All Your Fates (Currently editing/updating)

Chapter 37: The Reboot ~ Carrie Cutforth

In an Ancient Swedish I only partly understood, the Norns kept chanting loudly over the groaning wails of the walls. Everything seemed to be getting tighter and tighter; even David standing before my nails clawing into hard cement seemed askew, thinning, narrowing…

Fateless One, they kept calling me, Fateless One…

“You will not NAME ME,” I screeched spittle and rage while continuing to dig, the floor becoming now sand, and my palms like shovels, as a tide washed in and filled my hole with water. I frantically tried to bail the water out before the tide could come back…

David was standing farther and farther away. He was now far from the shore, the ocean water up to his waste. He just stared at me with that same dejected look, but I could not respond, I needed to keep digging, to keep holding on…

I scooped wet sand into my hands where it cooled the stings of bloody scrapes on my palms. I needed to hold on, hold on, hold on to this body. But the sand quickly dried in my tight fists, and then began to slip out of the sides more and more until I was holding onto only air.

I looked back at my hole before my knees: it too was dry, and now caving in…no not caving…

I was slipping, the shore and sky were gone; it was all darkness as I began to slide down into the funnel and fall through the sands of time…

***

Pepper’s POV

I looked back at the old Devil. Atticus knew more than he was willing to let on. They both did. But I had no time to press the issue. The secrets the witch had told David that he had been too afraid to convey to me, I could see it in his eyes as he glossed over certain moments, in his half-told account, would have to die with him.

But Atticus’s secrets are going to die with you, a voice in my head said. I had no time to reflect on it though. It was time for action.

“We need to do a reboot,” I snapped at both of them.

“A reboot?” David said slowly in his mouth, like feeling his tongue around the word for the first time.

“Computers,” I answered to him simply. He wouldn’t understand, from what I could gather, our technology was foreign to him.

Atticus stared at me with that old goat glee. “A reboot,” Atticus repeated with a gleaming smile. Is there an echo in here? I just said that, morons.

I glanced at David, trying to find the best way to explain to him but Atticus interrupted before I could.

“David,” the old man began in that syrupy way he had when he was about to convince someone to do something against their own better judgement, “We are going to reset the system…think of it as interrupting a hand of cards, to reshuffle the deck and start fresh.”

I nodded reassuringly, but the voice nagged in the back of my mind, But who will hold all the cards now?

***

DAVID’S POV

It was wrong for me to have kissed Emma, or allow her to kiss me – Stop, minimizing your actions, David – you’re always doing that, I cursed myself.

Even while the world around us began to bend and refract with violent groans, I could still feel the heat of her lips leaving mine as she cursed to herself in Swedish.

It was wrong, all wrong…but more than that…

I couldn’t remember why I loved her, beyond her beauty, beyond how she stirred my body with that electric current, but…

The electricity was like…putting my finger in an electric socket repeatedly. When I looked at Emma, all I felt was pain. All I had felt was pain for months and months. Pain was the only thing I held on to of her. I was my only memory. There were no moments of joy, had been no moments of happiness. Just the pain I had caused myself, and the pain I had caused her.

I watched helplessly as she dug her palms into the cement frantically. As the walls began to twist, as Atticus’s face seemed to refract and spin light in a hundred different directions…

This was all my fault, all my doing. I had caused so much harm to so many. I had caused so much harm to myself in this relentless pursuit of someone who clearly didn’t love me. Who didn’t want me.

And I finally understood why.

It was time to stop hurting her. It was time to stop hurting myself.

It was time to let go.

Frigid sea water flooded up my waist and I could taste salt air. I saw Emma on the shore, far off in the distance, raising against the oncoming tide to dig her way out, with three menacing hooded creatures closing in on her.

But it was too late, I could do nothing to save her. The ice picks were already flooding the brain, numbing all sensation. I felt my soul release into the void…

While somewhere a plug was being pulled from its socket.

/AN

Hey guys, sorry, I got a nasty bug that I'm still not recovered from. This is a first rough draft. I will be going back to do a clean edit of all these latest chapters once the final one has been published, but earring on the side of flying by the seat of my pants. ~ C