talk to you, and you fickin punched me!"

I was thrown across the room, the back of my head smacked into the bar, and I slumped onto the floor, rattled, and spent. The fight was over.

Furious tears of grief streamed down my burning cheek, and in that moment I cared not for the blood that filled my mouth, for the rampant buzzing in my skull, for the danger I could face if I challenged Engel any further, I would not let him go without knowing exactly who he had wronged.

"Edward is gone! He's gone, he's gone, and you, you absolute Arschgesicht, he was your brother too! Geh zum Teufel, du Fickfehler, du Hurensohn, he was your... he was your brother.

I thought you, of all people, understood."

Damascus' head swirled with trying to keep up with everything that had escalated- he had been wildly scanning the room in search of Edward, who wasn't terribly hard to spot, being a Spector. And then Engel had started acting weird.

On a whim, he checked Engel's soul, and was instantly taken aback. Engel had two souls!?

He quickly opened his mouth, and then was interrupted by Boris' untangelment, and his punching of Engel. His mouth stayed open in a gape, and he made a little choking sound. And then Engel returned the punch.

An exclamation sat right on his lips, and he was ready to stand up and come between his two brothers, but that wasn't what happened.

What happened was that he turned his head and vomited loudly.

When he had finished emptying his stomach, he sluggishly grabbed the counter and pulled himself up, wiping his mouth and trying desperately to refocus on the fight.

Boris was sprawled out, blood on his mouth, and shouting something Damascus couldn't quite make out at Engel.

"S- shtoooopp!!" He slurred loudly, standing to his feet. His knees buckled underneath him and he tripped, but continued his trek to Engel. "Please, don- dah, shtohp hurting eash otherr!"

"BORSH!" he seized control of his body and stumbled over to his brother. "Borsh, are you okay?! Brozer, I'm sho shorry, I didn't mean to hit yoush!" He proceeded to smack himself in the face. "SHTOP HITTING BORSH!"

I squinted at him, hard.

"...The hell?" I hissed in bewilderment.

"Ouch," Edward whined, recoiling from the pain of Engel suddenly slapping him across the cheek - he didn't know it was possible to hit yourself so hard. Apparently, Engel hadn't realized it either; it gave Edward an opening to seize back control. He just had to get his point across, even though the whole room seemed to be swaying around him and he could barely focus-

He took a deep, unsteady breath and tried to push past the combination of his slight drunkenness and Engel's total lack of sobriety. Engel had already bridged the distance between them, and now he was at Boris's side.

"You're the one zat doesn't understand!" he shouted. "I can't do it - veren't you listening earlier!? Schadel would haf to do something like vat! Stop mourning something that doesn't need to ve mourned-"

He came to a sudden stop, gaze dropping down to the hand that Engel had slapped him with. He raised it up ever so slightly, studying it in the bar's lighting, before eying Boris's cheek. It was questionable how well it had worked with him, but he was running out of options to get Boris stop going on about him passing on.

He pulled his hand back and slapped, skin hitting skin for the briefest of moments-

And then suddenly he was thrust into darkness.

Damascus let out an undecipherable screech and made his way across the floor as best he could by crawling. He blubbered as he went, until he reached Boris' feet.

"Enkelll, whash in- jimeny, why didchaa..., an' whydja have two shoulsss?" He checked the condition of Kratzer's soul again in between patting at Boris' face. "Oh, nevehrmiind, oneh one."

He squinted hard at Boris, who wasn't responding to his touch. As gently as he could, he pried an eye open (and poked it in the process). It was rolled back in his skull. His panic started to rise.

"Enkell, Enkel, help!! Is he- is he dead!?" the fear seized at him, and his breath came in fast pants as he shook Boris gently. "Whado we... whado we, oh jimeny, Borishh, open yer eyes!"

The world spun around him and he stumbled in an attempt to keep his balance. What was going on...?

The next thing Kratzer knew, he was on his rump next to Boris and Damascus, the latter patting Boris desperately and voice jumping several octaves. In his drunken - and rather disoriented - state he only got one word: dead.

"Dead?!" he blinked, looking hard at Boris and cocking his head to listen. It was gone, nothing there. Was he- no. Wait. There it was. Faint, and slow, but still there: a heartbeat. "Nein, not dead!"

Wilson watched from a short distance with popcorn in hand. She was giggling to herself as she thew popcorn into her mouth and chewed with an amused grin. As long as no one was actually dead (which no one was) she decided to see if they would figure it out.

Meanwhile, James didn't know what happened between him bending down to get Kratzer and Boris being declared not-dead. Frankly, it was all a blur. At some point, he'd fallen onto the floor on his rump and everything was spinning wildly, people were yelling, and he was pretty sure punches were thrown.

Why was everyone so emotional?

"WHEre's ScHaeDeHL," he mourned loudly, wishing she was back already.

Wilson paused, and looked at the mess that was Boris and Engel and Edward and all of them. "Hmm..." she hummed to herself, before she walked over to the seating area they had all but abandoned, and started to search the floor.

Fortunately, for her, she could see Edward. When he wasn't busy possessing someone's body, that was.

When he came to, everything hurt. His entire body was sore and aching, and he could barely think straight. His eyes slowly opened, and, as they struggled to adjust to the bright lights he let out a pained groan.

"Claiiireee," he whined, certain that Schadel's other ghostly assistant was responsible for his sudden pain. He couldn't remember what exactly she had done, but he was the only one who could have possibly been responsible. But, now that he thought about it, that didn't make much sense - why would Claire be shaking him right now-

The bar suddenly came back into focus, and, with it, the memories of the last few minutes. He scrambled to get up, hands grasping anything nearby as he tried to push himself off of the ground. Boris must have knocked him and Engel unconscious, even though he couldn't remember getting hit by him. His cheek did hurt more than it had earlier, so maybe that was were-

He felt his hand grasp a small, metal thing. He withheld the urge to give a victorious cheer when he realized it had to be the missing bobby pin - thank God he had finally found it! But just as he was having an internal celebration, he realized something was horribly wrong.

Engel was sitting right next to him, and Damascus was frantically trying to shake him. But if he was a ghost, how was anyone than a reaper, Liz or another ghost supposed to touch him-

"Heilige scheiße," he managed to get out, raising his free hand up to touch his injured cheek. It so much because he had just hit it as Engel; he wasn't his normal self again. He had been too out of it at first to notice how wrong all of his proportions were, how strange his voice sounded, and how every bit of corresponded to a place he had hit Boris.

And, as the icing on the cake, Damascus's last shake had surprised him to the point of the bobby pin being flung out of his hand and across to the other side of the room. Edward hurriedly tried to get back to his feet and chase after it, but his body didn't want to move and Damascus had an incredibly strong grip.

"Damascus, it's alright," he reassured him. "You can let me go. I need to-" He let out another groan, the pain still frustratingly present and the desire to move diminishing. He knew he had to get his bobby pin, wherever it had fallen, but Boris's body ached all over. He really didn't want to move it right now.

Damascus sighed in relief- once when Kratzer declared Boris alive, and again when he came to. He dropped his hands from Boris' shoulders and went back to gently pawing his face.

"Borishh, ar' you... are youh okay?" He crooned.

Oh. Oh, he was telling him to let go, right. As if a string had broke, he dropped his arms and sunk to the ground, too tired to expend the necessary energy to hold himself up.

"Whadja, whadoja have to do?" He slurred, watching his brother and trying to resist the urge to touch him again. He looked very much in pain.

"I need to get it," he vaguely said, in far too much pain to elaborate. He staggered to his feet, began the surprisingly difficult task of walking from one side of the room to the other and promptly fell on his face a foot away from where he was. A small part of his mind felt a pang of guilty when he realized how much pain Boris was going to be in later. The punch and slap had seemed like great ideas, but now that he actually felt the amount of pain, he was really regretting it.

He struggled to push himself off of the ground a second time, finally giving up and taking a temporary break from his attempt when it accomplished nothing. As he lay on the ground - still somewhat looking for the missing piece of reaper tech - he noticed that it wasn't half as hard to move Boris's body as it had been with Engel's.

He didn't want to focus on anything right now, but he forced himself to figure out what the reason for the difference was. Maybe Engel had a better will, or maybe the reason Boris wasn't responding was because the hit had been so hard that he had died-

He let out another groan as he tried to prop himself back up; it still hurt just as bad as before. Boris wasn’t dead. He wasn't going to jump to assumptions like Boris had - there had to be a good reason for why Boris wasn’t doing anything to wrestle back control!

...but if there was, then why were tears beginning to stream down his face as he thought more and more about the possibility of having killed his brother?

"Borish, Borish, nooh, you need ta stohp." Damascus pulled himself over to where his brother had collapsed, and held his shoulders gently, both to steady him and to keep him from getting up again.

"Noow, now, whyar you-" he gasped a little, and his face softened in concern. "Borish! Why are youh crying? Is it..." he struggled to remember the name he had uttered upon returning to consciousness. "Ish it Claire?"

Despite Damascus's best attempts to prevent him from moving, Edward still stubbornly tried to get to his feet again. He could barely see past the tears blurring his vision, but he wanted to get the bobby pin all the same - it was a distraction, and something else he could focus on. But then Damascus was saying something, and he shifted his attention over to his brother's face instead.

"I'm not..." Edward started to say, intending to clarify that he wasn't Boris. But another groan erupted from when he tried to wiggle out of Damascus's grip instead; everything seemed to make his body hurt right now. His mind drifted, and, through the pain, he realized that Damascus thought the tears were because of something involving Claire.

He let out a little, pained laugh, because even that hurt right now.

"Why would I ever cry over Claire?" he said. Another giggle - little more than a hiccup, thanks to the crying - escaped him. "Last week, I stubbed my toe and she laughed. The week before that, she pushed me down the stairs. It may have only been three stairs, but I fell flat on my face and it hurt so bad that I started to cry - which only made her laugh again."

He angrily crossed his arms.

"That woman deserves no tears," he declared, tears still streaming down his face.