And To Dust, Return [Complete]

[Tess Abrahams]

"Fuck you, Ronnie," Tess hissed. She was sitting on the grass, head between her knees, hands clasped against the back of her neck like a winded soccer player. Like a prisoner. Her fingers clenched into white-knuckled fists against the dark nest of her hair. "It's not gonna be alright!"

Their neighbors to the right were arguing again, like they did almost every night, their buzzing voices drifting into the still yard of the House. Tess wanted to laugh. They didn't even know what it was like to be angry.

"Who was on the phone?" she asked, lifting her head enough to see the neat rows of vegetables planted in the garden. "Was it Anna? Is she on her way, does she know w-what happened?"

[Ronnie Bluth]

Ronnie paced on the stoop. There wasn't much room for it, but he managed. He spoke like a stream overflowing its banks.

"No, no, I'm tellin' you, it's gonna be all right, okay? That was Vipul on the phone, can't keep the man down. He's on his way over now. So, see? It's cool."

[Scott Green]

Scott abandoned any pretense of sweeping up the broken glass after he brushed it away from Jake. He'd managed to check Jake's pulse with a shaky hand and found it steady enough, but was unable to get him awake. "Ronnie, dude, we may need help with Jake. He's totally out."

But Ronnie was deep in conversation with Tess, and Jamie had finally turned back into the little girl she was and fled the scene. He could respect how she'd summoned the gumption to -

"Oh God." Scott had looked up and the illusion Jamie had cast had faded and the contents of the kitchen had returned to being covered with an inside out Vipul. Jake was slumped awkwardly and Scott didn't know how to check for broken bones. He cleared a space on the floor, the island separating them from the main pile of goop, and carefully laid Jake out flat on his back, trying to keep his head and neck as immobile as possible.

"Where's Jitters when you need him," he muttered, then felt guilty because Anna didn't like them using nicknames. But Jim would know how to properly check for a broken back. "Ronnie!" he hollered, "Help me with Jake, we need to get him outside!"

[Tess Abrahams]

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

There was a fist in her gut and it cut loose with a vicious uppercut that sent her vital organs twisting. Tess closed her eyes against the hammering nausea that washed over her. Vipul. He was coming back, he was on his way right now and any minute he could turn onto the street, come through the back door with bits of himself on his shoes.

No, no, no, screamed a shrill and terrible internal voice, I can't. I can't.

What should have been a sweet relief was instead a deep, unwavering dread. Of course he was okay. He was in a million goddamn places. He was in a million goddamn pieces, too, all over the kitchen and all she could see was his agonized face as it melted away, his screams still singing in her veins so vividly that she could taste them welling underneath her tongue, metallic and sour.

Scott's voice clapped over the rising pitch of the argument next door, a grateful interruption.

"Go help Scott. Jake's hurt," Tess said flatly, rising on unsteady legs to stalk across the lawn. The fence that framed the property wouldn't be a problem; she couldn't jump like Ronnie, maybe, but she'd vaulted a hell of a lot higher obstacles with less motivation.

Before Ronnie could protest, Tess was flipping over the wooden planks and dropping out of sight into the narrow lane between lots.

[Ronnie Bluth]

"No, wait, Tess--"

Ronnie watched her vault away. It occurred to him that he could easily leap after her - but his train of thought ran out of rail right there. He wasn't wrestling her back to the house, not after what he'd just seen.

He turned and dashed back inside to help with Jake. There was nothing else to do but wait.

[Scott Green]

Scott looked up gratefully as Ronnie came back inside. "D'ya think we can move him?"

The other guy regarded Jake's prone body, and then regarded the rest of the room. "Don't have a choice. Gotta clean up the ...mess before we can have any paramedics over."

"Agent Smith en route?" Scott eased his hands under Jake's armpits, nodding Ronnie down to his feet. Together they heaved him up as gently as possible and awkwardly waddled out the back door to the deck.

[Vipul Chandrashekar]

A trio of Vipuls raced through the front door, headed to the kitchen. The lead Vipul gave pause for a moment when he saw the carnage of himself spread out everywhere. He shook it off, and looked to Ronnie and Scott.

"Where's Tess?"

The other Vipuls quickly got to work attending to Jake, who looked to be unconscious and possibly badly injured. Another Vipul entered, and pulled mops and buckets out from the nearby closet.

[Ronnie Bluth]

Ronnie bolted to his feet, relieved that someone else could be in charge now and he didn't have to pretend to know first-aid. "Vipul! You're a sight for sore eyes, man... uh..."

The boy threw Scott a helpless look and turned miserably back to Vipul. "Tess is gone. She just took off, and I didn't know what to do."

He tried not to think too hard about what he was seeing as Vipul started cleaning up the remnants of himself.

[Scott Green]

Scott hovered uneasily around the perimeter of Vipuls surrounding Jake's still body. Hands suddenly left with nothing to do, he hugged his arms across his chest and watched as a pulse was felt for, breathing checked.

"Shit, dude," shaking his head, Scott shared a fleeting glance with Ronnie. "It's not like anyone could stop her after..."

The sentence died slowly, stilted by the obvious events that still coated the opposite room.

Scott licked his lips and blew out a gust of breath, corralling his nervous energy into a useful purpose as he made for the stairs. "I'm gonna go check on Jamie, make sure she's okay."

[Vipul Chandrashekar]

"Do that."

Vipul nodded to Scott as the others got to work.

"Let's all take a moment to calm down. I don't think, whatever this is, it's something that you have to worry about. Some kind of latent power within Tess interacted with my own power, and caused it to go wrong. I don't know how to explain it yet, but I'll figure it out."

He looked to Ronnie.

"Did you see where she ran off to? I can at least put a few of myself on her trail."

[Ronnie Bluth]

"She just took off over the back fence, toward the middle school," Ronnie said, pointing. "Uh... latent power? You mean she's getting new powers? What about Jake, I mean, I never seen him do shit like that. Is he all right?"

He turned to address the question to the Vipuls who were tending Jake before he realized there wasn't any point to it.

[Vipul Chandrashekar]

"Doesn't seem to be anything broken, just unconscious."

A Vipul retrieved a bottle of ammonia from under the sink, dribbling a little on a paper towel. This was passed under Jake's nose, with the intention of rousing him awake.

Meanwhile...

Vipul, tipped off by Ronnie's pointer, was already swinging the GMC around, en route for where he thought he had a good chance of intercepting Tess.

[Tess Abrahams]

Hang a left down Eucalyptus Drive, cut behind the two-bedroom starter home that's been up for sale as long as anyone can remember thanks to the highball asking price that isn't up for negotiation, loop over to the middle school and veer into the scraggly woods that border the football field.

Tess ran, her sneakers slapping obscenely on the pavement, mind on autopilot as she pounded away from the House toward... shit, where was she going? It didn't matter. Anywhere was a perfect destination. Anywhere that wasn't there, anywhere that didn't have eyes that had seen it.

"Jesus!" a sudden vibrating against her hip nearly startled Tess into tripping over a knot of tangled tree branches, and she jerked harshly to the right, crashing loudly off the shoe-worn trail. Breathing raggedly she felt her pocket, tracing a square outline; cellphone, her mind supplied, it's just your cellphone.

Through the woods and then you'll be out of the residential area, into the older part of Los Santos, condemned buildings leftover from the golden age juxtaposed with video rental joints and takeaway restaurants, the occasional titty bar breaking up the monotony with flashing neon signs and lax ID policies.

She ignored the call, didn't bother to check who it was. Her arms pumped fiercely as she burst through the foliage, torn leaves fluttering in her wake. Suddenly her mind caught up with her soles and she knew where she was going, breath leveling as it focused in on the direction. Tess pushed aside the panic trying to crowd it's way into her step and pressed on. Her phone started buzzing again.

Left on Metcalf. The old theatre. Nothing but exposed beams and suspended walkways. Just like old times.

[Jacob Foley]

"Ngh!"

Jake groaned himself into wakefulness. The pungent waft of ammonia made him wince and his eyes snapped open. An explosion of blue dots peppered his vision and in his gut he felt that falling feeling. He jerked upright in sudden recollection of the nightmare that had sent him to sleep in the first place.

"Oh... fuck!" he muttered, and slumped back to the ground.

While his head swam, he picked out a familiar face framed in the pale glare of daylight.

"Vipul, thank God... I thought you were man soup."

[Aidan Fox]

Afternoon wound into evening, which, close to midsummer on the Southern California coast, didn't look a whole lot different aside from the longer shadows. Night crept up in a hurry around eight PM, and it didn't pay to hang around in the wrong parts of Los Santos too close to dark. That gave the hunt for Tess a special urgency.

Vipul was an entire missing persons unit all to himself, and when Aidan got off work, he joined the search on his motorcycle, focusing on the streets he knew Tess frequented on her morning runs. He'd already ridden past the old theatre on Metcalf when he got the call from Vipul that someone had spotted a weeping girl running into the abandoned structure hours ago.

Aidan rode up the concrete handicap access ramp to the front doors and killed his engine before walking his Harley into the foyer. This wasn't a part of town where he wanted to leave his bike unattended in the open for any period of time. He put down the kickstand under a vaulted art deco archway and pushed his way through the house doors into the empty auditorium.

Most of the seats had been removed, leaving a broad slope of scarred hardwood stained and filthy with neglect. The stage was just as barren, littered with fragments of foam set pieces and odd pieces of wooden construction. Above the stage were a half-dozen or so flies suspended by chains from pulleys in the ceiling, long metal rods that once held up backdrops and stage lighting and actors in harnesses. They were rocking back and forth. Someone had been up there.

"Tess?" Aidan shouted out. His voice echoed through the auditorium, swallowed up by the cavernous fly tower. "Tess, it's Aidan. Come on, let's talk."

[Tess Abrahams]

At some point during the declining days of the old theatre, a renovation had been started, an attempt to vault the ceiling above the stage and grade it's slope. It had probably been meant to improve the acoustics though with steadily declining interest as multiplexes became popular, how well Arthur Miller's monologue was heard from the back row had probably been the least of the owner's worries. Whether they themselves had come to this conclusion or funds had simply run dry mattered little; the reno had been abandoned and years of neglect had added a tint of shabbiness to it's sad appearance, bare-boned framework curling in the air like a whale's ribcage.

High above the dust-faded floor on a crossbeam sat Tess, her feet swinging in the open air below. There was a pulsing sting in her palms from the exhausting spectacle of aerial spins and launches that had been performed upon the structural skeleton of the auditorium, but at last the woman had found some sort of quiet mental plane, an exhausted peace. Now she sat, watching the shadows shift and play amidst the dancing dust motes of the upper levels and feeling sweat dry slowly, tightening in her pores in a way that made her more aware of her skin. Every deadly inch of it.

A building sense of dread bubbled in her chest as th snarl of a motorcycle engine bounced against the outer walls. The sounds of Aidan's approach were softly amplified; crunching debris under thick soles, measured breathing, the rustle of cotton like whispers of anticipation.

From up here, perception was off, thrown into a open-lidded blender and splattered Picasso-style. Aidan looked like a head on top of impossibly tiny legs, his torso completely erased by the vertical divide. Tess rolled slightly as he talked, her profile catching in the lopsided edges of light that filtered through a jagged-edged hole in the roof. Beneath her hip the wood was strong and solid.

"Hey," she said softly, looking down at him. "It's probably not a good idea for you to be here, Aidan. Something's wrong. You could get hurt."

[Aidan Fox]

"Said the girl sitting on the rafter fifty feet off the ground," Aidan said. "I'll take my chances."

He scanned the tangled structure of the ceiling, now that his eyes had adjusted to the dark. Running along both walls was a steel catwalk painted in varying shades of black and rust, and, standing on the catwalk, the rafters would be within arm's reach for someone acrobatically inclined. Aidan began looking for a way up onto the catwalk. Probably a couple ladders in the wings of the stage.

He started meandering toward the stage, but he took care to keep Tess in sight. "You should come back to the House, Tess. We've been worried about you."

[Tess Abrahams]

"Is everybody... how are they?" Tess gripped the smooth edge of the beam, toes curling in her sneakers anxiously as she followed Aidan with her eyes. He was heading in the right direction, would come to the pull-down ladder concealed in the wings that offered a way up within a handful of paces. And then he'd be up here.

The idea seemed to make the air heavier and Tess turned her concentration elsewhere, hands coming to either side of the wooden support as one long leg extended back and up, straight as an arrow. Slowly it descended on an exhale, muscle releasing in measured time, until she was straddling the beam, hips hovering just above the knotted surface as her weight shifted to balance on her hands. A cross sit wasn't hard; more like a bit of fluff to fill in the time between real moves. It was a promise of motion.

"It was pretty bad when I left," Tess explained. Probably needlessly.

[Aidan Fox]

"Everybody's a little shaken up, but they're okay," Aidan replied, and he took out his cell phone and started punching in a text: FOUND HER! old thtr. will call soon. "Jake's got a little headache, that's all. Vipul's absolutely fine. He's not angry or upset - he just wanted to be sure you were safe."

He hit SEND just as he spotted the ladder, and he stowed the phone and gave the ladder frame an experimental tug to make sure the moorings were still secure. Then he began to climb.

[Tess Abrahams]

Rattling metal signified that Aidan had found his way, each stepped marked by a hollow clatter as his boots scuffed against the rungs.

"Absolutely fine?" Tess paused, rolling the words around in her mouth. They felt awkward, marbles in a diction lesson. "Do you know what happened, Aidan?"