And To Dust, Return [Complete]

[Tess Abrahams]

It was so hot. It was an oven and a furnace and the worst kind of shame all rolled into one horrible package. Rivulets of sweat dripped down Tess's face as the rolling desert landscape before her continued to disappear in whorls of disintegrating dust that curled sickly and rose into the air like so much smoke.

Vipul's screams came from a depth, muffled by the crushing effort that his destruction took but Tess could feel them vibrating up her arm and worming their way underneath her skin. Drawing a hoarse breath the mutant tried again to tear away and only found that the attempt tore at him, too. Writhing and terrified shards of the man settled over her invisibly like a shroud and Tess gagged as her mouth filled with a thick, ashy coating. Unable to stop the grim scene from unfolding, she turned to the only option left: she screeched wretchedly, her voice twining together with Vipul's agonized cries and rising in desperate pitch.

[Anna Fernandez]

"You totally cheated!"

"Whatever, I just ...jumped." Sixteen year old Ronnie dribbled the basketball, then tried to go between his legs and lost control of it. "Oops."

Scott Green, a laconic seventeen year old who'd been with the House for only a few months, quickly snatched up the basketball from the asphalt and tried a jump shot that banged in through the rusty hoop. There had never been a net, as far as he knew. Ronnie caught the ball as it bounced, and hopped up again, dunking it home.

He swung wildly from the rim, hollering victory, but it was a hollow triumph. Scott rolled his eyes at the other kid, and then shouted, "Shut up. Shut up!"

Ronnie dropped down lightly to the street and opened his mouth to ask what Scott's problem was when he heard it too. Screaming... from inside the house. He turned and leapt towards the front door, bypassing the driveway completely and landing on the footpath, basketball forgotten and rolling slowly down Banyon Street. Scott ran after him, both guys worried about what they would find inside, and scared (though they'd never admit it).

Bursting inside, the pair was momentarily transfixed by the sight that greeted them, until Ronnie realized that his sweaty shaved head was getting covered in a film of Vipul dust. "Aaahhh! What the fuck, man!? What the fuck is going on what the fuck, fuck, FUCK!?"

Scott's skin dialed through several different shades of grey before he could control himself, frozen in place and trying to figure out what to do.

[Jacob Foley]

Jake barrelled into the room and froze in his tracks. The toothbrush fell from his mouth and spattered the floor with minty foam. He abandoned any hope of comprehending the horrific scene unfolding before his eyes and took one cautious step forward.

"Tess?" he said, surprised by just how weak his voice sounded, "Tess, what can I do?"

His hand hovered tentatively over her shoulder, ribbons of fine dust draped over his fingers like ghastly lace. He cleared his throat.

"Tess!"

[Tess Abrahams]

"Stop it!" Tess screamed, a frantic wail that was sent out everywhere and to anyone who could possibly cause the plea to come to pass. The insatiable energy that connected her to Vipul pulsed centrally against her palm and with every passing second it grew more vicious, fueled by the whispers of his vanishing frame. "Jake! I... I c-can't stop... stop it, please oh god oh please! Please stop it! Ah!"

[Anna Fernandez]

"FUCK, dude, what -!" Ronnie was freaking out nearly as much as Tess was, but Scott had darted just barely into the kitchen, grabbing the mop out of the broom closet. He brandished the handle, ready to try a manual separation, but looking to Jake to see if that was okay.

[Jacob Foley]

"Don't touch them!" Jake barked, his voice cracking with fear.

And to emphasise his point he quickly retracted his hand. His eyes darted from Tess to what was left of Vipul, his stomach lurched. Where was Aidan? Somehow, he'd know what to do, Jake was sure of it. Tess gave a horrified sob. Slowly, he lowered himself onto his knees, breathless.

"Oh, shit... oh, shit... oh, shit... oh, shit..."

Transfixed by the point where their hands met, he closed his eyes, and fought to chase away his surroundings so that all was left was him, and the tiny pocket of air trapped between their palms. He exhaled, then exherted his will upon that miniscule point framed in his mind, and into it he poured himself. It expanded slowly at first, like a bubble of molten glass; swelling, pressing against the edges of his mind. The strain was gargantuan, and with a final grunt, he lost it.

First, the table was rent asunder with a thunderous crack, and as Jake was thrown violently backwards something hard struck him in the face, the last thing he heard was a chorus of rattling pans and shattered glass.

[Tess Abrahams]

Everything exploded all at once. With a roar the hollow void suddenly pounded shut and Tess hurtled diagonally into the wall, breath knocked out by the force of impact. She crumpled into a breathless heap on the floor, quaking and pale and surrounded by the wake of an earthquake.

Vipul. Oh god. Oh god. He was keening underneath her skin. What had she done? What had she done?!

Tess lifted blank eyes and stared at the puddle of skin and viscous fluid on the kitchen floor. Threads of bloody, pulpified muck began to spider out, trickling away from the main site of carnage in slow, ominous threads. There was an acrid, sulfurous smell in the air.

Gagging drew her attention to the doorway where Scott stood frozen in shades of anemic charcoal and Ronnie was bent over, hands on his knees, dry heaving.

"..." Tess opened her mouth but no words fell out, only a hobbled, sharply-drawn intake of breath. Jake. Jake was on the floor, unconscious, bleeding at the side of his head and maybe he was dead too. Maybe they were all dead. This had to be what it felt like, empty and senseless and incomprehensibly raw.

Not daring to move from the corner in which she was huddled to check on Jake, Tess dug the heels of her hands into her eyes and pressed until phosphenes blossomed in the darkness and blotted out the horrific scene her mind projected over and over onto the screen of her eyelids.

[Jamie Morrigan]

The screams had sent Jamie huddling under her covers in her bedroom, afraid the Three Elevens had returned. But the blast shocked her back out again. The whole house had shaken - things had fallen off the shelf above her bed. And now it was deathly silent, except for a car alarm squealing somewhere down the street. But car alarms didn't count. They only ever meant that something was happening somewhere else.

With a deep breath, the ten-year-old girl pooled up her courage and slid out of bed. She picked up the red Mag-Lite on her dresser - it never hurt to have a flashlight in an emergency, especially when it was heavy enough to use as a club - and tiptoed out the door and down the stairs.

She heard what sounded like Ronnie choking, and as she rounded the bottom of the stairs she saw him come staggering out the hallway leading to the kitchen, bent over double.

Jamie caught his eyes with a questioning look. His face was waxy and gray. "Jamie," he gasped, "don't go in there. Whatever you do. I need to call Anna - Wait, Jamie!"

Without a second thought, she'd run past him, and he was too unsteady to grab at her. Her shoes clapped down the hallway and into the kitchen where she saw--

She made a strangled noise, something like a gasp and a sob and a shriek altogether, and she backpedaled around the corner and leaned against a wall with her eyes shut. She'd seen Scott, and she'd seen Jake slumped against the counter island, and she'd seen what looked like the shredded remains of someone's clothing around the table, and everything had been covered in broken glass and... and...

Mud. That's what it was. Big, heavy gobs of it. It was smeared over the table and the floors and splattered against the cabinets. That's what she had seen. That was all.

Jamie slowly stepped out into the kitchen again and saw that it was true. Most of it was around the table, as if someone had dumped a wheelbarrow full of soupy earth, and it had exploded over every surface she could see. There were even footprints where Ronnie had walked through it and tracked it back out into the hallway.

Careful not to step in the mud, Jamie crossed toward Jake. His skin was cold and clammy, but she'd learned in health class how to check someone for a pulse, and his was there, but she wondered if that was what people on hospital shows meant when they said someone's pulse was thready.

She turned and was startled to see Tess huddled in the opposite corner, her hands over her eyes and breathing more rapidly than she'd ever heard anyone breathe before. Her arms and face were covered in mud, and there were even big clods of dirt sticking to her. Somehow Jamie felt instinctively that she was worse off than Jake.

The little girl walked toward Tess. She had to step in the mud to do it, but this was more important. "Tess?" she said, quietly, as if trying not to startle a frightened animal. "Tess? Are you okay?"

Jamie tenuously reached out a hand to touch the older girl on the shoulder.

[Tess Abrahams]

You don't have to be afraid. Say what exactly is at stake.

And he had talked of his home and his family and of the girl he had very much wanted to marry and of the way that things turned out. Things hadn't turned out. Things had gone wrong, so terribly wrong and oh fuck oh fuck his face --

A soft voice drew Tess gasping from her thoughts and she blinked at Jamie, at this small girl in the midst of so much wreckage. She wore white cotton socks on her tiny feet and they were wet with rusty brown stains.

"Jamie..." Tess couldn't stop staring at the damning socks, soaking up evidence from the lino thirstily. It was touching her; Jamie had come in here, into a terrible place that she shouldn't have seen, and she was covered in... in...

Alerted to a slow peripheral approach, Tess suddenly jerked into motion, scuttling violently away from the girl on legs that gave way like wet noodles. "Don't! Jamie, don't t-touch me, don't - get out of here! Get away from me!"

[Jamie Morrigan]

The little girl jumped backward and almost slipped in the bl-- mud. It was still mud. Tess left dark streaks of it on the wall as she scrambled away.

Jamie slowly turned around to see Scott still standing where she'd found him, ashen-faced and motionless. "Scott?" she said. "Could you make sure Jake's all right? And then can you give me a hand? We're going to need to clean this mud up."

She hurried over to the closet to find a bucket and a mop. Scott stammered something and lifted his hand, which he'd dragged through a stain on the counter. He looked at it and froze. It was mud now. There were even bits of grass in it.

[Tess Abrahams]

Part of Tess's mind - the part that wasn't numb or screaming hysterically - rebelled mightily against the idea of Jamie, little Jamie, cleaning up the... the mess. She was just a child and even if she was a child who had experienced terrors that had no right in existing let alone plaguing the young, there had to be some lines. There had to be. This was not a little-known country in the midst of a violent and bloody civil war and she was not a child soldier; this was a safe place.

It was supposed to be a safe place.

Tess gagged on the thought and blinked furiously, her eyes dry and burning as she tried to meet the chameleon-skinned boy's gaze. She couldn't remember the kid's name. Jamie had just said it and she couldn't remember his fucking name. It didn't matter. "Don't let her."

Scott flinched, crouching over Jake's still form. He looked scared. More than that, balls-to-the-wall terrified. Tess shook her head, hand coming down on a clump of soft soil just starting to seed.

"Don't le-let her--" before she could finish the sentence Jamie returned, bucket in one hand and mop dragging along behind her like a faithful puppy. Tess made a choking noise and shook her head, tremors ripping through her so fiercely that it was almost over the top, a comedic Lorne Michaels sketch. "Jamie, don't. P-please don't, please stop. You can't be here. You can't, you can't, you can't..."

[Jamie Morrigan]

Jamie gave her a troubled look and gripped the mop and bucket as if they were the last lifelines holding her on earth.

"Where else am I gonna go, Tess?" she said. "What else am I gonna do?"

If Tess wasn't going to be any help at all, Jamie would look elsewhere. "Scott, get a broom and a dustpan and start picking up the glass. Be careful you don't cut yourself."

"M-maybe we should call an ambulance," Scott said.

"No, it's mud!" Jamie shouted desperately. "You don't call an ambulance for mud!"

[Vipul Chandrashekar]

A few miles away, Vipul, accompanied by three more of himself, hopped in his GMC van and fired it up, leaving his apartment and heading for Rendecion. Along the way, he pulled out his cell phone and hit a speed dial.


Back at Rendecion, the cordless phone on the wall unit began to ring.

[Tess Abrahams]

"Be quiet! Everybody just be quiet!" lurching to her knees, Tess felt her heart hammering against the thin frame of her ribs so hard that it made her throat accordion into a shriveled knot. An overwhelming sense of panic was beginning to bubble forth and the room closed in. There was not a breath of air in the entire house.

They had to leave. All of them. They had to leave this place, now. Anna was out and the other kids were gone, at school or the park or wherever, and when Aidan got back he could light fire to the kitchen and they could watch from the safety of the garden as it went up in cleansing flames. A kitchen wasn't so important. How hard was it to rebuild?

Someone would have to drag Jake out first. Ronnie and Whatshisface. And Tess and Jamie could get out by their own strength -

A phone clattered harshly and Tess clapped her hands over her ears.

"I'm gonna be sick," she whispered, turning and stumbling through the back door on all fours. With a clumsy, see-sawing gait she leaned against the railing of the steps and wobbled down them on her knees until the grassy lawn caught her.

The soft green expanse was damp from recent watering and the moisture bled through the ruined denim of her jeans. This was real soil, not the masquerading fantasy inside the house. Tess dug her hands into it, tearing up bits of lawn as she threw up, tears spilling down her cheeks.

The phone wasn't ringing anymore. Instead, she heard the murmur of one-sided conversation and it made her exhausted stomach twist. Get out, she wanted to scream, get out of there! But Tess could only suck knife-sharp breaths in through her mouth, the sour taste of bile thick on her tongue, and twist the cool earth in anxious fists.

[Jamie Morrigan]

There was nothing for Jamie to do but watch Tess's meltdown. Her own mind was a jumble, as if it was trying to feel all the emotions she had a name for, but it averaged out to feeling nothing at all. So she settled on anger.

"Fine!" she shouted after the juddering screen door. "We'll just clean this up ourselves! Scott, will you PLEASE pick up the glass, or somebody's gonna get hurt! I swear, if this is a telemarketer..."

Jamie picked her way back across the kitchen toward the ringing phone and snatched the handset off its cradle. "Hello, Redención House?"

[Anna Fernandez]

Ronnie stood just outside the kitchen, back to the wall that ringed it so he wouldn't see anything else. He'd already puked once and wasn't keen for a repeat performance. "I tried to call Anna... she must have her cell phone off at... the doctor's..." His voice trailed off, and his legs gave out, depositing him shakily to the worn wooden floor.

Scott flushed red and then blended in with the background nearly perfectly as Jamie yelled at him, and looked down at the mop in his hand. It was all dirt now, just dirt clods, and mud... but it wasn't. He knew that Jamie was using an illusion on what had been Vipul. But this... made it easier somehow, even if you knew it was fake.

He was only a few steps from the broom closet, and he retraced them to retrieve a dustpan and broom, picking his way across the kitchen to where the glassware had shattered. There was mercifully very little mud there.

[Vipul Chandrashekar]

"Jamie, this is Vipul"

Vipul spoke calmly but to the point as he rode shotgun, leaving Vipul's full attention to the road as he drove to the house as fast as possible.

"I want you to tell everybody to relax, okay? I'm heading to the house. Keep out of the kitchen and make sure that Tess stays calm, are you listening? This is important."

The van quickly changed lanes, gunning it for a burst of acceleration as they passed a slower vehicle.

[Jamie Morrigan]

"Vipul?"

Jamie turned and looked over the muddy kitchen again. Scott's head popped up over the counter island, and his face was - literally - as white as a sheet. Jamie remembered the shoes and the clothing scraps by the table, and in her mind several pieces settled horribly into place.

"T-Tess ran out the back door," she said. "What happened? Were you here?"

She yelped in surprise as the handset was pulled out of her slack grip. Ronnie stood there, looking pale but very determined. "Jamie," he said, "I need you to go upstairs and stay there, okay?"

Jamie stumbled backward, breathing more rapidly. There was a smell in the kitchen that her illusion didn't cover. "But... I'm trying to help."

Ronnie laid his broad hand on gently on her shoulder. "I know, kiddo, and you've done a good job, but I need you to be brave and go now. Please."

The little girl backed out from under Ronnie's hand. Her face was a storm of uncertainty, and her eyes began to water. "I..."

The mud began to lose its clarity. Jamie ran out of the kitchen before it disappeared entirely.

Ronnie swore under his breath and lifted the handset to his ear. "Vipul... Holy shit, man, you gotta get here fast, we're flipping the fuck out over here!"

[Vipul Chandrashekar]

"Keep everybody as calm as you can. Tell them I'm okay. It's gonna be fine."

He'd felt the damage done when Tess killed him, and it was excruciating, but that was neither here nor there. The most important thing right now was to keep the kids together.

"Keep everyone out of the kitchen, okay? I'll handle all of that. Ronnie, I need you to find Tess. Keep your distance, but make sure she stays put and is okay. I'll be right there I promise."

[Ronnie Bluth]

"Okay, I'll do that... shit... get here soon!"

Ronnie nearly dropped the phone on the way to putting it back in its cradle. He reconsidered and just hooked the clip into the back of his shorts. With Jamie gone, reality had settled back in all its grisly details, but he didn't have anything left to throw up. Holding his breath, Ronnie crossed to the kitchen door in as few steps as possible.

He found Tess on her hands and knees in the back lawn with her back to the house. Instincts told him to stay on the stoop. "Tess. Tess! Come on, try and hold it together, okay, everything's gonna be all right."