Chapter Text
They’d both lost their daughters.
Needy may have been walking the earth still, but April knew that she was changed. There was some solidarity in that, she supposed. Enough so that Judy came to say goodbye when she knew April was set to leave Devil’s Kettle.
They’d never been close, despite knowing each other all those years. But something about one child murdering the other, who was allegedly murdering so many other children of women was, well… there were no more holds barred.
Judy was doing alright, considering. She’d always been a stoic woman. April wasn’t surprised she’d handled the situation with so much dignity. She felt it was time she could be entirely honest.
“Do you remember when the girls were about… nine?” April pursed her lips around her cigarette, waving her hand through the air in some vague gesture. “You took them camping for a weekend.” Judy nodded along, remembering. She still kept her distance, though. Hovered by the front porch steps. “When you dropped Jennifer off… I was so taken with how you were with her. So patient. I was going through a particularly hard time,”
“I remember,” Judy said softly, leaning against the porch pillar.
“I wished I could ask you to adopt her.” She smiled humorlessly. “And that’s not a joke. I thought about it. Please, take her off my hands. She deserves someone who doesn’t resent her. But obviously, how does someone approach that?” She’d tried hard not to let the world become her confessional. Sometimes, she wanted to shout it from the rooftops; denounce Jennifer, and all she had done. I never liked her. Don’t blame me. But it’s entirely my fault. “How does a mother approach another mother and ask you to take custody of their child so they can run away, start again? Pay a stipend of child support like a deadbeat dad, only to be hunted down again when she was sixteen, seventeen… And you know she’d demand answers.” She felt the muscle in her chin quiver, and dropped her head into her hands. I never liked her. “I wanted to forget about her. I wanted that,” She heard how thick the words were in her throat, squeezed her eyes shut. A bloody mess. “I never would though, not really. I knew I’d never outrun it. Then- what- I send a card every year on her birthday?” Pulling the cigarette between her lips again, she shook her head, trying to get a grip. Didn’t want Judy to see her like this. “She’d haunt me. I may as well put the gun in my mouth then, you know, for the good it would do me. Pills. Liquor. I saw my future. It was better with her in it, so the guilt wouldn’t eat at me.” And the woman’s face didn’t shift as she listened. April knew she always knew. Could see through her, could tell that her acts of love had never come naturally. That’s why she was so good to Jennifer. “I know it’s my fault. Children feel when their parents don’t love them. I knew she’d be a monster, I just didn’t think… Would you have done it, if I had asked?”
Judy sighed heavily. Wordlessly, she extended her hand, and April knew she was asking for a cigarette. With a surprised raise of her eyebrows, she obliged. Handed her a cigarette and lighter.
It started to rain during the silence that followed. April didn’t blame her. It was a lot to digest.
“I think I would have,” She said finally. “Children deserve someone who loves them.”
Jennifer wasn’t cremated.
Her mother felt it would be hypocritical to take Jennifer with her, lug her place-to-place when she knew she never really wanted her to start with. It would have felt like an effort placed entirely too late. Not to mention after everything she had done, it felt like a bad omen.
She wouldn’t spread the ashes, either, because she knew of nowhere she loved enough to warrant a permanent haunt. Except maybe Needy’s house. And that was out of the question. She wouldn’t risk some ghastly spectre, some residual pain to soak through the walls. Though she could almost see it; late at night, with only the sound of the clocks ticking and the refrigerator making ice, the porchlight would flicker on as Judy approached and opened the front door. And the light would wash in, pooling around her, and she would pause; a few feet before her, halfway down the hall, a dark half-drawn figure would look back at her over its shoulder. It would be Jennifer; despondent and slouched, weighed down by her own presence still on this earth, forced into some other place where she walked only alone. Doomed to roam the halls. Searching for solace, an ounce of warmth, of love. Wandering. Doors would open and shut. And Needy’s bedroom; always ice cold. Judy would wake up from an afternoon nap feeling as if someone was hovering over her.
Jennifer.
And then Judy would finally find it in her to flick on the light, and the mirage would be gone, but deep down she would know what she had seen. She’d leave a kitchen chair pulled out during her morning coffee, so the girl could sit. Because somehow she’d still have space for her. Leave out offerings and make peace with the ghost. Do what April couldn’t.
So Jennifer was buried. But not in Devil’s Kettle, where destiny would have her grave become a site for vandalism and hatred, a folklore infested watering hole where bored local kids with bad ideas would sacrifice rats and any other poor animal they could get their hands on. Slit their wrists or besmirch the dead with some self-serving ritual.
Jennifer was buried in an undisclosed location. There was no funeral.
Only her mother, a pastor, and the funeral home workers who would lower the casket six-feet-below would know her final resting site. The grave was uninspired; April couldn’t afford much, nor was she certain she would have immortalised Jennifer with anything more than necessary even if she could.
Before the casket closed, April spent a lot of time looking at her daughter. She hadn’t hired a mortician to do more than what was necessary; with no service, no one would be seeing her, so there was no point. She hadn’t had her makeup done, she was just dead. They’d cleaned her up, washed the blood away, did their best to give her some dignity; despite the fact that she was a monster. The fact that she’d cannibalised her peers hadn’t mattered when it came to the sterile act of scrubbing her clean.
She wasn’t sure what she felt.
When the coffin hit the bottom of the hole, April threw salt, for good measure.
She left Devil’s Kettle. Tried to start somewhere new. Couldn’t stop thinking about Jennifer gutting those boys, hands red with blood, pulling the organs out. Eating them. The viscera gnashed between the teeth of her beautiful face. It would wake her in the night.
She drank wine. And more wine. And more pills.
The thought of her; a corpse now, those teeth loose and skin like jelly- had April wailing into the night. There would be no redemption for either of them. She had failed her baby. Was there something bad within her, was she predisposed to this evil, or had it been entirely her doing?
Seven months after Jennifer was below the earth, when the dreams wouldn’t stop, she tied a noose but couldn’t bring herself to really do it.
She moved farther. Purged herself of everything that she could, except for the worn photograph of Jennifer when she was eight years old; beaming up at her with one missing tooth, a melting pistachio ice cream cone dripping down her hands. Never returned to the grave.
Every year, Judy thought about lighting a candle on Jennifer’s birthday.
She wasn’t sure if it seemed like the right thing to do. But she would hover there, over the candle at the kitchen table and she would think for a long time, before setting the matches back on the windowsill.
Something had gone terribly wrong, somewhere along the lines; but she still saw the little girl who had gotten her period in the middle of the night in her memories. After a while, she took down the photos she had of her. She couldn’t bring herself to get rid of them entirely, so she’d stored them in a box, shoved it under the basement stairs and waited for the day she forgot about them.
She’d spoken to her, once. Not in a literal sense, of course- though she wasn’t so sure. Judy had never been an avid believer in the paranormal, so to speak, but she believed there were forces in this world that couldn’t be fully understood, or explained. But there’d come an early morning where she had felt something that she could only relate to what she’d come across before in the sense of her motherly intuition. Something that had come up in tingle only a few times before in her life- including the night that Needy would later confess ended in a mostly harmless car accident.
Judy never thought of Jennifer as a bad influence. Needy had a well-developed sense of discernment, and self-preservation. In fact, if anything; Judy was glad Jennifer was around, because she could tell that she helped Needy come out of her shell, when she didn’t push too much. Jennifer was reckless, but she wasn’t stupid, either; she was at least crafty in most of her antics. She was the kind of girl who could scare herself, though; Judy saw it. Get herself into a situation she only thought she wanted, quick to realise just as fast that she didn’t want to be in it at all; she was naive. Naive and desperately trying to get her footing in something. To fill the void that Judy so clearly saw.
She was a hurt, aching little thing, all the time. She used to remind her of a bird with a broken wing. Cheeping and flapping around, trying to escape, only hurting herself more the process.
Judy found herself suffering a very violent dissonance trying to make sense of everything that had happened.
Of course, she’d spoken to Needy about it. As a mother, it was a very stark moment in which she had to come to terms with the fact that no matter how close she thought they were, how much she thought she knew about her daughter’s inner world- despite also making peace with the healthy fact that she would never know everything- she was very quickly humbled by just how much Needy had hidden from her.
She also couldn’t wrap her head around why Needy had decided to take all of it on herself. The psychiatrist had mentioned something of a shared psychosis between the two of them, perhaps. They were so close. He’d suggested that Jennifer could have been so manipulative that she had done nothing short of brainwashing Needy.
What Needy had told her, however, was that Jennifer had clearly suffered some kind of psychotic break in which she believed consuming boys’ flesh was the only thing that would keep her alive. The word succubus had been thrown around loosely in passing, and Judy wasn’t sure if that was Jennifer’s belief, Needy’s belief, or just a turn of phrase about the situation; nor was she certain she wanted the clarification. Needy believed she was the only one with the power to stop her, because she would kill anyone else who tried. It had to be her, and her alone.
It was a very disturbing reality that had coexisted in her own, oblivious floating through life.
But there had come that day in the laundry room; with suddenly the feeling of eyes against her back. Thousands of years of ancestry ingraining that sense of danger within her genetics- only, it wasn’t necessarily danger she had felt. Just presence.
Slowly, she had set the dish towel she had been folding back down, and paused. Absorbing the sensation of it. She knew how bizarre it was, before she had even let a word leave her mouth- but she was somewhere in her grieving of the situation where it had simply felt… right.
“Jennifer?” She queried softly, into the open space. Judy almost didn’t want to turn. Afraid that she would see her, young and small, standing down the hallway, just staring at her. As helpless as the day she had met her. Or even worse; grotesque, and sloping. A zombie. Wandering lifelessly, coming back to haunt the people who had left her for dead. “Is that you, baby?”
She found the strength to, though. There was nothing more than a dark hallway staring back at her, but still she felt her. Somewhere just out of sight, someone just out of frame.
Judy brought the laundry to the kitchen table, her slippers shuffling along the linoleum, she pulled out the extra chair, for the first time in a very long time. “Why don’t you sit with me, hm?” She asked the air. It still felt strange. But also right. “Why don’t you keep me company?”
She forced herself to fold a few more towels, willing the feeling to leave. It wouldn’t. She sighed at the empty chair. “I’m sorry, baby. Are you here because I took the pictures down?” She expected something to fall from the wall. Some sign. The refrigerator just made ice. Judy shifted her weight in her chair. “It was just hard to see your face, love. You know… Just hard to know you weren’t that little girl anymore. Broke my heart. I know all those things you did… I don’t know why you did ‘em, what happened… It’s hard to make sense of.”
She reached for a towel again, but stopped. While she wanted to busy herself, she didn’t want her attention anywhere else. Judy felt compelled to keep speaking. She sighed. “You know… despite all that… I wish I could have been there for you more as a little girl. You deserved that. You deserved better than what you got, Jen. I know you weren’t a bad little girl.”
And then, the telltale sting behind her eyes. Jennifer. As a little girl. Tiny and beautiful and so dismissed. She tucked her in once when she was six years old, crying and scared of a thunderstorm. Judy wished she had said it all a long time ago. She should have done more. Maybe things would have been different. “That little girl always has a place here, baby.”
She felt a tear escape from the corner of her eye. Judy let it, felt the hot trail it made down her cheek. Sat with it. It wasn’t fair. “I'm not ashamed to say it, Jen. That little girl was always loved here.”
The matches fell off the windowsill.
Judy would maintain the moment until her deathbed. The way the breath caught in her throat. Fear, and then humour. It was all the snark of Jennifer. The tears melted into laughter. The feeling remained, but shifted, ever so slightly. She wasn't sure if it was just because she'd finally felt peace in saying it aloud.
“I see what you’re saying, Jennifer.”
Judy found herself smiling as she lit the candle.
Not everyone thought it was Jennifer, the same way not everyone thought it was Needy, when it came to the matter. After enough time had passed, Needy began to consider the fact that maybe it wasn’t either of them alone, after all, when it came to everything.
Maybe she always knew, deep down, that Jennifer wanted her in a more intimate sense. In hindsight, she could always feel the way Jennifer wanted to cannibalise her life, her existence; own her entirely. She liked it. She liked that she had that kind of control over her, even if she wasn’t consciously wielding it. She liked being Jennifer’s weak spot. But maybe if she hadn’t dangled the carrot for so long, she wouldn’t have acted out, wouldn’t have gone with Low Shoulder that night. She’d still be alive. Chip would still be alive. Everyone would.
They would be fighting, still. The lifetime of frustrations with one another brewing under the surface of their skin, ready to chew each other at the heels. Needy spent a lot of her time fantasising about the arguments and the conversations they would have. She hated Jennifer. She knew that. But she loved her, too. Loved her all the way into the grave. Needy spent most of her time with Jennifer, in these fantasies. She was even beginning to realise that it was Jennifer’s voice with her, a lot of the time; speaking inside of her head.
But what she thought of most, was that May afternoon when they had shared their first kiss. Jennifer had been eating cherries. Needy had been chiding her for the way she used her thumbs to split them down the middle, to dig out the pit and toss it aside. It was messy and careless, and somehow childishly violent, the fruit staining her fingers a wine-red.
“Seriously, Jen, you’re making such a mess.” She wasn’t sure why she cared. Needy wasn’t even sure if she cared at all, or if she just wanted to scold the girl for something.
Jennifer stopped, looking over her for a moment so long, that it made her insecure. Her lips were stained a darker red, too. When Needy revisited the memory, she wondered if it was akin to how she must have looked after all the blood.
But that day in the sun, when Jennifer finally broke her pause, she simply reached up and cradled the side of Needy’s face. She felt the juice from the cherries smear under her chin, and knew she would be stained, too. But she wouldn’t move. She would never have the audacity to offend such an act of tenderness by her flinching away from the mess.
A reaction that granted her the reward of Jennifer’s lips parting ever so slightly as they stared at one another. Needy could remember Jennifer’s thumb near her mouth. She could remember the way she felt an urge to take it between her lips, clean it off.
“Here,” Jennifer’s voice could barely be heard, despite the quiet surrounding them. She brought the split cherry up to Needy’s mouth in offering.
It felt like a welcome substitute for her thumb.
Their eyes didn’t waver as Needy parted her lips, allowing Jennifer to bring the cherry closer. The girl, while still gentle, pushed it against her with more force than Needy knew was necessary, smearing its stain against her in some marking. When she’d finished swallowing, the girl spoke, and Needy could see that there was something different in her eyes but she wasn’t sure what it was yet. “You’ve never been kissed.”
Needy felt the spell of whatever was happening around them break as she realised the shame she felt about her response. Wondered if Jennifer was setting some trapdoor for her to fall through. She looked down at her feet. Could feel the cherry drying against her skin. “No. You know that.”
After everything that had happened, Needy was half inclined to think that it wasn’t until she was covered in Jennifer’s mess that the girl wanted her. She lay on her cot at night, and had the memories wash over her until they were technicolour- an acid melt of instances, blurring into one another. Kisses that blurred into one another. A reality, a parallel universe, an existence in which it wasn’t taken from her. Blurred into one another. Where she’d never been uncertain. Where things could be better. A world where they were stuck in a time loop of that moment with the cherry crushed against her teeth. Where their hands weren’t bloodstained. Where the sun never set.
She wasn’t sure about any of that shit. But she spent a lot of her time entertaining it.
Blurred into one another.
Her own opinions even blurred into one another.
The shrinks tried to talk to her a lot about her relationship with Jennifer. She’d stopped trying to articulate it. Needy wasn’t sure she’d even want to hear any of them try to explain it to her. It was her own mess to pick through.
Jennifer’s mess.
Their mess.
She cried about it. A lot, at first. Not so much anymore.
Now she missed it.
Even when she felt violent; a new emotion, for the most part. When her fantasies of moments that could have been grew red around the edges and Needy thought about shoving her, or clawing at her- biting her lip until she bled. She would clutch at her pillowcase, sobbing into it, wishing she had taken some piece of Jennifer with her. Stolen a shirt. A stuffed animal. Anything. Even in one particularly sick instance, she’d found herself yearning for the hairbrush that Jennifer kept in the bottom drawer of her bathroom vanity- tucked far away from any accidental use, because Needy knew it was the artefact she had used in a very nonconventional sense.
She wondered if she still wanted to become Jennifer.
Because she felt more like her now than ever before.
When she wasn’t thinking about Jennifer, she was thinking about how she could avenge her. Avenge herself. The only logical conclusion that Needy could draw was that of Low Shoulder.
Sure, things weren’t perfect before that night at Melody Lane, but that was the stark point in which Jennifer became a man-eating succubus. That couldn't be argued.
Which was the catalyst for the altered trajectory for the rest of her life.
She couldn’t even look her own mother in the face anymore without being reminded of the monstrous act she had to commit. The rage of all of that felt very displaced, she needed somewhere to put it, someone to blame.
Low Shoulder.
She was different now. Mentally, physically.
She could fucking hover.
It was something she could tap into. It was the reminder that Jennifer was never really going to be gone. She was forever changed.
It was something Needy was equal parts furious about, and yet she cherished all at once. She supposed that it was only fitting that she was destined to continue to waver on either side of the pedestal, day by day, moment by moment.
Jennifer would never really be gone. She lived through her now.
But she was gone. Irrevocably gone. Never to be seen again; she would never utter another word, dream another dream, share a kiss- never again would Needy, let alone anyone else, walk into a room and see her turn her head to look. She would never feel the sun on her skin. Never see a new place.
She was dead.
Needy had made sure of it.
But she would always be there. As an idea. A thought. A memory. A ghost.
She wasn’t sure if it would ever get better. Easier. Or if the burden was simply hers to carry. Some karma from a past life indiscretion. An ugly fact of life. Trauma. Or if her devotion was her reverence. She existed as the sole acolyte of Jennifer’s life. A vessel in which only she could understand, alone and swollen with the task of sitting with it. With Jennifer’s life.
She wondered if she could think her into a deity.
She wondered if she already was.
And if she was good, or bad.
Needy was consumed. The ouroboros. Alight with the rage, the despair, at peace with the desire, the love- everchanging, day by day, moment by moment. Resentment. Gratitude. It cycled, the wheel turned, the sun rose, and set. It would keep being that way. Life went on for everyone else. She was certain it would for her, too, one day. But not now.
First she had to put an end to the story where it began. And that was Low Shoulder. There was no question as to whether or not she could do it, or would; Needy knew it was only a matter of when the time would be right.
Until then, she missed Jennifer.
She wanted one more conversation. One more night sleeping in the same bed, facing one another, holding hands. She wanted to wake up one more time and see Jennifer asleep- so relaxed, harmless, and at peace. She liked to imagine her that way. At rest.
Needy thought about it every night as she went to bed- memorised the way she remembered Jennifer looking as she slept. But mostly she just wanted Jennifer back. It was the impossible reality. The unsettling end; only for her to discover that the world did not stop when Jennifer left it, a devastating and dizzying finding. It was hard for her to comprehend. And so she clung.
There were so many things she didn’t understand.
But she understood the depth of her loss very well. People told her to search for meaning, but she wasn't sure if she could find it. She'd tried digging up the graves in her memories, only to find them all empty. Devoid of anything that could change the fact that she had killed her friend. And while she could say that it was mercy- which, she still believed- she didn't feel right subscribing to the idea that she had saved Jennifer. Though, she had. But there were days where she felt like she was barely staying alive. A long line of colossal fuck-ups that Needy would pay for with her life. She wasn't sure if there was meaning to that.
She just missed her friend. That's all.
She searched for shooting stars out of her window.
And thought of Jennifer with every wish on an eyelash.