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"i'm sending consolation prizes to my next of kin
and i can't see the future, but i know it's watching me"
She’s been coughing up blood for days now, more than a human body can realistically have inside of it. Buckets upon buckets - yet while she feels weaker and more tired than ever before, she does not die.
(Or, perhaps she does die, but the parasite from Wiltshire’s mind doesn’t allow her to. Perhaps she does die, but Wiltshire herself has placed a curse on her, to revive and revive and revive until they meet again.)
When she sleeps, the Oracle twists and turns on decaying muscle and hands and fingers and toes and eyes and pus all around her. Encircling her. It creates a bare room with empty shelves, and an inch of thick blood that encompasses the entire room, like a house that’s been flooded with water. Oracle shifts, wrapping around her, and Scarlett thinks they sound more like a purring cat than a person.
At least until they speak.
“The house is flooding,” they say, voice slick and wet as the glob of flesh that now lightly passed the back of Scarlett’s neck. “Your house. That boy cracked your skull open to put me in, and I brought the rain through your broken roof. The foundation was weak, did you realize how weak you were? and we’re starting to sink. No one can patch it up anymore, no one can save you -” she moves, shoving the shifting mass away from her. All she manages to do is slip in the flood and fall to the ground, as the pool of blood rises and rises to fill the room. “Or, no, is it just that nobody wants to? Nobody wants you, nobody needs you,
- what makes you think you can fix Charlotte Wiltshire? Do you think you can fix your mistakes? Do you think she wants you? That he'll want you? Really?”
But she said -
~
In the midst of the fever dream where the Oracle set up camp in her mind she thinks she saw Felix in her weakest moments. There was an IV in her arm to replace the fluid lost. He must have scrubbed the floor a thousand times, and she shakes to think of what would happen if he decided enough was enough and threw her back out to writhe and die without ever seeing Wiltshire again. Once, twice, she’s tried to swallow it down before he could notice, before she ruined his nice clean white tiles. It only made her gag and heave, blood backing up until they feel like they’re pressed behind her eyes, until they’re leaking from her nose as well. Huge clots sticking to the roof of her mouth that she can’t hack up with the rest.
As that all goes, she can’t hide it long, and when he finds out he’s angry. “Why are you hiding it? You human maggot, why are you hiding it?” He hooks her up to the IV, “after all of this, do you want to die from blood loss? From dehydration? Of all the things!” He storms out, but returns quickly with a glass of water and the trash can from his lab for her to spit the clots into. “You can move and breathe and speak with the parasite in you - only Wiltshire has been able to do that - and you think oh, after all of that, after the surgery was a success, after Felix worked so hard to give me the head start I wanted, I’m just going to drown in blood and vomit before I even begin.” He has a cool washcloth in his hands and moves forward to wipe blood from her face. She jerks away, and so he hands it to her instead.
He doesn’t move from her side, though.
Eventually, the blood is cleaned and Felix’s face goes from red fury to his usual coldness. He stands. “Thank you for -” she doesn’t know what to say, what to thank him for. “- being... concerned about me?”
He looks at her again, brows furrowed. Lets out a long sigh and turns towards the door again. Before he walks out, he pauses. Doesn’t turn around. “This is the first time I did something that even my Uncle couldn’t do.” It’s quiet, and Scarlett doesn’t question him further. “We’re leaving tomorrow for the fourth floor, don’t get up you are not going today. Get some proper rest.”
She doesn’t tell him that she can’t.
She doesn’t tell him the next morning about the world the Oracle set up.
When she went back she was drowning in a sea of thick red, when she went back she was drowning. She remembers what it felt like to drown.
- she remembers what it felt like to drown, as Charles wrapped his arms around them and opened his mouth and breathed the water in -
~
“- you’re dying, you know.”
~
She remembers drowning, but this time when arms encircle her they do not drag her down. They push her up instead, towards a light, a crack where crumbled shards of bone float. It’s a perfect incision. She’s the perfect size, and the hands push her through. When she goes through, though, she falls from the ceiling of a room. It was the room she’d dreamt of before. Only, this time, the shelves were filled with colorful books, and a piano was shoved against the wall in the back.
With a loud, wet sound, the Oracle falls behind her. Sighing, the creature rests their head in one of their many gangrenous hands. Scarlett shivers to realize that was what held her up. Saved her.
She looks away. Combs clots from her hair and tries not to think about the fact that her clothes were damp and sticky with blood.
Hands reach out, pull her into an embrace with that same strange purring as before.
“It’ll be you, soon. Rotting. Do you regret it?”
“... is that where Felix drilled? The crack you came through?”
“Mhm.”
“He did a wonderful job, then,” she says. “No, I don't. Even if this goes wrong at least -
- I was useful to one person.”