A Rock in the River

9- Because I Do Adore You

"...What do you mean?"

Her knees bent in the candlelight, hands curled over them as she leaned to view the dim floor. Hair dangled past a frown, and a gleam on her eyes revealed how sharp they were pinned to the ground. There's a...certain emptiness that doesn't feel empty at all when you see something you shouldn't, like when you go through a book and begin to realize it's a diary hidden in plain sight, like when you turn the corner of an alley to hide from the rain and glimpse past blue brick walls someone stealing a kiss like a thief in the night. Something that maybe shouldn't matter to you, but you care all the same.

A detachment- just enough so- with a pang of empathy can do wonders for seeing through lies...

...And it turned out, so much more.

Unspeakable- literally unspeakable; she couldn't find words it- and incomprehensible things. Pictures meant to be text and text meant to pictures- that's the only way she could describe how scrambled she felt to see them. And the indentations upon the paper were bleeding their ink, and the ink ran off the pages and glues the floorboards beneath together.

A room built upon ritual, myth, and incantation. Of course, the origin of instability would end up being the most stable.

"...Well?!" Francine heard the angel inquire anxiously, voice shaken but eager with the disjoint in topics.

She didn't look up, and maybe she couldn't with how mesmerized she was when she answered, "They're...things. Weird things- I mean. I can't- I can't even read them...!"

Her eyes followed the dried stain that bled from what must have been one letter of a word and saw it trace beyond her toes, across page and page and page. She followed it, standing up and walking in a trance; maybe it was, indeed, a hypnosis because it seemed to walk her around...around...around....in a circle, a shuffle under her feet yet with every step not pushing them out of place. She straightened her neck with her chin still angled down, and even the air about her was so thoughtful that Sammy took notice.

Feeling Alice by his side, the prophet reborn to preach yet again asked her what their friend was doing, but the seraph said not a word. Lips painted black parted, and half a face gaped with the kind of discomfort that only comes with discovering why you are who you are.

And the more Francine stared, the more she saw that she was no longer certain if the words had bled to form it or if it was the other way around. A headache burrowed into her skull with how hard she was staring and contemplating, and decisively, she stuck the tip of her shoe and dragged one paper with it.

As the paper slipped out, the ring remained, like it was a shadow instead of a stain.

Far too like the ink demon.

She felt something not meant for human hearts come onto her shoulders and grip them tight.

"Francine?"

Sammy had called for her again, and Alice stood there in wait, and again, she did not reply. The holy- or perhaps its other- often takes breath away.

And that force upon her would either push or pull.

...It pulled.

"It's...a circle." And then more quietly, more for herself: "But what the fuck is it...?"

"FRANCINE-"

She turned, finding eye sockets that almost seemed to have a brow with which to curl with worry behind those cracked glasses. An outstretched hand reaching blindly ahead stayed in the air a bit, before the four fingers slowly folded and fell to his side alongside a growing expression of unease. He knew Joey now- there was a reason to be anxious of the place that was his.