The Hanged Man

The Hanged Man

The Smiling Goat was all aflutter the next morning. Suitcases and other bags were piled on tables and chairs, and everyone scrambled around to get their stuff together. It didn’t help that half of them were hung over.

The quest had been completed. Gil and Muirne were recovered safe and sound, and it was high time that everyone get back to their lives. Of course, they weren’t leaving quite yet. They decided that they might as well stick around for Doug’s coronation, err, re-coronation, whatever the hell it was. They kept catching each other snickering at the mention, as those were two words that none of them ever thought would grace the same sentence. But once that was over, it was definitely time everyone headed off in their different directions. Plus, Cowell kind of needed the rooms back.

Cindy was once again getting hit with that specific, directionless anxiety that had been mostly absent since she’d gotten to Discord. Soon, she’d have to go back to the exact same place she’d been in before, stressing about the upcoming crossroads of her life. Well, it wouldn’t be exactly the same. She gripped the small pebble that Gil had given her tightly. She’d made fun of him a bit after he called it a ‘sending stone’, as they both knew where he’d gotten that name from, but he’d told her that she could use it to get in touch with him if she ever decided to get serious about her magical studies.

Niko, on the other hand, was leaving with more anxieties than when he’d started. He knew things now, about himself, and the cosmos at large. And still, he hadn’t made a choice. It wasn’t one he could run from. Valki would find him wherever he went. He almost had half-a-mind to give her exactly what she wanted.

Tommy felt the tension in the air, and for some reason, couldn’t help feeling like they were leaving prematurely. He still had business in the city, and with Kei. He’d reacted… badly to their reunion, even he could admit that. She’d shared her story with him—on his insistence no less—and then he’d called her a stranger. He hadn’t been lying, but there might have been a better way to word that.

Plus, getting out of Ede Valley, traveling again, it felt… good. Right, almost. He’d spent more than half a year back home, so maybe it was time to get back to it, even if he had to go it alone. Although secretly, he was hoping that this time, he might be able to convince Kei to go with him.

That was a ridiculous idea, of course. She was the ruler of a whole city now in all but name. She couldn’t just leave to go on adventures with him. Although, he had to remind himself, time was a funny thing in the Other, so maybe just one. Maybe.

He was still figuring out how he was going to break it to his family. His mom had finally just gotten him back a few months ago, and now he was gonna take off again. But he would promise to come back way more often than once everything thirteen years this time.

“How’s that brooding treating you?” Cowell leaned over the bar, from where he’d been watching the chaos.

Tommy frowned, straightening on the bar stool. “I’m not brooding,” he insisted. “Just thinking.”

They both knew that Cowell was well aware of what was going through Tommy’s head without having to ask, so he skipped the formalities. “Well, I guess this means I’ll have to close the Ede Valley pub for a little while, considering there’ll be no one to run it. Although, maybe I’ll pop by to open shop every so often. The regulars would be upset otherwise. But, if you ever need a place to crash, mate, my door is always open.”

He waggled his eyebrows, and Tommy laughed, despite himself. “Thanks, man. I’ll probably take you up on that.”

“Now all that’s left to do is break the news, eh?” Cowell turned to look over at Cindy, who was doing mental calculations about the locations of all her remaining belongings, despite the fact that she wasn’t necessarily stable on her feet.

“I think I’ll wait until all the excitement winds down,” Tommy said. “I gotta drop the kids back off anyway, say bye to my mom and all.”

“Of course,” Cowell nodded. “One last Miller family reunion.”

For a hot second, it looked as if they wouldn’t all be ready on time, but, somehow, they managed to get everything together and back onto Mathilda before heading off to the Tea Party.

As the little trolley car forced its way uphill, Tommy stared at the sky above the city, all those colors dancing together. That was home for him. He loved his mom, and Cindy and Mike, and he would miss them a lot. Saying goodbye was going to be hard. It always was. Tommy had had to say a lot of goodbyes in his time. But he wasn’t just a Miller. He was Remus’ son through and through, and it was time for him to head back off to where he belonged.

~~ o ~~

Doug wondered just how long this was going to go on for. He was tired. Tired from the party last night, of course, but also just… tired. He’d never really wanted to be here, and the feeling was only getting worse the more time went on. He didn’t want to be an all-powerful god-king, in fact, the whole affair was kinda cramping his style. His wet, pathetic, self-loathing sort of style but it was a style, and it was being cramped shut up.

He never thought he’d be thinking it, but more than anything, he just wanted to go back to being Doug Bailey.

In a dumb sort of way, Gil had actually reminded him of that. Back in the days of St. Adelaide’s, Doug thought that it would be impossible for his life to get any more complicated. And yet somehow, here it was, doing just that. It just kept getting more complicated, and more stupid, and was going faster and faster all the time. It was like a roller coaster designed by a toddler on his mom’s Windows 95.

Desperately, desperately, Doug wished that it would just slow the fuck down. But here he was, still stumbling onward. Why could he never stop? What the hell was that mythical thing he was moving towards anyway? He’d asked himself that question a million times, and never once came up with an answer.

And still it was time to be Bacchae once again.

The crowd was gathering down in the square. He wondered if the nerd squad was down there somewhere. Probably, but it was impossible to tell. They would have stood out in any other crowd, but not this one. Everyone else waiting out there was just as weird as they were.

He kinda wished that it was someone else getting to be king today, that he could be out there with the rest of them, instead of up here alone, waiting for all eyes to be on him. Luckily, Discord didn’t have any protocols for a coronation, they probably thought they’d never need one. So all that was gonna happen was they were gonna go out there, Kei would hype him up, he’d do his thing, and then there was gonna be yet another party. He was getting really sick of those at this point.

Doug trudged down the stairs and into the throne room, where Kei was waiting for him. She straightened when she saw him. “You ready?” she asked, smirking as always. But for some reason, Doug thought he saw a little hesitancy in her eyes. Was she… nervous? Why? Just what did Kei have to be nervous about?

The look disappeared as soon as he saw it, so maybe he was just projecting his own jitters onto her.

He sighed, and ran a hand through his hair, careful to avoid the horns so they wouldn’t come loose. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

“That’s the spirit,” she said. “But hey, once this is over it should all be smooth sailing from here. You’ll be Bacchae for… the foreseeable future.”

“Great.” He didn’t bother trying to hide the bitterness in his tone.

“Then I think it’s time,” she gestured for him, and, after readying himself, Doug pushed the clock tower’s big double doors wide open.

The crowd entirely filled the square now, yet somehow, they all managed to part like the red sea when they saw him. A path that led straight up to the gallows formed in front of his feet. That was the best stage they had, after all.

Kei went first, gliding smoothly down the aisle. While the reaction wasn’t sheer adoration, he noticed that the daemons weren’t quite as aggressive towards her anymore. She’d brought their god back and kicked out the buzzkill, after all, and they all knew it.

Doug really wished he had earplugs. He made a mental note to ask Kei about some later. Because, while Bacchae the immortal godhead probably couldn’t suffer hearing loss, Doug Bailey the mortal man absolutely could. And the noise of the crowd as he strutted up to that stage was threatening both that and additional blood loss as well.

As soon as he hopped up on the stage, a couple of bouncers stepped in to keep the crowd from jumping up and stealing his shoes or something. Kei had hired them, of course. Bacchae wouldn’t have liked it but Doug was grateful for the distance they created.

Oh shit, he was getting out of character. Doug tried to plaster the patented inane smile back on his face as Kei tapped the microphone, and the crowd quieted. She paused, probably for dramatic effect, took a deep breath, and began to speak.

“Quite a wild two weeks it’s been, huh?” she asked the crowd, and then waited for the hollering to die down again. “Would you believe it’s been even stranger behind the scenes?”

There were a few scattered laughs here and there, but a more subdued silence fell as they looked at the concern growing on her face.

That wasn’t the only place concern was growing. Doug was confused. What was she doing? This was not at all what she’d told him she was going to say.

“This was supposed to be a day of celebration, but I’m afraid to say that I have some rather… unfortunate news to share with you all.”

Those words hit Doug like a fucking truck, and it took him a few seconds to run them through his brain. But once he did… She wouldn’t. She couldn’t. There was no way she was about to do what Doug had a growing suspicion she was. And yet, she would. Kei absolutely would. Kei would annihilate anything that was standing in the way of what she wanted. And now that Malachi was gone, that thing would be Doug Bailey.

He needed to run. He needed to go right now. But just as he was about to dash off the stage, he realized that the bouncers were not there for the crowd. They were there for him.

“This man is not Bacchae,” she pointed a finger at him, and before Doug could react she stomped right up to him, and pulled the horns clear off his head.

The crowd gasped. Then a deafening, terrifying silence filled the square. Doug had lost his chance to run now. One of the guards had come up behind him and pinned his arms behind his back. Not that he tried to struggle, he was thinking way too many thoughts at the moment to spare any processing power for actual physical movement.

“You see,” Kei’s voice echoed over the absence of any other sound. “I found it odd. When Malachi sent me out to find Bacchae, I found it odd just how quickly I came across him. One would think that the god of chaos would be a little more difficult to track down.”

She was lying. Not obfuscating, not confusing, just flat out lying to this crowd of hundreds. And by the looks of things, she was getting away with it. Well, that was the Moon Princess’ number one specialty. Of course, all Doug had heard about Kei’s mission had been pure hearsay, but there was one thing he knew for sure. She’d never confused him for the real deal for a single second.

“So I did some snooping, some investigation, and do you know what I found? We’ve all been played for fools. This man and Malachi Desault have been working together from the very beginning.”

The crowd’s reaction hit the same notes as Doug’s: utter shock. “The fuck?” he yelled, but he was nowhere near the microphone, so there was no way he could be heard over the chaos. It was a brilliant lie, if only for how simple it was, and how impossible it was to prove one way or the other. It was her word against his, and well, only one of them was standing up on that stage with fake horns.

As the daemons filling the square grew angrier, Doug saw the corners of Kei’s mouth twitching upwards. “Malachi already knew he was unpopular; he knew he was ruining our beloved city with corporate culture bullshit.” The crowd liked that one. “Someone was going to call him out someday, so what better way to keep pushing your dumb decisions through than to put them in a friendlier mouth?”

Oh my god. In a way, it all made sense. If Doug had been some other sucker, and if he didn’t know Kei for the pathological liar she was, then he probably would have believed her. Son of a fuck this was bad.

“I don’t know who this actually is,” she pointed back to Doug again. That pissed him off. Lie all you want, but don’t pretend that they were strangers. Not after all the fucking bullshit she’d put him through. “But whoever he is, I guarantee you he got paid a lot of bones to deceive us all like this.”

Doug was pretty sure the daemons were about to start throwing things at him. This was what he’d feared since the beginning. The angry faces he’d pictured in his mind’s eye looked exactly like this: blended up into a stew of mindless hatred.

“Now, as much as I’d like to punish the mastermind, it seems as if Malachi has skipped town. I wonder fucking why?” she had to pause again amidst the booing. “So I guess the patsy will have to do.”

Despite himself, despite everything, Doug finally started struggling to get away. She was really going to do it. She was really going to kill him. Which would leave no one behind to refute her side of the story. Convenient.

“And you know what? Let’s do it in a way Malachi or any of his cronies never would. It’s time to go back to the old ways. So you know what I say? I say it’s time for a good, old-fashioned hanging!”

The crowd went ballistic.

“Better yet, let’s stick him in the labyrinth for a couple of days first, let him really stew in what he’s done.”

Right in front of the gallows, there was a large lever. Kei gripped it firmly and, bolstered by the screaming, pulled. A large trap door opened, only to reveal a pitch black pit. But just as the guard holding Doug made to push him in, Kei held up a hand, and he stopped. Kei walked right up to Doug. Now that she wasn’t facing the crowd, her expression was… surprisingly complicated.

“Oh, so you’ve decided to spare a last word for this ‘complete stranger,’ huh?” Doug spat, and that hardened her face right up. “I suppose this was your plan from the very beginning.”

“Of course it was,” she said. “And you’re the dumbass who fell for it.”

“I suppose it’s probably out of the question that any interaction we’ve had has been genuine on your part?”

She looked away. “It’s like you said: you’re just a greasy, little dipshit who no one would probably miss. Honestly, I’m probably doing the cosmos a service by removing you from the equation. But this was never about you, Doug. You just happened to have a very convenient face.”

“You’re a bitch, Kei.”

“I’m not ‘a bitch,’ I’m ‘the bitch,’ and you’d better fucking remember that,” she growled, her face now an inch away from his own.

“Well you’re still a dog, either way.”

She—quite fittingly—barked out a laugh. “I gotta say, I’m disappointed. I was hoping you’d at least beg a little.”

“Can I ask why, you know, before I meet my untimely demise under false pretenses and all that?”

“You could, but my answer would probably just be another lie.” She smiled bitterly. “I’ll be back for you in a day or two,” she continued, gesturing to the black abyss behind her. “Try not to die before then.”

“I don’t make promises I can’t keep.”

“Oh, by the way, you can try to find your way out. It is a labyrinth, after all. But I would save your strength. I’m just going to kill you either way. Goodbye, Doug.”

The guard dragged him to right beside the hole, his feet nearly dangling over the edge.

“I won’t say it wasn’t fun.”

“Is that a lie, too?”

“Who knows.”

She nodded, and the guard shoved Doug forward. So now he was falling, down, down, down into the maddening darkness below. And yet as he fell, all he kept thinking about was how, as always, Kei hadn’t answered a single one of his questions.

~~ o ~~

Only one small group within the crowd seemed to not be affected by the spreading indignation. For a minute, they all stood in shocked silence, identical expressions of horror plastered on all of their faces.

“What… what the fuck…?” Flora muttered.

This seemed to knock Cindy out of her stupor, as, shaking her head, she glared up at Kei and rolled up her sleeves. But before she could do anything Niko grabbed her arm.

“Don’t you dare.”

“Why not?”

“They. Will. Kill us,” he hissed.

Cindy glanced around at all the angry faces, who even now Kei was stirring into a frenzy, even though Doug was already gone. And there were so many of them. If she attacked Kei now, she’d have to fight an entire city of daemons.

“It’d be wise for us to regroup,” Muirne remained calm, but her hand twitched towards the sword at her belt. “Perhaps at the pub? For the moment, he is still alive, after all.”

Cindy gritted her teeth, frustrated. “Fine,” she mumbled finally.

Niko grabbed her round the shoulders, to both comfort her and prevent her from doing anything stupid, and the group turned around to push back through the crowd.

“Hey, Tommy, you coming?” Kuro asked, noticing that he hadn’t moved. He was still staring up at the stage, at Kei.

“I...I’ll meet you guys back there,” he said.

Kuro shrugged and turned, leaving Tommy behind.

The sheer volume of the crowd was deafening, but he didn’t hear it. Tommy had called Kei a stranger before, and had thought that slightly unfair. Even if she’d changed, she was still recognizably Kei. But this person standing on the stage, this person who had strung a vulnerable kid along only to condemn him to death to achieve her own ends? He didn’t know her at all. That couldn’t be Kei. Not the Kei he knew.

He’d still seen a path back to that person she’d been, but now? Now Kei was about to kill someone. That was something you had a hard time coming back from.

Tommy had to stop this. He had to talk to her, get her to see how crazy all of this was.

Well, at least now he knew what she’d meant when she said she’d wanted “a little piece of the cosmos” just for her.

But he’d never imagined just what the price of that would be.