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highest highs and lowest lows
everybody knows where it goes
there's always someone somewhere who cares, there there
Hell is a little darker without Lime.
After her punishment has gone through, Charlotte returns home, to her dark and neon fantasy dimension with the weak, weak haters who worship her there. Her fingers and toes are starting to go numb despite her boots and gloves, her body feels more sluggish. When she wipes the tears from her eyes, she finds one of the lesions on her swollen throat has broken open and stains the glove with slough. It always progresses more rapidly than it did, it progresses faster when she’s emotional. She’s barely noticed the shortness of breath over her tears, crying was rare enough she simply mistook the symptom.
Whatever.
“Lady Charlotte! The humans left behind a rafflesia, would you like it?”
Her skin itches and her vision blurs. She ignores the creature trying to talk to her, ignores the rotting meat smell of the rafflesia that makes her feel like vomiting. She’ll soon smell like rot too, soon she won’t be able to smell anything anyway. She disappears beyond the neon brick to a closed space where she can be alone, she holds Rabi close and dies crying for Papa.
Hell is a little darker without Lime.
And it's a whole hell of a lot less colorful.
When Charlotte wakes from her death, skin unblemished and lungs full, the first thing she does is check the corner of her neon world.
Few people wanted Lime near them, but Lime hated waking from the flames with nobody around to annoy or laugh at. So, early on, Charlotte allowed her to make one of her spaces here - she could handle Lime being annoying and laughing at her, after all. After forming her candy room, complete with the cute little strawberry shortcake safe where the contract with the Elford was kept, Lime never liked to die anywhere else but here.
But, it’s gone now. No door, no locking magic mechanism - just smooth black wall.
Like Lime was never there.
At least I won’t have to deal with part of my world being set on fire every day, I guess, she tries to think, but even she isn’t fooled by how little she cared about that.
With Lime gone, whole fantasy worlds are wiped out in the blink of an eye. Doors start to blink out of existence, stupid passwords whispered in her ear start to take up space in her brain like junk. “Hell isn’t infinite,” the purebreds say, and go about their little clean-up, cold and bureaucratic as they always are.
Zizel at least pauses as Charlotte walks up to a door she was starting to break down.
“We can keep one, maybe two, if you’d like. But she really made so many of these.” Zizel smiles, almost fond (a lie, Charlie thought, nobody is fond of Lime.) “It’s impressive.”
“Impressively stupid,” Charlotte replies dully, far too focused on the way Zizel’s hand caresses the tell-tale heart decoration on Lime’s door. The sweet smell of candy behind. “Why are you asking me? I don’t care.”
“If you say so, Charlie.”
She was the most creative of them, vibrant and bright, a ray of ultraviolet stifled by the clouds of her life. Without her here, it’s almost like the sun is gone. Charlotte finds she has nothing to wake her up in the “mornings” and nothing to follow, and she falls back into her pre-Lime state - eternal apathy, a quiet death alone on cold, cold concrete. For more than a hundred years she’d been content to wake up and move where Lime moved, to do what Lime did, to just watch as Lime successfully isolated herself from everyone and everything. There were distractions - human distractions, Dorothy Elford lived in this monster mansion that connected them to the human world, Fiona Elford was her pact partner, Claire Elford and Sirius Gibson were poor, stupid, clueless children, and Noel Levine was a poor, stupid, but slightly less clueless child. The loops upon loops upon loops had her following Ashe Bradley, his dreams and his nightmares and the things that kept him up at night. He was dedicated and fascinating and passionate to his cause, and it was something Charlotte had never once felt, and so she bet on him over and over. She knew Lime’s passion meant she’d never give up on anything, Ashe’s passion won Charlotte a lot in their games.
More than a hundred years. It had almost been fun.
And now they were all gone.
Nothing to follow, no one to chat with, nothing to care for, nothing to want. No contract, no sunlight, no need.
Only a thousand stupid passwords stuck in her head for places that no longer existed. Only a black wall in the corner of her world. A lollipop here or there, some sweets based worlds that other hater demons overrun and made their own.
Charlotte chewed on gummy candy and kicked her feet out the permanently broken window.
“D’you miss Claire, Zizel?” she asks one day, catching Zizel as she was wandering down the hall. “She was like a ray of sunshine, wasn’t she? What about Lady Rouge? We still don’t know what happened to Noel.”
“A little. They were interesting children, weren’t they?”
“They were stupid children. I’m kinda disappointed I didn’t win in the end.”
“You won more times than anyone else.”
“Mhm, but it's the end that counts, isn’t it?” Lime had gotten away with her own deeds for hundreds of years, for thousands of loops, but in the end, none of that mattered. It was the end that counted, and in the end she was caught.
“Do you miss Ashe, Charlie?” Zizel had stopped. Charlie didn’t even turn to see what she was doing, but she felt her there, their shoulders almost touching.
“No. In the end, he gave up, didn’t he? He’s probably boring now.” Probably healing, probably getting help, maybe he listened to Noel in the end and was out there now, searching for his kinder self.
Made her sick.
“Do you miss anyone, Charlie? You seem like you’ve been unwell.”
Charlotte winces, glancing to Zizel to the side of her. She wonders if she’s being made fun of, mocked. A sentimental demon, missing someone, was a weak demon. Especially the way she missed Lime. Sad, pathetic.
Zizel knows.
Zizel only smiles in her face. Charlotte smiles back.
“It’s just different,” Charlotte says. “Not used to having no humans to play with. Rouge is lucky, huh? She gets to follow them - Wilardo has Dorothy’s heart.”
“Oh, but she hates it,” Zizel laughs. “I said I’d take over. She doesn’t appreciate it like I would.”
“She doesn’t. She wouldn’t.” Rouge never understood humans or Haters. “You finally cleaned house of all of Lime’s junk, huh? Really, you guys shoulda kept some of it around, as a warning to the young Haters. Don’t cross the rules put in place by the big bad purebred hierarchy, you know? 'Don’t ever try to make any part of this space yours, or we’ll drop you into a deeper hell and twist everything that’s yours into ours.' Like it's always been.” Charlotte laughs, like its a joke. Like she doesn’t care. Like she didn’t suffocate and die every fucking day because of those rules, because of her curse. “You get rid of all her shit, they’re just going to forget about her.”
Zizel was silent for a moment.
Charlotte dares her to pull rank. Dares her to grab her by the hair and drag her to that magic circle deep within their hell where they dropped Lime.
“I don’t think she’s quite so easy to forget, do you? In fact, the absence of her seems to unnerve everyone.”
“It’s quieter. They’ll get used to that.”
“Maybe,” Zizel hums. “Rouge isn’t very vengeful. Lime annoyed her. I don’t think she wants to be reminded of her.” Rouge was either the most perfect form of a purebred demon ever, or she was a fucking freak of one, that’s what Charlotte thought. “But, no. She won’t be easily forgotten. You, for one, won’t forget her. I trust that.”
“Me?”
Zizel smiles again, says nothing more on that. But she looks at Charlotte like she looked at Claire, in the times when she found Sirius’s body. Loop after loop. “I’m glad you stopped me, Charlie. I had a job for you. Speaking of Lime.”
“Speaking of Lime.”
Charlotte comes down from the window, and finds two books dropped into her open arms. The art on the front covers are familiar, green shaded crayons taking up most of the space. “Witch’s Heart books?”
The mansion was filled with them. Dorothy Elford collected them, and her whole collection dropped into hell with her mansion. But, these didn’t look like they belonged there.
“Lime was quite creative. She wrote her own Witch’s Heart books. I found them while cleaning up. I’d like you to circulate these within the human realm. One is quite good for our cause, the other is… I believe it will break someone’s heart. The despair it can cause will be quite nourishing to us demons, I’m quite a bit more excited for that one to get into circulation, don’t tell the higher ups.” Zizel laughs like a bell. “If only we found the first one sooner, though. It had her whole plan in there, exactly the manner in which she wanted to end things. Silly girl.”
“You want me to circulate these?”
“Gives you something to do, doesn’t it? I don’t want you to get boring, Charlie. Should we put it under her name, or should she have a pen name? Well, she needs a surname, I think. Ah, I’ll let you decide. Surprise me?”
Charlie snorts, swinging the books under her arm with Rabi.
“Fine, fine. You’re so lazy, Zizel.”
“Charlie, don’t walk away, come here, I have one more thing to say.” And Charlotte lets Zizel pull her back, lets Zizel whisper in her ear.
“I kept one room. Her little writing room.”
Charlotte had a list of useless passwords in her brain, and the last one for that door burned a hole in her skull. “Right,” she says, spitting her gummy candy onto the ground. She winces as Zizel strokes her head.
“Take all the time you need, Charlie. I’d like these to be perfect.
A warning to the others, you know?”
“Or a legacy,” Charlotte shoots back with a sigh.
“Or a legacy.”
It's a whole hell of a lot less colorful here without Lime.
So Charlotte can’t hide her smile when she opens one of the books to see Lime’s familiar bright scrawl across the pages.