Location: Party
Skills: Enhanced Reflexes (Passive)
Andy laughed, Mary Sue probably wasn't wrong from how the people exiting looked. She smiled, held her head up, and walked in. For a moment the room was too dark to see anything, and she took a few steps, her hand out in front of her to keep her from running into a wall. Then she found herself in a well-lit room. A room she knew too well.
Bright fluorescents hummed and rows of bunk beds cast shadows. Unlike its real-world counterpart, one Andy hoped was long gone, the room seemed to go on in every direction. There were no walls—just rows of beds. The room was empty, something she couldn't say she had seen happen very often. For her it had only been a few years, for the world it had been almost twenty, since she had stood in this room. This room was designed to break her. The whole school had been.
Andy had to admit, this was a top-tier horror house. Her friends were gone and she was in a place that she hated more than anywhere else in the whole of the world. She had frozen. Held perfectly still in the fear that crawled through her. However, she had escaped this place once. She had walked away and she was not back there. Instead, she had found herself at a new school far into the future where people like her were treated well. Her fear shattered as she thought of Zari. This was the past and she was stronger than it.
She started walking. Figuring she'd find an exit. When she did, the door did not lead out, but instead into the gym of the Drummonds' studio. On the other side of the square someone was punching a dummy. They did not take notice of Andy, not until the door shut with a slam behind her. Their hands dropped and they turned, not quickly as if startled, no this person had been expecting her.
"You made it." Her own voice said from the other side of the square. Because it was her. "I was starting to think your past had scared you more than your future did now." There was a smirk in her voice. "You ran away from the past, got so far away from it you're legally dead, almost a whole adult is now between you and the people who you killed. Did you really think it'd be all Sixteen Candles and Breakfast Club from here on out?"
Andy didn't say anything, but she did walk closer to the square. It still kept the two apart, it was the space of choices, the space of winning or losing between them.
The other Andy climbed into the square, leaning under a rope and hopping into it with ease and grace. Andy hadn't been in a square in what felt like years but was less than a year. Had she ever entered that easily, that cool and collected? She didn't think so, even now her hands were sweating. Without choosing to, she climbed into the square. She clenched her hands and gloves were on them.
A bell rang. The other Andy moved faster than she could track and punched her square in the face. Andy recoiled, her nose filling with blood.
"You're afraid of what you could become. Too afraid to do anything. You teeter on the edge of slipping into Mother's grasp. But that means you're too afraid to become yourself." Lightening crackled around the other Andy, this time Andy ducked it, and punched back. The world had become the fight. This was where she excelled. Her world hemmed in by ropes on four sides as she punched and kicked. It felt good.
Punches and kicks and lightning were exchanged. It lasted for hours or seconds. Finally, the fight that had waged on between them with no end in sight Andy, gasping for air leaned against the post, she was watching the other Andy as they removed the gloves.
"You've been getting hungry, you know what that means, no muffin will satiate you ever again." Her bare hand wrapped around Andy's neck and she felt her body begin to sag. She could breathe, but that wasn't what was happening. "Don't be weak, weakness will kill you." Teeth sunk into her neck. The world narrowed, her vision started to blur and the edges darkened.
Just as the last of the light vanished from her vision Andy stumbled and landed on her knees and hands. The sound of the dance filled her ears and she knew she was out of the haunted house.
Sweat was pouring down her, the costume well ruined. Andy stood and stepped to the side. She kept her eyes open as much as she wanted to close them and gather her strength. But she dared not. Dared not risk having someone come to her aid and touch her. Because she was hungry.
Framing A Moose
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