Chapter Text
“I can see some of you are new here, so I should probably warn you, I have a bit of a reputation for accidentally getting people hurt.” The boy on the stage pauses slightly. “… In all seriousness, you might wanna take a few steps back from the stage. Right now.”
The J-Word wears brown shorts and a grey and pink striped sweater vest over a yellow short-sleeved shirt. His hair is brown and has been cowlicked to a point in the front; his eyes are brown and so is his backpack.
“I know we’re not supposed to use real names here, but I’ll go ahead and tell you that my last name is Murphy. As in Murphy’s Law. If anything can go wrong around me, it will go wrong. So I guess it was only a matter of time before I ended up in a place like this, right?” He laughs weakly at his own joke, then his face turns to a thoughtful frown. “Actually, you know what, I should probably ask my dad if he needs to come here…”
Instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment; wherever the J-Word walks, calamity follows. Dog leashes snap, locks break, screws come undone. Through it all, the J-Word is prepared for any sort of situation that comes his way.
“Here’s the thing about when everything that can go wrong around you does go wrong; you learn to get used to it. I have learned to be prepared for anything - literally, ask me if I have something in my bag, I probably do have it. Spare seatbelts for the subway, umbrellas, llama feed… I’ve got it all. And I have too many funny stories to count here. So I thought I’d be ready for anything.” He looked down. “That’s what I thought.”
The J-Word is running late for school again, and is in need of a shortcut. He peers into a nearby alleyway and decides to cut through there.
“I know it probably wasn’t a smart idea, but I’d done it before, and do you have any idea how many tardies I have? I needed to get to school, and if I went through there, I thought I’d cut my travel time in half! But I’m here, so as you can probably guess, things didn’t really turn out according to plan.”
The J-Word hurries along and does not notice as his shoelace comes untied. After a few steps he trips and stumbles on it, falling flat and hitting his head against the pavement. His bag tears in the collision and school supplies spill out across the alleyway.
“What did I tell you? Un-lucky.”
The boy scrambles about on his hands and knees, frantically shoveling his belongings back into his bag. He does not notice the man creeping up behind him.
“He was kind of a big guy, too, I’m not sure how I didn’t notice him… but I didn’t. Not until it was already too late.”
A hand covers the J-Word’s mouth, and he struggles to free himself from a stranger’s grasp. In his haste, he drops his bag; due to his head injury, he does not notice this until it’s far too late to do anything about it. His legs kick the air as he gets pulled into a van, is tied with duct tape around his wrists and ankles, has his mouth covered, is locked in the back.
“I know a lot of cars will come with that little trunk release - I know I’ve had to pull that a lot when I accidentally get myself locked in there - but vans are a different story. There’s usually a handle in the back to open the door, but I couldn’t open it with my feet and hands tied up, and I couldn’t get out of the bonds. I couldn’t even chew my way out because my mouth was covered. And there was no way to call for help because my cell phone was in my backpack, so all I could do was lay there and wait for him to take me to… wherever.”
A cabin in the woods, with stuffed deer and an antler chandelier. More men, in masks and robes; seven more. The J-Word’s bonds are cut and the boy scrambles in a feeble attempt to get away, but the man - Herne’s hunter - pulls out a small handgun. Don’t move, he orders. The J-Word doesn’t.
“He had a gun, and I wasn’t wearing Kevlar. … Okay, I was, but he was aiming at my head. They don’t make Kevlar for your head!”
He freezes, looking down the barrel of the gun. The giant reaches out, one huge hand going for the J-Word’s fly. Don’t move, he says again. The J-Word is left in a puddle of his own clothes, and another man with grey curls just visible under his hood recites: Milo Murphy… guilty of witchcraft, consorting with demons… The J-Word’s jaw drops, but the man talks on.
“He called me a jinx - that’s what the ‘j’ stands for. I think he meant it too. I wonder how much, or if it was just how they got their kicks. I mean, c’mon, if I was doing witchcraft why would I direct curses at me? Maybe not. Maybe those guys had to believe to keep doing what they did after everyone knew who they were.”
The first man pushes the J-Word to his knees, gun cocked in one hand while the other reaches for his own zipper, pulling it down. Go ahead and scream. I dare you.
“I didn’t. I didn’t make a peep. Even if I had, it wouldn’t have mattered. We were out in the middle of nowhere. There was no one around to hear.”
The J-Word keeps his eyes closed, as the last man pushes him face-first against the wall instead. He doesn’t turn. He doesn’t move.
The fathers shall not die for the children, neither shall the children die for the fathers, but every man shall die for his own sin, the man mumbles to himself like a half-recovered memory. For his own sin… His head is thrown back.
“You know, I’ve read the Bible and there’s a lot of stuff about generational curses and things like that in there. Children being punished for what their ancestors did. The ‘Mark of Cain’ stuff or Adam’s original sin. Everyone in my family seems to have their fair share of trouble. I guess maybe they thought… I don’t know. It’s a reason.”
The gun remains pointed while the last man adjusts his clothes. The J-Word is too dazed to speak. He stares at the wall with eyes as glassy as the mounted deer. A heavy hand falls on his shoulder. He doesn’t flinch; not until a gun barrel meets his temple.
“See, remember I said if something can go wrong around me, it will? Well… sometimes that works in my favour. Thank God.”
The J-Word sobs. The gun clicks. The man holding it looks at it, shakes it, and pulls the trigger again, and again it jams. The man takes his hand off the J-Word as he examines the gun more closely, and the J-Word takes the chance to grab his clothes and run. Shouts follow him, a bullet hits the ground behind him, but he hears someone else say, Let him go. Little bastard’s jinxed, remember?
“I guess they thought I wouldn’t make it back to town, or no one would believe me if I did.”
He runs. There are tire tracks in the soft California earth. He knows better than to follow them, knows better than to take the most obvious route to the main road, but he doesn’t have a lot of other options now. The J-Word stumbles and twists his ankle in a pothole, wrenching it to the side. He keeps going.
“It might have been easier with a compass - I normally carry one - but I didn’t have my bag, remember? So when I did get to the main road… I kinda just had to pick a direction and hope for the best.”
He goes the wrong way at first, sees the sign that says Herkleton Mills and turns back around. His legs are screaming murder. He wants to cry and does just a little when he goes the other way. Eventually though, the houses in the distance start to look familiar. Eventually he finds himself standing in front of his own. He doesn’t have a house key to get in through the door. He pounds on the other side of it.
“Mom’s an architect. Sometimes she works from home, but she wasn’t there that day. She went to go run an errand.” He chuckles. “Talk about awful luck.”
A car doesn’t pull into the driveway for an hour or more. A woman with short red hair and arching eyebrows.
Milo?
Hey, Mom… lost my keys.
“I do always have spare keys, but it wouldn’t be that weird for me to lose all the ones I’m carrying, and I come home looking beat-up a lot. It was about the time I normally get back from school, so yeah. She let me in and we kinda had a normal evening. Things were pretty normal until the next day…”
… apprehended… remaining members… drones the TV, and the J-Word stares at the screen, unseeing.
Milo?
He glances uneasily at the Wildcard and then at the floor. “It was kind of like what happened with you, but in the really, really short term. I didn’t want to think about what happened, so I didn’t, and then… Well, it all came rushing back. Because it had to… And I just kind of… froze up.” He chuckles. “My friends were over at that point. One of them put two and two together with me freaking out - and freaking out about them…”
A boy with dark hair and a girl with red snap their fingers and say his name, trying to bring the J-Word back to some form of reality. He hears something like hospital and kit and when he blinks again he’s in the back of his mother’s station wagon.
“The thing is, by the time they actually managed to check anything… I had already taken a shower the night before so there wasn’t any DNA evidence to find - plenty of physical, but that’s not as good, really. Still, that’s kind of the least of our problems, right?”
A short round male nurse, a biracial female doctor; the partner of the Spirit Speaker’s uncle and the mother of the Brothers Night and Day. Questions from them, and from his parents, and from police. The J-Word can’t remember a lot. Yet another thing going wrong. Still, they have plenty of reason to believe him, and not just the evidence on his body.
“I know a lot of you guys have… problems with your parents, but I don’t. Mine are pretty great. She believed me. And the cops believed me.” The J-Word bunches up fistfuls of sweater-vest in his hands and he gazes out over the audience. At the empty chairs; the downcast eyes; the black armbands. “But by the time I told them… it was too late. I’m so sorry I couldn’t make that go right.”