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deathchrist2000 · 7 years

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The Eyes of Her Double

A Clara Oswald/Faction Paradox fan fiction.

Inevitably, Clara O’Winn found that looking at the ceiling was not a good way to mute out the muffled screams of her double. It wasn’t so much because she couldn’t come up with many inventive ideas from the ceiling to distract her; she had long since perfected this method of avoidance and had already created several inventive story ideas, as well as a few fan fiction prompts, from the patterns the Styrofoam alone (her favorite involved Captain Picard, the NCC-2260, and Gok’ū, leader of the Tribbles). Nor was it because she wasn’t able to ignore the terrible screams her double made. She was a child of the early 21st century, an era where those who can ignore a terrible situation will and those who can’t die. Or get called a “faggot Ess-Jew snowflake.”

Not even the sounds of the screams were distressing to her, as they reminded Clara of long passionate nights spent under the moonlit fields where she used to play with her girlfriend. These were her favorite nights growing up, as they were away from the stress of the daily grind of both her job and her disapproving stepparents. For the most part, they were unbothered by any of the locals, who assumed them to be a bunch of wild animals and would call them such if they were ever caught. Some nights a group of bikers would come to watch, but given that Clara was a co-founding member of the gang, they tended to only be there to say hello or participate if Clara allowed it. The games Clara and her girlfriend played ranged from horsey to cops and robbers to pegging (though that was only when their mutual frenemy, Jack, was around).

It wasn’t even the fear of the people in the motel room next door paying enough attention to call the cops. Clara had long known this motel to be the go to location for crack, smack, and other such drug dealers to make arrangements with larger entities to practice their trade. These dealings ranged from “which locations are ok for me to make deal in” to “I need you to be my representative in a drug deal that could end my life if I go” to “PLEASE IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, DON’T KILL MY DAUGHTER” among other mundane deals. If the police were to get wind of a kidnapping at that motel, they might find the skeletons hidden in the closets, both figuratively and literally if some local legends are to be believed, and motel management didn’t need that hassle. They already had to worry about whether or not the drug lords would kill them for knowing too much.

Rather, what distressed Clara was the ways in which her double was not like her, despite being nearly identical. She noticed that her double was roughly an inch taller, had green eyes, blonde hair with pink and purple highlights that was typically put into a pony tail but was now unrestrained, and a small, nearly unnoticeable, mole on her left cheek. Her ears, until fairly recently, held little circular earrings that had been passed down, generation to generation, for over a hundred years. The double’s skin was obviously paler than Clara’s, though she did have the soft tan expected of a California resident. She was left handed, though she didn’t realize it, as she had always written with her right. Her hands never worked any harder than a few hours on a keyboard typing a paper for her college professor on the implications of time travel on free will. Her body did not have any scars on it.

In the long run, these differences didn’t matter all that much, as her fate would still be the same. They would come for her and Clara would get what she deserved.

Clara O’Winn was only 10 years old when she realized she couldn’t die.

It was on a long car ride when it happened. With here was her mother, Janet, driving the car while thinking about doing activities such as being in a relationship that actually has love in it, not going to prison, or climbing a mountain that she would never do in her life time; her father, Bob, who was as oblivious to his wife’s feeling towards him much like how when one is driving late at night and a deer suddenly jumps in front of the car, killing everyone involved; her younger brother, Francis, who as at that moment on 8Chan figuring out his sexuality, a move that would lead him to spend years in therapy and inadvertently destroy the career of a prominent presidential nominee; and finally, Flapjack, the family dog who would die long before anyone else in the car.

As for the car itself, it was not moving. Clara didn’t know why it wasn’t moving, nor did the majority of drivers to preoccupied with honking their horns to solve the issue at hand. It appeared to Clara that her side of the road was completely jammed. Curious, as she is wont to be, Clara decided to leave the car. She knew that it was usually unsafe to leave a car on a busy highway, but Clara felt that it was safe to do so as nearly every other car was beginning to send an emissary to discover the source of the calamity that had befallen them. Also, Clara knew that she wouldn’t get lost like the last time she abandoned her family, since the road was just a straight line. That, and her parents were too busy playing at adulthood to notice her leave the car. The only one who did notice Clara leave was Flapjack, who silently followed her to his death.

At first, Clara felt that this was like one of the adventures she would make up in her grandmother’s garden back home, about mysterious travelers who right wrongs, defeat the baddies, and kick some serious ass. She always loved coming up with those stories, but she only felt safe telling them to her grandmother while weeding the garden on hot summer’s days. She never dreamed she would ever be one of those characters. Too self involved for those types, too ordinary, too boring to be a hero. Not even this quest to discover what caused all the cars to stop was an adventure of her liking. It was an adventure, sure, but it was just a mundane curiosity that everyone wants in on. A true adventure, Clara believed, would be a solitary experience. She would hold this belief for the remainder of the day.

While walking towards the source of the problem, Clara encountered another young girl, whose name she would never share, nor would Clara. She had dull blue eyes, red ravenous hair turned into pigtails, and slightly yellow teeth. The girl was roughly 13 years old, but she appeared to be much younger. She was barely three inches shorter than Clara, though she held herself much like a wolf cub trying to initiate themselves into a clan they weren’t born into. There was something familiar about this girl, though Clara couldn’t put her finger on it. She claimed her family sent her to solve the problem, but even at a young age Clara knew that was bullshit. Still, the girl seemed nice enough, for a kid, so Clara allowed the girl to follow her to the center of the commotion. To pass the time, the girls talked about the only thing there was to talk about.

“What do you think it is,” asked Clara.

“Deer,” replied the girl curtly.

“Deer? Surely it must be something more interesting than that.”

“Deer are interesting,” argued the companion. Clara was unsure if she hurt her companion’s feelings but assumed, as always, that she had, so she tried to save face towards this stranger, whom she would never meet again in her lifetime. Though she would still think about her, occasionally, whenever she saw deer eating her garden.

“I mean, ah… surely there must be an explanation that isn’t so… ordinary?”

“Oh yeah, like what?”

“uhh… Aliens?” The girl with blue eyes raised an eyebrow. “I mean, there’s signs everywhere, y’know. Books talking about crop circles and people being abducted and probed and… and… C’mon, you have to wonder, right? What’s out there and all.”

“Not really,” the pigtailed stranger sighed, knowingly, with a smile on her face that always appeared whenever she had good dreams, “there are so many fantastic sights out in the world: tornados that can lift frogs states away; 100 ravens sitting outside, waiting for the homeowner to just… open the door so the can scatter; the depths of the ocean that house creatures we have never seen before. I just don’t have time to think about space.” This would change a month after her 24th birthday, when the Children of Nyarlethotep used her in a failed ritual to summon their dark and terrible god from a self imposed exile. In that moment, she saw that space was nature’s dark mirror. Cold and uncaring like a parent who is never there. And yet, there’s a beauty blocked off by its needlessly cruel nature, born out of necessity lest the War, and those who fight in it, kill it for not choosing a side. A beauty seen only by those who appear to die, as all the others would, but in reality transcend the body’s physical form, since physicality is a mere option to this solitary figure, and be everywhere and every when.

The only retort Clara could offer the teenager at the time was a snort and a “whatever” before continuing their journey in silence.

As the museum of cars went on and on, people began to head back to their homes, accepting this bizarre occurrence to be an unexplainable event. Perhaps some gave up because of the unending forest that surrounded the road like fingers grasping at the palm of a hand, waiting to crush the insect that flew its way in. Or perhaps it was because they realized that the universe is a much bigger and terrifying place, whose answers will consume those who dare to try to discover them and as such it is best to care for those closest to them, rather than walk to the end of this dark forest road. Or maybe they just don’t care for walking. A few, however, persisted.

Eventually, even Clara and her stranger decided to call it quits. Or rather their mothers found them, grabbed them by the ear, and dragged them back to their car. At some point in the future, the roads freed up, but by then the sun had set. One of the drivers could have sworn he heard a crunching noise as he turned off the highway to stay the night at a motel, but thought nothing of it until the last seconds before his death.

Clara and her family, meanwhile, decided not to stop driving. Her parents would alternate between who was driving and who was sleeping for the night. Normally, Janet could drive the whole way there, but the incident with the stopped cars got her in a mood that forced her to take a break. Bob, who was currently driving the car, was slowly showing his fellow drivers that he should not be driving at this hour, nearly killing several of them without noticing. Clara and Francis, meanwhile, slept in the back seat, dreaming.

While Francis’ dreams were of a symbolic and sexual nature, Clara’s were far more straightforward. In some cultures, far in the depths of space, in the halls of power and the streets of the powerless, there are tales of what one sees when they die. Some say that there is a bright light that leads you to where you will be judged, be it by a scale or Santa Claus. Others claim that there is nothing but the black void seen when one closes their eyes, waiting for REM sleep. Few even claim beings “souls” reincarnate into other beings, to keep the karmic balance and save money on developing new character models.

Few stories, however, tell of the Death Dream. The Death Dream is the kind of dream only seen when one dies in their sleep. It tells of the life that one lived as a mash up: events bleeding into each other, creating new narratives. A mother, who died in childbirth, dancing at her daughter’s wedding; a family of old men, born decade’s apart, sharing war stories and the good old days; and other tales that the living can never know. It was in this state that Clara O’Winn died in.

Though it wouldn’t be diagnosed until well after this point, Clara could very well be considered Patient 0 of a disease lovingly called “The True Plague”. So called, as victims of it lose access to the parts of the brain that allow secrets to be kept prior to death. When Clara began exhibiting these symptoms, her mother dismissed it as merely the childish bravado seen when one has their ear pulled by their mother in public. The True Plague is fast acting and the survival rates are so astronomically low that there are better odds of surviving sex on the dark side of the moon for an entire hour. Naturally, Clara O’Winn died from the disease.

And then, she woke up.

She wasn’t anywhere new. She was still in her family car, woken up by her parents bickering about the direction they’re supposed to be heading in. Her brother was drooling on her shoulder, somehow still sleeping through the most foul-mouthed conversation their parents had up to that point. Clara made a note of that for later. The sun beamed down from outside the car, the windows haven been taken down so the cool breeze of the previous midnight hour could engulf the car in its soothing nature.

Surveying the scene, two thoughts popped up in Clara’s mind. The first was that she should be dead. It wasn’t a thought she fully understood at the time. She wasn’t dead, not even in the dream. (Her dream involved watching a low budget 1960’s British science fiction show with her great aunt Harriet and a pair transsexual wereseals while eating French Fry shaped spider legs on a table made out of wood draped in the flesh of still living white nationalists, who the only people in the room not having a good time.) And yet, she should be dead. She felt perfectly healthy, no longer feeling like she had a fever while freezing to death, no need to shout secrets about how Mr. Pick hates her because she caught him kissing one of the janitors without wearing his wedding band. She was completely free of The True Plague.

Clara asked her mother to take her pulse, and, when they were at a rest stop to get some breakfast and bring back the good driver, there was indeed a pulse to be found. Regardless, Clara knew that she was supposed to be dead. She tried to make sense of it all, but could only come to one conclusion: she was God. She quickly realized her mistake when it didn’t rain ice cream and instead realized there could only be one conclusion: she was finally the protagonist in the stories she loved to make up.

It was as if the universe had given her superpowers to… do what, exactly? Solve crime? Topple empires? What? Regardless, she knew she couldn’t tell her family about this, not even her beloved grandmother. They would all tell her that she’s too young to do anything. That she shouldn’t aspire to do anything more than what they did. Be realistic. No, instead Clara decided to bide her time, plan out her escape, and, when the moment’s right, flee from her captors and save the world.

The second thought that came to her mind was the realization that Flapjack had gone missing. Which was a shame, as Clara always believed he was a good boy.

“You haven’t been on a date in how long?” Jane teased with mock horror. They had been roommates for roughly a year, and yet Clara felt as if they were already lifelong friends. And though this would not be the case, as some lives last longer than others, they were still as thick as thieves. And yet, there were secrets kept between the two of them. Jane, for example, recently joined an organization that offered to pay for her entire college tuition, as well as hire her immediately after college for further work in exchange for a small donation of blood. (What Jane was unaware of was that said donation would be used to rewrite her timeline so that she was always a fiercely loyal member of the organization, and would die in their temporal War games. But then, corporations tend to leave out little details like that.)

Clara, meanwhile, had many secrets kept from those around her. She never told anyone of her immortal status, save for when it would be written off as the ravings of someone who really shouldn’t be driving a car at the moment. She didn’t tell Jane that she used to be a blonde or that Jane suddenly didn’t need glasses or that the lifelong vegan was eating a cheeseburger. Clara didn’t mention to Jane that she was aware of the tattoo on her left butt cheek of a snake eating its own tail, nor that it suddenly changed to that of something that looked like a snake skull midway through the semester. But then, Clara had to be aware of Jane’s changes for them to be secrets. For her, she had always been like that.

As for the subject of dating, Clara had long given up on the endeavor. It wasn’t that she shared her roommate’s asexual tendencies. Rather, she felt dating to be a waste of time. Fiction had long taught her that living forever meant other people would die around her. She never liked death, not even before seeing her mother whither away in a prison cell, denied food and medical care for too long. Clara wanted to avoid that as much as possible. Besides, she wasn’t even sure if she would stop aging at some point or if she would become a shriveled husk of 20000, forever aging until the end of time, and perhaps even longer (the latter, as it turns out).

However, on occasion, she felt like having a nice old-fashioned one-night stand that meant absolutely nothing, save for some (hopefully) good sex. Usually, Clara used the Tinder app to find someone also open to such an arrangement. However, she had just recently finished The Telephone Book, and had grown extremely paranoid by its fascist implications and decided to stay away from phones until absolutely necessary like later that night, when she needed to give out a phone number. As such, she decided the next sensible move would be to ask Jane if she knew anyone willing to go out on a date and hope that whoever it was could be let down easily.

Fortunately she didn’t have to, as Jane had an old friend coming up that weekend, but needed the room to herself to perform a blood ritual as part of her initiation into the organization, though she simply told Clara she was studying for a final, a lie she thought was true.

“You’ll like her,” Jane assured, “ she’s got a wicked sense of humor, a quick mind, and a hot body, so I’m told. Hell, she even kinda looks like you.” That last part befuddled Clara, as many of people she had sex with tended to respond with the opposite reaction. Then again, they had been the kind of people who expect to have sex with a person like one has milk in your cereal, so she tended to ignore their remarks. Maybe Jane was exaggerating about their similarities.

Regardless, Jane had set their date for a local restaurant that served overpriced steaks and other fancy food, but made up for it with the large fountain in the center that shines an indoor rainbow throughout the restaurant. Jane had said her friend would be recognizable by her dark red dress, which was one of a kind. Clara opted not to wear her blue dress, solely to spite her alchemist friends and their binary views on gender. Instead, she wore a dark purple suit with a long black tie.

When Clara arrived at the restaurant, she was somewhat surprised to discover that her dining companion did have a resemblance to her. Not by much, Clara mused to herself, I mean, she has longer hair than me, she doesn’t have a scar on the back of her hand from when I failed to trick my brother into getting me a drink from the gas station, and there seems to be a tattoo on her shoulder. But perhaps the largest difference Clara found between the two of them was the eyes. It wasn’t as though they were a different color or shape. That was one of the places where they were nearly alike. Rather, it was the implications of their eyes. Though Clara didn’t fully grasp what this meant for the two of them, deep down she understood. But instead of dwelling upon the similarities between the two of them, Clara instead decided to introduce herself to the woman before her.

“Claire Orlando,” she replied.

“Bit of an odd name,” smiled Clara as she read the menu, “don’t you think?”

“Not really, no. I mean, there are loads of people named Claire.”

“That’s not what I…” but before Clara could finish that thought, the waiter arrived to ask them what they wanted to eat. They both ordered the steak, as it was honestly the only good food served at the restaurant. Clara resumed, saying, “I mean, isn’t it a bit odd that we almost have the same name?”

“Not particularly,” Claire said, hoping it would be enough, “I mean, it’s not like we’ve known each other for our whole lives. We literally just met, and you’re from, what?”

“New York.”

“Right, and I’ve pretty much lived in California for my whole life. The odds of it happening to me twice are astronomical, but they do happen.”

“Twice?”

“Uhm… I, uh, Why do you even care anyways?” Claire asked, hoping that this would lead the discussion away from what she felt was a rather embarrassing teenage phase.

Clara sighed. “Honestly, I’m just trying to make small talk. It’s been a while since I’ve had to do this sort of thing.”

“And what sort of thing is that?” Claire asked, silently thanking the god she was praying to as Clara asked that question (Sadly, and perhaps fittingly, it was Glycon).

“You know, dating. Going to dinner. Talking about things we have in common. Ah geez, I don’t even know.” Clara began rubbing her eyelids with her thumb and index finger; her tone was growing slightly exasperated.

“Well… what do you usually do on a Saturday night?”

“Oh, you know. Stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?” What Clara did not want to tell Claire was that her Saturday nights were predominately spent working on a series of fan fiction projects including various one off stories based off of minor non-speaking characters, brief flash fiction projects about cartoon horses, and multiple long chaptered works about certain science fiction characters practicing BDSM. But her magnum opus would be the series of fix-fics on the Animorphs book series, which took the themes of terrorism, alienation, and other child friendly themes and brought them to the forefront. She only got up to the 49th book in the series before realizing that the spark of creativity that had started her on this path had moved on to bigger and better things (though it would be awhile before it would move on to more profitable things). If she was being honest, she was just doing this series to finish it up. Fortunately, there weren’t that many books left in the series for her to work on, so she would simply take the breaks needed for her not to face complete burnout (as each book rewrite could be as short as 15,000 or as long as 100,000). By the time she reached the final book, Clara was almost glad that a group of Russian hackers deleted most of the work she had done for no other reason than a hatred for a specific ship. It meant that she could claim that she wouldn’t be able to redo all of them again and she could move on to better things. All told, the only fics that survived the Russian hacking job were #48-The Return and #50-The Ultimate, which were, ironically, the primary source for the shipping war that caused the aforementioned purge in the first place.

Instead, Clara said, “Watch TV, read a book, do some homework. Normal stuff. What about you? What do you do on a Saturday night?”

“Masturbate.” To say Claire did not want to say that word would be an understatement. Given such a statement, there was an extremely awkward pause in their conversation, long enough for their steaks to arrive. Claire finally broke the silence. “Sorry, I panicked, so I tried to make a joke. It didn’t work.”

“Clearly,” Clara remarked, more focused on her steak than this person she would only have to interact with for another hour or so. Though she wouldn’t say it aloud, if Clara saw the response in the same context in a movie, she would have most likely laughed at that “joke.” But, as this was not a movie, Clara was not pleased with the situation. A shame given that up to that point in the date, Clara believed that they were getting on rather nicely.

“Look,” Claire pleaded after having her first bite of steak, “I know I screwed up, but we still have to talk about something.”

“Like what, your taste in porn?”

“Sure, if that’s what you want to talk about,” Claire replied, grinning to hide her desperation. When in doubt, she thought, go for humor. Clara nearly spurt out her coke with lemon when she heard this offer.

“No, no. That’s uh… that’s fine… So, what do you do exactly?” At that moment, Claire was enrolled in an internship program with an organization that sent her to various inner cities throughout the country to work as a TA under several High School English teachers who would allow students enrolled with them to learn their second language. She planned to travel the world and write a novel about her experiences teaching to various cultures and what she learned from them. She would never get around to writing it. Claire was taking the week off to visit an old childhood friend, unaware she was setting Claire up with her roommate, Clara.

“Working on my teaching degree, you?” Clara, meanwhile, was concluding her training as an actress with an acting company. The director of the troupe claimed to have plans to groom her into being one of the great actresses of the modern age, but he said that of all the new girls. She played several minor roles in various plays before making her break two years back as Lady Macbeth in a well received production of Macbeth. Afterwards, she moved on to other roles including Ophelia, The Stepdaughter in Six Characters in Search of an Author, and the lead role in an original play about the shooting of Andy Warhol. Currently, she was working on a script for a satirical one-act play about the fairy queen spending a day in outside of her kingdom. Its lead would be a 10 year old girl whose mother was locked away in prison for killing her husband in self defense, so she claims. The play ends with the girl running away to fairyland after trapping the fairy queen in a fallen world.

Rather than respond to her companion, Clara proceeded to feel the urge to puke out her guts as if she was the first kill of a horror movie more interested in cheap thrills and gore than in character drama and gore. Indeed, nearly every one of the patrons at the restaurant was puking their guts out. That was, except for Clara and Claire. For unbeknownst to the patrons, the main chef had long been a member of a cult who worshiped the Greek god Glycon. They had long planned to summon the snake god onto the mortal plane, but lacked a means to do so. That was, until the chef read up on a mystical ritual in a mediocre fantasy novel that required a massive and painful sacrifice to summon the main baddies’ snake god. They didn’t concern themselves with the obvious flaws in their plan (after all, they did believe Glycon was a snake) and went with it anyways. All told, 51 people were murdered that night. It was fortunate that the police were tipped off later that night, as the cult, not seeing their god, decided to try again at a later date. The restaurant, wanting to save face, sued the meat supplier for giving them tainted flesh.

As for Clara and Claire… the sensation of discovering that someone who has a similar name to you, a mild resemblance, and also can’t die is a coincidence too large to ignore. There was a long, awkward silence between the two of them as the police put blankets around them to deal with the shock. They were both smart enough to lie to the police, claiming that they were just about to eat the steak when people started puking their guts out. Eventually, when the night got quiet and they were alone under the dancing sky, they exchanged phone numbers, as this is the kind of thing one would want to know more about. Then Clara made an all too familiar suggestion to Claire.

When Juliet returned to the room, the stench had not gone away. More peculiarly, was the snake puppet in the back pocket of her roommate’s pants, which were lying carelessly on the couch. Juliet could have sworn she heard it talking, but brushed it off as her overactive imagination trying to distract her from the naked bodies in the middle of the room.

Sooner than they expected, Clara and Claire found themselves renting an apartment together. Even more surprisingly, was that it was located in Union Square, New York City in an apartment that, under normal circumstances, would cost $10,000 per month. Neither of them had employment per say, though Claire would be working a teaching position that in no way could afford to pay $10,000 per month, and yet they had an apartment to live in. But in a rather oddly forced tone of voice, the landlord, a lean man of 50 with damage from a third degree burn on his left cheek that made it look like there was no cheek at all, said they could have the room for free for their first year. And while that did seem suspicious, their options at that time were either there or a place in New Jersey. They chose the saner option.

Clara suspected it had something to do with the dealings they had last year with a cult. They were in the midst of spring break in California. Clara wanted to surprise her girlfriend for once by showing up unannounced and to introduce herself to the family. Claire never talked about her family during their Skype chats, though Clara did occasionally hear grumblings in the background when Claire claimed to be at home. Deep down, in the part of the mind where childhood and childish dreams reside, she hoped that they were homophobic. Not so much because she wanted more people who thought of her as an abomination against God, but rather because it would mean that she could save her girlfriend and they could fly off into the sunset, living happily ever after, finally giving her a story to be the protagonist of. But those dreams never arose to the conscious mind, as the part of Clara’s brain that housed empathy remarked about the banality of such dreams.

When she arrived at the Californian airport, she bumped into a janitor by the name of Charlotte Orman. Charlotte had spent the past 20 years working at the airport, barely able to keep her house from losing it, thus making her and her three daughters homeless. What Charlotte would never know is that the only reason she was able to have a house at all was because an influential friend wanted to spite a competitor who wished to use the property to build a high rise for rich people who wanted to act like they were starving artists who didn’t have an offshore bank account they could fall back on. As such, the landlord of the trailer park Charlotte lived in would be bribed double whatever the competitor offered.

Immediately, Clara was apologetic, a ritual she grew up with less for the sake of the person she was apologizing to than for her own. She offered to buy Charlotte something to drink. Charlotte mumbled yes, but she was more transfixed by the woman before her. Clara looked exactly like Charlotte imagined she could have looked like when she was young and wanted to set the world on fire. She had the scruffy long hair Charlotte thought she could pull off if given the chance and the figure of a non-anorexic actress in her prime. Her arm was covered in tattoos Charlotte was always afraid of getting and the eyes of a revolutionary that always stared back at Charlotte asking what went wrong. She always wanted to be this woman, instead the one she grew into.

Sadly, the woman she wanted to be would never be proud of who she became, as while they were sharing drinks Charlotte put a roofie into Clara’s. The things you find in an airport bathroom. Nobody cared at the airport, save for some lewd remarks about Charlotte’s sexuality that were unfounded in the facts her coworkers had. It wasn’t that Charlotte wanted to do this to the young girl, she had no hate or jealousy towards her. She just had three kids to care for, and they always took priority to her dreams.

When Clara awoke, she found herself tied to a table made of stone. It was wet with a substance Clara typically felt on the other side of her skin. Next to her were rows upon rows of women just like her: bound, gagged, and about to die a horrible death. Clara wasn’t worried though. She knew she couldn’t die, no matter what these people did. But then she looked closer at the women around her. Closer than she ever thought she’d need to. In particular, she looked at the woman at the end of the row, who was about to be sacrificed. Clara decided her name was “Cassandra,” which coincidentally it was. She saw something familiar in her, like a childhood friend she never had. Cassandra had frizzy hair that was usually kept in no particular style. She had hands that worked primarily on a farm, but sometime would be used to write about the wonders of nature. Her nose was broken, most likely by whoever was keeping them hostage. But what caught Clara’s eyes were Cassandra’s. At first, Clara thought they looked like none she had ever seen in her life. And then, it dawned on her that she had seen them. They were the only eyes she would have to see in her life, no matter what she did. And with that realization, more realizations came to her, flooding her mind with monstrous implications of what made the tables wet. And as she stared into the eyes of her double, they appeared to turn pale with death.

There were only two women in front of Clara. She couldn’t create names for them (and they would have been wrong anyways) as she was far to busy trying to escape her predicament. She didn’t want to die, as she hadn’t discovered the horrifying and obvious implications of being an immortal that ages, and so she tried to look for a way to free herself from the table. It dawned on her that there were no chains on the table, but she felt like she was being held to it like a mother seeing her child before sitting on an electric chair. It appeared that there was no way out.

They came to her, eventually. Their knives were drenched in the blood of countless other people with lives just as valuable as anyone worth less than a billion dollars. They were smiling, apologetic beings who wanted only what they thought was best for Clara. They said that she was the child of the great god Nyarlethotep. They talked about a cosmic War between corporate fascism and freedom. The cultists proclaimed that humanity was a mere insect in the face of this uncaring War of gods, and all they wished was peace. They claimed their god was the personification of freedom. They said that if they did it right this time, their god would free them from the chain of mortality. They showed Clara a rotting corpse; still alive and shriveled to the proportions of a doll a baby could hold, pleading for the sweet release of death. They asked Clara, with mouths too much like her own, if they could sacrifice her to their god. And Clara said no. They didn’t care of course, they were going to cut her up anyway, but they still had to ask. It was a key part of the tradition. The last thing Clara saw was the blade that murdered countless others pierce her flesh.

And then, Clara woke up. She was in the passenger seat of a rental car, used mostly by people who didn’t care if a car had air conditioning. Driving the car was Claire, drenched in a sweat that covered her tears. Clara was groggy at first, but was slowly able to pick herself up from the slightly opened car window. Claire focused on the road, not even acknowledging her passenger.

“W… what happened?” Clara asked, still a bit dazed.

“You got drunk at the airport, and I picked you up,” Claire replied, hiding all emotion and praying to Glycon that this would work.

“I don’t remember calling you.”

“You were drunk.”

“I don’t feel hung over.” Clara pulled out her phone. “Claire?”

No response.

“It says that it’s Wednesday.”

No response.

“I got into the airport on Sunday.” Clara looked deep into the eyes of her girlfriend and noticed that they couldn’t do what they thought needed to be done.

Claire pulled over the car and nearly everything poured out. She told her love that she was kidnapped by a cult called the Children of Nyarlethotep. She told her that she was a member back when she was a stupid teenager who didn’t think things through. Who thought that the answers lay with people who were just like her in nearly every way. How they were Claire’s only friends growing up, or they told her as such. How she believed them. How she participated. How she felt that if she ever told Clara, that she would hate her and never want to-

Instead, Clara kissed her girlfriend.

In the end, Clara spent the night at Claire’s house. Her parents were rather nice, if a bit too fond of the 60’s for their own good. Claire didn’t want to talk about them because she felt there really wasn’t much to talk about. She was wrong, as all people are when they say that about a family member. Clara and Claire swore to never join the Children of Nyarlethotep, a promise that would never be kept.

Claire, who was more familiar with the Children of Nyarlethotep, dismissed the claim that the cult is funding their apartment, as funds of the cult tend to go towards far more sensible things like human sacrifices, fixing their evil lair, or buying a coffee maker that actually works. Claire thought she noticed their landlord talking to someone shaped like a person. An alien, though he looked too human to be an alien, yet too alien to be a human. She couldn’t make out what they were talking about, just a bit of grunts and growls. They appeared to be in the middle of some kind of interpretive dance that kept them extremely close. Claire didn’t think they saw her. She didn’t say any of this to Clara, as that would require remembering the encounter.

In the meantime, they had to move their stuff into the apartment. To pass the time as men who sweat like a character on Baywatch carried their stuff into the room, they decided to come up with names for people who also held an immortal status. It was Clara’s idea, having felt brazen one afternoon during that fateful spring break. They created three base assumptions as rules for their game. First, the people all had to be women as all the people like them were women (this isn’t remotely true as Clark Oswald can attest). Second, they had to have the initials C.O. as this was also true of all the ones they had met and indeed was generally true of everyone of said status (save on alien worlds where the letters “C” and “O” do not exist). And third, no stupid names like Charity Oregon.

All told, of the people they had come up with up to that point, only three existed. The first, Carrie Oswin, was a director of a museum of art in the upper area of the state of Connecticut. She has four children, all out of the house, and is content with her life, expecting to die within the next couple of years of natural causes. Then there was Carmen O’Winn, a thief primarily working in Europe. She was inspired by a television show she watched as a kid whose title character was also a thief working her own agenda and setting her own rules. She stole many artifacts over the years, primarily from the rich and powerful. At the time, she was being contracted by a group of men who had never gone outside their own mother’s basement, let alone talk to a girl their age, who wanted her to search the house of an archivist of old 60’s television to see if he had any tapes that the BBC Archives could use. No such tapes were found, and she barely made it out of there alive. Finally, Cassandra Owsley did not exist in that exact moment. Nor would she ever, despite existing in later moments as well as earlier ones.

They spent the hours making up names, all of them fake, as well as taking breaks to argue how to position the tables in the living room, which bathroom got which curtains, and other banal conversations. In the end, they were able to make the apartment their own. Innocuously, Clara asked Claire for a cup of milk, only to discover that they forgot to go shopping. They decided that it could wait until the morning and decided to take an early rest. One of them would get it in the morning.

Clara wouldn’t see Claire again for a long time.

After a month of grieving, she was brought into the arms of the Children of Nyarlethotep by despair. It wasn’t that she was unaware of groups that could help her in her time of need, or even ones that were primarily run by people like her. It was that the cult got to her first.

The cult didn’t want her depressed, as that only gets people so far. They wanted her indoctrinated and fiercely loyal. They had had this exact situation happen countless times over the years where vulnerable people of their kind would be found and needed to be taught the right way of existing. They lived for their god and one day they would die for him as well. Until that day, they needed more sacrifices and those willing to sacrifice. The cult felt she had the tenacity to be one of them and not a mere sacrifice. But first, they had to break her down.

The depression did most of the work for them. She already felt like she was falling into the abyss. It was her fault they took Claire. If she had gone to the market, they would’ve taken her instead and Claire would be safe. Then she thought of how Claire would feel without her, and fell deeper into the pit. It didn’t help that the cult never referred to her by name, simply saying “you” or “girl” or something along those lines. Or, for that matter, their inexplicable decision to refer to Claire solely as “the deceased” or “it.”

They had to remove the influence of Claire from her heart. If she had even the slightest inkling love for anyone other than Nyarlethotep, she would desire freedom. They didn’t touch her, not physically. They just talked, as people who offer shoulders often tend to do. At first, they just listened to her about how much she loved Claire. How Claire was the only thing anchoring her to life. Then, the cult twisted the stories, gas lighting her claims of abuse. That Claire never loved her, only wanted someone who she could have power over.

It took time for her to accept the truth her friends were telling her. Years, months, hours, they all bled together in the sanctum the Children of Nyarlethotep reside in. She thought that it was love, real love. She didn’t realize how often they argued, how easily the scars faded, like the one she got last spring break when the deceased stabbed her in the stomach. It hurt to come to terms with this, but her sisters said that healing hurts.

Time passed. Eventually she had to show the cult that she was truly theirs. She had to perform a sacrifice. They provided her a book, telling of the War, of their god, of all the factions and sides and important members. And then, something happened to her. Something the cult wasn’t expecting. They thought of everything, save for one small thing they weren’t even aware could ruin everything. It began when she was reading the final pages of the ritual. She was practicing the various sigils on a dead homeless man, as all trainees do, looking back and forth between her work and the design. Suddenly, a wind from nowhere blew the pages away. It whispered like an old, long dead, imaginary friend.

She looked at the book, frustrated that she’d have to flip through the tome again to find where she was. She’d probably forget where she was and have to perform a new ritual. Homeless corpses, while not limited, are a tedious item to find. The page the wind turned the book to seemed familiar to her, especially the symbol. It was almost like skull of a snake but the fangs were too long. And there were other teeth around it. The eyes weren’t shaped like snake eyes, but almost human ones. And the snout, which was much too large to be a snake’s, had teeth in it as well. She had seen it before, somewhere though she couldn’t remember. When she was young and wanted to set the world on fire perhaps. She thought of where she saw it. It was on a butt. A friend’s butt. And it wasn’t always a mask; it used to be an Ouroboros (she didn’t know how she knew that). And the butt belonged to Jane, best friend of-

She didn’t want to say the name of the deceased.

It hurt when she even thought of the deceased.

She remembered what her sisters reminded her of what the deceased did.

The knife to the abdomen, deep enough to threaten but not kill.

She thought of the knife used by the deceased, how she was so afraid.

It was a familiar knife, like the one in her hand.

Exactly like the one in her hand.

It didn’t come together all at once. Maybe she knew the truth all along, but denied it to let herself do what they call healing. Maybe there were other moments where she almost came to a realization of what they were. Maybe she would have broken free even if the wind hadn’t coincidentally turned the pages, as if destiny wanted her to see it. But other lives would have been lost, tortured for a futile purpose that she saw all too clearly. Would Claire love her if she did those things? Would she ever love herself? Yes, she responded to herself. She read through that section, eager to learn and understand what she was fighting. Eventually, she would know what to do with this book. But in that moment, holding the knife, she knew what she had to do.

“Are you ready?” asked Charity Oregon.

Clara O’Winn smiled.

Clara sat on the cheap motel bed while Charity continued to futilely scream for help through the duck tape. Clara was looking at her watch, which told her they had less than a minute to arrive. She was aware from the stolen book that they were known for their punctuality, but arriving at the exact minute seemed a bit excessive.

But she would soon realize that excessiveness was baked in their nature as a shape began to form. Not of an individual, but of an object. Something that would not be conspicuous in a motel room, but still distinct enough for the owner to not have to spend five hours debating which TV he used to go home and ending up picking the wrong television. The device was championed by a sound akin to a child squeezing a squirrel to death while playing with the blinds. Eventually, the shape revealed itself, and the being stepped out of the toilet.

The being was not human. Sure, if one were looking at the being through the lens of a photograph or moving picture, the being would appear to look like a human, but there was something off about the way he looked. He certainly looked like a he, but there was an air of ambiguity to the significance of that detail. He looked less like a person and more like the culmination of generations of film studios and focus groups to create a character archetype (the archetype in question being the stuffy dean seen in every single college comedy ever made, but with the smile of an authoritarian dictator and the teeth of the infinite). But perhaps what made him look the lease human was in the eyes. They were dilated in such a way as have a star field shine through his infinite darkness.

Clara had heard of the parties involved in the War, and called first the side that would be least likely to simply take both of herself and Charity and do what she expected them to do to her kidnapped victim. Sadly, no such side existed, but the side of order, lordship, and sterility was far more likely to humor her than the other factions would. The only fortune she had was that he didn’t simply rewrite her timeline so that she’d give herself to be experimented, dissected, and used to create relatively good cannon fodder for when the War inevitably got boring. His side wanted time to flow exactly as it always had, never changing, forever.

“Well,” he said in the voice of an ornery deposed king while stroking his beard impatiently, “is this the real deal?” Clara said nothing, for she knew his side, like all the sides in the War, thought of her (and the rest of humanity for that matter) as a Lesser Species not worthy of listening to bluster. Instead, she simply pulled out the knife she had in her left pocket, and stabbed her captive a few inches away from her heart. It was surprisingly easy to cut around the organ (though she had many years of practice) but it still took a bit of time. The knife cut through Charitiy’s breastplate like it would butter or wood or the skull of an Elder God.

There, in front of both of them, was Chartiy’s beating heart. The sight and feeling of this happening to her made the young woman pass out. Clara, who was used to the sight of cruelty in the name of uncaring powers, proceeded to rip out the still beating heart and present it to the orderly gentleman. The blood that belonged to Charity still flowed through the body, only slightly leaving the hole. It didn’t so much create a new organ to replace the removed one as simply acting as if the heart wasn’t removed in the first place.

“Interesting,” said the man with an air of self-congratulation, “tell me, what do you want for this… intriguing specimen?”

Clara felt no need to lie. “I want your time machine so I can travel the universe.” The man shaped being laughed. One doesn’t typically hear members of his side laugh, but it is always unsettling when they do so. It’s not clear why the laugh is unsettling to an average being as, for all intensive purposes, it sounds like a normal laugh, albeit an evil laugh heard in old science fiction movies with lines like “NOTHING IN THE WORLD CAN STOP ME NOW!” But the cadence of the laugh was… off. Emphasis was put on the wrong syllable, focusing on the letter in between the “H” and “A” in “HA.”

When the laughter stopped, he calmly, as if he had never laughed at all, said, “I must say, you are an amusing little thing. The hubris of your species is well documented, and indeed fascinating compared to other Lesser Races, but this really takes the cake, as your species is fond of saying Clara.” Clara was stunned. In her conversation with his side, she never once mentioned her name to them. “You know, it was quite easy to come across your name. We have several agents in your time zone who were eager to tell us information about you and your cult. Once certain pressures were used, of course.”

“It’s not my cult,” Clara demanded.

Ignoring her, the being continued, “Frankly the only reason we didn’t simply take you earlier was because you were able to contact us.” He paused for effect. “At first, we assumed you simply got the information from that book you stole,” pointing directly at the book, which was hidden poorly inside a nightstand draw too small for it to fit into, “but then we noticed that it was years out of date.” This mildly stunned Clara, but she didn’t show it. “I mean, your book only covers, what, the first 100 years of the War. There is no contact information for our side in that edition. So how were you able to call us?”

Clara smirked, “It was written on the wind.” She then fled for the exit, but the man shaped being simply slowed down her perception of time and causally walked in front of her before resuming it to a speed faster that 1^-100,000,000 inches per hour.

“Cute,” he smugly retorted, “I suppose we’ll get the real answers out of you in the-“ But before he could finish that sentence, a familiar sound to the being filled the room. Like the wheeze and groan of an organ being played at a packed church in the instance a roof fell on it. It dawned on the being that if this Lesser Being had the contact information for his side, she might also have the information of other sides. Which is why it came at no surprise that a ship that looked like the skeletal remains of a dragon appeared in the room.

The dragon’s mouth opened revealing another bidder for the captives. Unlike her competitor, she looked distinctly human. Though Clara couldn’t make out any physical features beneath her uniform, she could tell by the feel of her that she was human. She didn’t appear to be much older than a college dropout, but there was an air of scholarship to the way she held herself before the two of them. The woman was dressed in a typical Goth attire featuring pants darker than the depths of space, a black jacket covered in pins advertising causes the woman no longer believed in, and a mask made out of the skull from a long dead alien race that still had the species blood smeared on its teeth. She seemed familiar, but Clara couldn’t put her finger on why.

“Step away from the woman, or else” snarled the woman. The woman was unarmed, though her shadow rather strangely appeared to be holding some sort of explosive device in its hands.

“Come now, Cousin Jane,” said the man shaped being, “surely we can end things civilly.”

Cousin Jane thought about this briefly. “Nah, don’t seem to be any other way. Think I’ll blow you up anyways. Always wondered if your kind bleeds gold.”

“Well, clearly there is another way. There are two of them, we can split them up evenly.” As if to piss all over his sunny day, a beam of light smashed through the celling landing softly and directly in the center of the room. Out from it, stepped an ethereal being akin to an Angel with the width of a song, the height of purple, and the shape of an experienced English actor known for playing loudmouthed kings and Viking gods.

ATTENTION LESSER SPECIES, hir whispered in a song, WE HAVE COME TO TAKE CLAIM OF THESE TWO SPECIMINS FOR OUR OWN PURPOSES.

“Bullshit you are,” shouted Cousin Jane. “’Sides, I was here first.”

“No you weren’t,” said the man shaped being. “Regardless, I’m sure we can work things out in a neat and orderly fashion.”

“Yeah, you’re just all about order, aren’t you? Not the order you want, mmm?”

“Is there any other?”

YES! OUR ORDER!

“Perhaps we can discuss this at another time, right now I have a business transaction to deal with.”

“Well, too bad, ‘cause so do we.”

AS DO WE!

“W̵̨̕e͘͞ ͟͡a͟l̵s͏o̶ ̸h̴́͝a̕͢͝v̡e̵ ̛͡an̨ ͢a̷̕͡rra̷̛̕n͡ge͞m̸̧͠e̸̛ņ̛t w҉͟ith̛͢͢ ̴̛M͏̵̕s͞.̧̕ ̷̛Ơ͢’͞W̴҉i̵n̸͏n,̸̕” A fourth party retorted, who didn’t so much enter the room but rather rewrote the nature of the universe so they were always in the room. Soon more and more parties showed up for a bit of, frankly, out of date technology that most sides only wanted because the other sides wanted it. The arguments got so loud, that Charity Oregon finally awoke. In the confusion, she found that someone had accidentally cut her binds, placed her heart back into her body, and plastered a bit of skin and bone over it. Wanting simply to go home, Charity fled the scene. Luckily the congregation was so distracted by their petty arguments that she was easily able to escape.

At the very least, they were distracted enough for someone to be able to steal a time machine, learn how to use said time machine, go back in time, convincingly fake a death or two, get married, find a time in the future where people have cured aging, woo a formless being who exists in any point in time she desires, steal a few phone numbers and contact information, get married again, write a few stage plays, and live happily ever after as the universe’s longest working actress married to a formless traveler and a wandering teacher. Which, in a bit of coincidence that is typical of the universe, someone in that room actually did, though she didn’t get the record for longest working actress. But then, I was never one to let a little thing like truth get in the way of a good metaphor.

#clara oswald #faction paradox #doctor who #fan fiction

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