SOULS BEING JUDGED before their time can only mean that Harrow is about to resurrect Ammit, or that he already has, which is catastrophic as thousands are already dying and sentenced to the sand without any chances or room for improvement during their lives.
Zagreus watches those souls, feeling the injustice in his bones. He can't believe the Curse once made him blind enough to agree with that. He can see it. Those people were innocents.
"We have to get back," Noor says, appalled. "Is there any way we can make it back up?"
Taweret lets out a shaky breath. "Even if I could send you back up there, they would be returning to a body with a bullet in it."
"A couple actually," Marc says, and Noor's stomach drops.
"Not the time to flirt," Zagreus snaps. "You wouldn't be able to heal." And he's not watching Noor's broken eyes again.
"Can you tell Layla?" Noor asks. "Just tell her to, I don't know..."
"Free Khonshu," Steven says, and Noor recoils. "I know, I don't like it either."
"Are you sure you want to be with Khonshu again?" Taweret asks Marc. "Sounds like you really want to get away from him."
Noor shakes her head softly at him, begging him to say no, that they'll find something else. "I did, but this is our only shot," he says, mostly to Noor. "It's the way it's gotta be."
"Like hell it is!" she cries out. "We'll find something else, I don't care, you're not getting back to that mental pigeon."
"Noor, baby, I don't have a choice."
She clenches her jaw, face scrunching up in frustration, before she realises that Taweret is looking at her with concern. "There's that denial."
She huffs. "Just... just help us, please."
"Please," Zagreus adds, driving the desperation across.
Taweret looks at the four of them, and sighs. "Oh, what the heck?" She goes to the steering wheel. "Osiris isn't going to like this, but his gate is the only path back." She grunts, forcing the boat to change its course by taking an abrupt left, almost sending them flying into the sands. "Get back inside! You don't have long. Get those Scales balanced!"
Without as much as another word, they run back inside and into the corridors' asylum.
The second Taweret can't hear her, Noor starts to scream. "You are not going back to Khonshu, either of you."
Steven wries his hands, almost disappearing under his sweatshirt. "Well there's no bloody other way, is there?"
"No, there's not," Marc agrees. "You have to face this."
She scoffs. "Yeah well, you're gonna have to face my dead body, because there's no other way that I'm letting you do this."
"If you want to balance your heart, you have to stop hiding from the inevitable," Steven says, eyebrows cinched together.
Noor, irritated and frustrated, rolls her eyes. "I am perfectly balanced, thank you."
"You're so far in denial you don't even notice it anymore," Zagreus tells her, crossing his arm. "I hate to make you do this, but you have to open your eyes."
She starts to backtrack, chest heaving and throat slowly tightening. "I won't go back there," she decreets. "I can't."
Her back hits a door. She feels panic rise in her as she turns around. She recognises it immediately. Broken glass, kitchen tiles. She can see a single tear run down her father's face.
She feels her shoulders shake before she even realises that she's holding back sobs.
"Don't make me do this, please," she says, talking to her father's face through the window. "I don't want to."
She feels small – frighteningly so, and she's not even in the room yet. She's not even facing him yet.
Zagreus, in all his time with her, watching her and helping her through panic attacks, has never seen her so scared. She knows exactly what she has to face.
She turns back to them, with poorly hidden tears, chin wobbling. "It's more than I can bear," she tells them, rubbing the tattoo on her wrist. "If I go in there, it's going to kill me again."
If Zagreus' sheer look of shock could rival Steven's pity, it's nothing compared to the endless compassion she can see in Marc's eyes.
He walks up to her, and takes her hand, slowly bringing it to his face. He kisses the inside of her wrist, and puts her hand on the handle of the door. "It's your choice," he tells her, as if her feelings mattered more than the deaths of thousands. "Only yours."
She looks up in his dark eyes, before dropping her head, leaning her forehead against his chin as he kisses her forehead. She's not a hero. She never has been. If she could, she'd run away from here. But there's nothing she wouldn't do for her people.
She inhales sharply, and looks back at the door. "Help me," she asks, voice shaking but loud.
Marc's hand is on hers in a heartbeat, and she can feel Steven rub her back. Zagreus is right behind her as he kisses the top of her head.
She turns the handle.
It's silent. Anyone would have expected an abusive household to be loud, filled with screams, but the worst part was always the silence. Waiting for the other shoe to drop, for her dad to start yelling over anything.
"It had been bad, the week leading up to this," she tells them quietly, as if her father could hear. "He didn't have full custody of me yet, so it was supposed to be a month of vacation at his house during the summer break. A week in, and I just couldn't take it anymore."
The yelling, the remarks on her personality, on her body. Saying that she owed everything to him, that she was insufferable, and kissing her cheek and laughing with her the next second. She couldn't do this any longer.
She couldn't always make sure that everything she did was perfect. Do everything herself to ensure her dad wouldn't get mad this time, it was too much.
"I had it all planned out, thinking it through in my room," she says. "I was going to say I missed my mum and wanted to go home."
"Why didn't you tell him the truth?" Zagreus asks, knowing that the real reason was her father.
"Because I liked life," she ironises, sniffling. "There's no way to know how he'd react, and I wasn't just about to risk him."
Noor, thirteen years old, shyly steps out of her room with eyes already filled with tears of fear. Her father, cleaning the dishes, waits for her to speak. She suspects him to know all this time what she was going to say, but waited to see if she'd have the courage to ask.
"I've been talking to mum," she says, with unmistakable sobs in her voice. "And this has nothing to do with you, but I think I want to go home."
The plates clatter as he drops them in the sink. The silence is back, hanging heavy in the air, waiting for the inevitable reaction.
After what feels like forever, her father picks up a glass, and throws it at the wall, right behind her. They stare, horrified, as Noor just takes it, lips pressed thin together and tears flowing down her face. She doesn't flinch, she's used to it.
She knows what her father is about to say, no matter how much she wishes she could erase it from her head, or how well she was doing up until now, keeping it locked away.
She closes her eyes, and holds on to Zagreus' hand, bracing herself for what's to come. They watch how terrified she is, unable to take her away from this situation. Even with her eyes closed, it's etched to her brain now that the memory has resurfaced.
Her father leans against the counter, and turns to her, a single tear rolling down his cheek.
"There it is," he says. "Are you proud of yourself? Making your dad cry?"
Noor hides her face in Marc's shoulder as the other three watch the sentence hit the youngest her, watch how tears spill on her cheeks and eyes grow wide in horror, and shame.
Shame for hurting him because she wasn't strong enough to stay. For making him feel bad when she went days without eating from how stressed out he made her. For making him second-guess himself when she spent hours hating everything she'd become because why... Why wasn't he just able to love her?
She stayed silent as he yelled that she never loved him. That she never pays attention to him. That she only came here because he lived near the beach, as if coming here was pleasant for her. As if it didn't make her want to vomit in anxiety just at the thought.
Once her father is done throwing stuff around and yelling, telling her how awful she is for doing this to him, Noor runs back to her room, too scared to close the door.
They watch as her father walks in another room, leaving them.
"It's done now," Steven tells her, reassuring her. "You've done it."
She closes her eyes, tears slipping. "It's not."
They follow as she walks in the room where her younger self is, crying, sitting on the bed, looking around, stopping her sobs to listen to the sounds around her.
"I'm waiting for him to come back," Noor explains, sitting next to her. "I thought he'd calmed down and come to talk to me about it. He'd always say the most awful things and come back as if nothing happened." She raises her eyes at them. "I was wrong."
Sure enough, her father walks back in, holding a baby. Noor's face falls when she sees her baby brother, knowing exactly what comes next.
Her father sits on the other side of her younger self, the baby on his lap. "Why are you leaving?" he asks.
Noor looks up at her father in confusion, wiping her tears. She never liked to cry in front of him. "I miss mum."
"It's because you don't love us," he says, not a hint of emotion on his face. "You don't love me. You only love what I can get you."
"That's not true," she answers, voice small.
"Yes it is." He points at the baby, playing with his toes, not aware of what's going on. "Go on. Tell him that you're leaving because you don't love him, and I'll let you go."
She didn't know how to answer that. She still doesn't know to this day what he wanted her to say. She just shakes her head, because how would she ever be able to do that?
"I just want to see my mum," she keeps saying, unable to hold back the tears. "Please."
Her father stands up. "I can force you to stay. The law is on my side, I'm supposed to get half of your vacation with the divorce, and that's exactly what we're going to do. You're going to stay."
"You piece of shit," she hears Marc mutter under his breath as her father leaves.
Her younger self curls up on herself, sobbing, whispering unintelligible things that Noor remembers but won't repeat. Why are you like this? Why are you so awful that your own dad doesn't love you? How can you live with yourself?
How can you live with yourself?
"I died that day," she says plainly. "The little girl I was, died curled up on that bed. And you want to know the worst part?" She turns to face them, eyes red and puffy, tears streaming down her face. "I believed him. I stayed. I was so far deep in my denial, that the next vacation, I came back. Pretended like it never happened."
"Why?" Zagreus asks, the word flying out of his mouth in disbelief. "Why would you even do that to yourself?"
"Because I wanted nothing more than to be enough. I wanted him to see me, and change for me. I wanted him to be my dad." She heaves out a sob, pressing the heels of her palms into her eyes. "I spent my whole life hating myself for never being enough for him. Hurting myself for it. If there's someone you can change for, it's your daughter, right?" She scoffs, biting down her lip. "What did I ever do so bad that he didn't love me enough to change?"
It was always easier for Noor to blame herself. Deep down, she knew that her father was never good. But she kept denying it. Kept loving him.
She feels Marc sit down next to her, holding her, the bond warming up in comfort. "The way he was with you," he starts, rubbing her back. "It has nothing to do with who you are." She sniffles, looking up at him, ready to deny. "Nothing, you hear me? You don't have an ounce of responsibility in it. You're a smart, beautiful young woman. You're resourceful, and head-strong. You never give up."
She shakes her head. "But it can't be all him."
"Yes it bloody can!" Steven cries out. "It is! Look at you, you're the best. Look at yourself," he adds, gesturing to her younger self. "Even then, you tried everything to make it easy for him, when he really didn't deserve shit, did he?"
She doesn't answer, afraid to prove him wrong.
She looks up at Zagreus, at the way he tries so hard to hold back tears for her. "I'm so, so sorry."
She remembers their conversation after the Blip. What he said to her. 'Aching for you, Noor, is the highest proof of love you could ask of me.'
Soon enough, she finds herself squished between the three boys, hugging her tightly as a small laugh escapes her throat, Marc wiping away her tears.
She was a child. A child who ran after a father she never even had in the first place, who denied the obvious for any hints of love he could give her. Starved herself on it. And there was nothing wrong with not giving up on the people you love, but she had to cut herself loose. To stop denying who he truly was.
Her father won't ever change. No matter how hard she wants him too, or how much she tries to help him. He'll always love having power over people, rather than the people themselves. It had nothing to do with her. And Noor was done giving him power over her.
"Gods, they should do this in therapy," she lets out when they part.
Steven frowns at her a little. "Without the dying part, right?"
"I think the dying part adds panache," Zagreus says.
"It definitely motivates you," Marc reflects.
Noor just shakes her head and stands up, following them as they leave the room. Marc lets go of her hand when he realises that she hangs back, and sends her a smile.
She stands in the doorframe, and looks back at her child-self. "It's his loss. It's all his loss."
Author's Note: I cried but like, in a cool way