Chapter 32 - Again
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Chapter 32: Again
CWs: Sexual assault, gore
In her newest cocoon, all was suspended. Seconds no longer moved, things around her no longer had voices, nerves were dulled into a harsh numbness, the type that made victims squirm. The only thing strong enough to break through was that burn below her belt. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do with it, but she did know that she wanted nothing more than to run away from it.
She couldn’t find it in herself to move. She’d returned to the alcove and couldn’t get out. Lips and hands she never consciously consented to held her down. They left marks, took on fistfuls of her precious skin, pulled on her zipper, left her indecent. Again.
Nausea rocked her back into awareness. She would have let it have its way with her, again, did she not find herself looking up at the ceiling of a car. The sacrilegious gauze around her brain made taking in her surroundings difficult, but not impossible.
A nice car. Not luxury, but nice. A coiled ginger head peeking up over the head rest of the driver’s seat, joined by angular, freckled cheekbones. He was speeding. She didn’t know how she knew that; she could just tell.
“How much do you think he gave her?” he said. His thick Germanic accent was murky in her ears but still comfortably familiar.
“He must have put an obscene dosage in there. She took one sip; I watched her.” She felt Val’s voice rumbling in the small of her back, just as her anger usually did when a drug wasn’t presumably muting it. They could have been two of a kind. His tone was working at the exact same intensity.
“You watched her drink a spiked drink?” the driver asked.
Even with her head in his lap, Odette could see that Val’s glare was homicidal, with intent to disfigure, disembowel, and dismember. “Maxence, with every ounce of my respect for you, if I could sucker punch you in the face right now, I would,” he menaced, a spidering crack in a crystalline glass. “Obviously I wouldn’t have let her fucking drink it if I thought for even half a second that it was drugged! This was an open Enigma party; there wasn’t supposed to be any free-for-all Sacrilege on the premises. That’s why the Board agreed to let her go in the first place!”
Max’s over-the-shoulder leer was a potent one. I’ll remember that for when we get through this, it said. He exhaled slowly as his otherworldly patience took the reins on his demeanor.
“You need to tell me where we’re going. Hospital or home?”
An arrow of clarity tore clear through her core. Clammy hands grasped Val’s sleeve for dear life.
“Val,” she whined. His polemical expression settled into something akin to a ragged, overwhelmed service worker trying to keep their cool.
“Yes, Sweetness, what is it?” His palms felt cool against her burning cheek. Her hands moved to grab at his wrists instead, trying to find reprieve in his touch.
“No hospital,” she said. “I want to go home. My home.”
He pushed some of her dampened bangs out of her face while his lips quivered down to a tight grimace.
“If Dorien goes looking for you, that’s the first place he’ll go. I’m so sorry, but we can’t risk that.”
She could finally feel her panic again. She didn’t know whether that was a good thing or not. “I want my team. I want my family. I want Noel.” She sniffled, feeling a burn in the corners of her eyes. “I still can’t hear Odile.”
“I know, Sweetness, I know. We’ll get you to my place and we can figure out what to do when this is out of your system. I don’t know how much he gave you, but it shouldn’t be enough to last more than a couple hours,” he said.
A couple hours. A couple hours of sitting in her own filthy heat, repeatedly being pushed back to that alcove where Dorien explored her without a sober yes. Being unable to hear or even feel Odile. She’d promised that she would handle things if they got out of hand. If she could have, she would have. So why didn’t she?
“I can’t hear her,” Odette sobbed. “She was supposed to help. She couldn’t help.” Val brushed her tears back with his thumbs.
“It’s probably the drug. Dorien’s reactions to sacrilege were always far more visceral than anybody else’s I’ve seen. I don’t know for sure, but I would bet everything that it's correlated.”
He didn’t want her to have that line of defense. He wanted to render her completely powerless. Again.
Again. It was happening again.
She couldn’t stop it. It all came rushing back, clear as the wretched day it all happened.
~+~
"Do you want us to go with you? Morale or whatever?" Noel said.
“I have plenty of pieces of my mind to give,” Acadia agreed.
Her first instinct was to shout “Yes!” The thought of being alone with Professor Deschamps made her restless. It was bad enough having to listen to him lecture about her favorite subject, especially when he was giving her his asshole reasons for grading her so low. Without the buffer of her other classmates, it was a whole new frontier she was hesitant to explore.
But she knew better. If Noel and Acadia were there, he wouldn’t take off his mask. He’d keep his gas light running. He’d act like he had no idea what she was talking about, like he tended to when she called him out during class, or tried to reason with him at the end. No, unfortunately, this was a battle she had to take on alone if she wanted to see it won.
“That’s going to defeat the whole point,” she sighed. She’d begun to rub her arms, as if that would sand down the anxious goosebumps percolating just beneath the fabric of her jacket. “Can you hold my bag, though? I don't want to have anything in my hand that I can break his teeth with. I also don’t trust Ange or Isaur to not come out and wreck the auditorium.”
She would give it five minutes. Just long enough to wear him down enough to admit to what an asshole he was. Then she could take that as the “proof” the Dean of Students needed to reprimand him. Hopefully he’d let her hold off on this course until another professor was available to teach it. Maybe petition to revoke his tenure and finally fire him. The girls of her class would certainly come after her with torches and pitchforks—it thoroughly disgusted her how much they liked him—but until they were all being wrongfully handed D’s and F’s for aced assignments, they could take their weird obsession and shove it down their no-taste throats.
"Okay...if you're sure. I'll be right outside the auditorium. We'll all go get lunch at Honey Gather after," Acadia said.
Noel smiled and flashed a thumb. “Give him hell.”
She planned to. And then some. She wasn’t going to let his bizarre vendetta against her be the one thing holding her back from graduating with honors; entering the theater scene with the accolades she deserved. She was good. She had an above average range and she’d worked her entire ass off to get to a point where she could hit complex dance counts without losing a single breath to an equally complex phrase. That was impressive. Plenty of instructors before Deschamps had said so. Of course, she’d gotten her fair share of criticism—she wasn’t pigheaded enough to think her performance chops were completely infallible, nobody’s were—but nothing like Deschamps’.
Odette, I’m starting to think you’ve never read this material. You’re completely missing the point of the lyrics.
She’d studied the musical, Sweeney Todd, an all-time favorite of hers, cover to cover.
Belting really isn’t your strong suit, huh?
In her class just before, her professor had used her as an example of, quote, “a roaring powerhouse” and “how a good belt is supposed to sound.”
You dance like a newborn deerling. Who taught you?
When she retorted that she, Noel, and Acadia had gone to the same dance instructor for over a decade, he gave her a condescending tut, shook his head, and laughed to himself. Well, Noel and Acadia were clearly in class much more than you were.
Some people are born to be Momma Rose. Others, he’d made hard eye contact with her when he said it, are just made for the ensemble.
She hadn’t wanted to hit somebody in a very, very long time. That day, she thought about the sounds his bones would make were she to run him over with her motorcycle hitting the top of its odometer.
Fleurrh University’s auditorium used to be a source of inspiration. A calling for what was to come in her life; her name soon in lights as she toured headlining the biggest shows in the world. Now, it was shrouded in a miasmatic smog, brought upon by her one and only wretched Musical Theater Mastery professor. He was exactly where he usually was during his office hours; at his stupid little makeshift desk, down stage left. He had a classroom, but it was as he liked to say, in a wistful breath that made her classmates swoon and her stomach rock: “I feel most at home here!”
He didn’t look up when she approached, a move that had something hot burning in her lower back. That was a sensation she welcomed back like an old toxic frenemy. She hadn’t felt it in a long while. Her therapist would be ashamed. This man really brought the primordial worst out of her.
When she cleared her throat, he only offered her a short glance from over the thin rim of his rounded glasses. Those brown eyes of his made her grind her teeth as she thought about poking them out with a sharpened pencil.
“Miss Odette.” He was annoyed to see her, as if she was inconveniencing him. He shuffled whatever bullshit papers were sprawled across his bullshit desk. “How can I help you today?”
“I want to talk to you about my grade.”
He huffed expectantly, leaning back in his too-small chair to cross his arms over his tacky red tie. It suited him. It went well with his ugly gelled hairstyle and his ugly chocolate-colored getup.
“Oh?” He might as well have been talking to a yippy crusty-eyed purse dog. He looked at her with no more dignity than one. “What about it?”
She couldn’t stifle her hard laugh. It wasn’t the most professional thing, but she couldn’t say she gave a fuck. “Uh. I’m failing? And I really don’t think I should be.”
He adjusted his glasses. Scrutinizing her. She wished she had her bag so she could try to break his teeth. “Why do you say that?”
It was probably nearing five minutes. She could tell by her waning patience. “Deschamps, I’m good,” she blurted. Months of unfair classes finally poured over her tongue. “I already have agents interested, I’m lined up for three real auditions, I’ve been doing this since I was six and haven’t gotten half the critiques you’ve given me before. What did I do to you?”
“I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re on about.”
That burn at the base of her spine screamed. For the first time in as long as she could remember, her cool stumbled and fell.
"I know for a fact I don't deserve the grades you've been giving me. That last test? Margot forgot her routine mid-way and I didn't miss one fucking beat. You gave her an A and I got a D. You and I both know it's all bullshit."
Odette sensed the regret before she felt it. She knew the moment she resolved to approach Deschamps and fight him for her grade—and perhaps whatever was left of her dignity—that she needed to be smart about it. Cursing at him right off the bat was hardly being smart. She could hear her therapist’s voice, an old ghost residing in the back of her mind. Anger isn’t a bad emotion to have. It reminds us that we’re human. But sometimes, you need to watch when you use it.
Before it could swallow her whole, Deschamps stood. She tensed when she saw the sparkle in his eye, the awe in his smirk. A bait, taken.
“How badly do you want to make it in this business?” he asked. Odette squinted, unsure if it was rhetorical. He left it open just long enough for her to realize it wasn’t, and her anger propelled her forward.
“Don’t ask stupid questions. I wouldn’t be here if it were anything less than very badly.”
Deschamps laughed with the most humor he’d ever directed toward her. She wanted to see it as a good sign, but all it did was exponentially grow her discomfort. Everything about him did. He crafted such an amicable demeanor that everyone, even Noel and Acadia at first, seemed to inhale like a Michelin-starred meal. But there was something about it that was just an iota off to her; just ever-so-slightly rotten. She didn’t know what it was, but she knew it was there. It was the whole reason she didn’t want to take his class; why she was prepared to hold off graduating until somebody else offered Musical Theater Mastery. Then the Dean of Students convinced her it was all in her head. Now he needed “proof” that it wasn’t.
“I like you a lot,” Deschamps mused, wagging a finger at her. She wished Ange were here to burn it down to a stump. “You’re feisty. Never had one like you in my class.”
“You sure as fuck don’t act like it.”
That awe bloomed across his face. What, did he want her to get this pissed off? Why?
“Look, Odette.” He was walking toward her now. Each tap of his loafers against the polished wood of the stage made her soul shrivel into itself. “You are pretty good. And I like how confident you are in that. I can tell how much this means to you, all of it, so how about this…”
Tap, tap, tap. He stopped before her, hands in his pockets, brow cocked like he was certain he had baited her instead.
“I’ll raise your grade. I’ll even guarantee you an agent—I’m extremely well-connected, see—and access to more exclusive auditions. In exchange, I just ask that you do a couple things for me.”
The change in his tone raised her hackles. Like everything about him, it was just an atom off. Just enough that it dropped the temperature in the already freezing theater to absolute zero.
She stepped back without realizing it. “Like what?”
“Just a few things. Here and there.” Now he was close. Way too close. She was becoming far too aware of just how much taller he was than her. She hadn’t noticed until that moment, when she nearly snapped her own neck to stare up into eyes that had gone completely dark. “We can begin now, if you’re interested in getting a head start.”
She noticed the Lustful coil in his lips just before he ensnared her wrist. His lips lunged down to hers as he dragged her hand to the front of his trousers. A swell of adrenaline exploded through the top of her head as she wrenched herself away from him, too stunned to speak at first
“Woah, woah, woah,” was all she could say. Horrified astonishment mutated into a broiling rage that she could feel roaring into every obscured nook in her body. “You are absolutely fucking derranged if you think I’m sleeping with you.”
To her terror, he didn’t look deterred in the slightest, only following her as she fled. “No. I’m just realistic. You want to make it, don’t you? To up your grade?”
“Not like that! Never like that!” He reached for her again, just a half a second too slow. “Don’t fucking touch me!”
I’m gonna make this motherfucker’s life hell, she thought. This was far more proof than she wanted to bring to the Dean, but surely it would guarantee revoked tenure. Blackmailing students into fucking him by tanking their grade was hardly best-performing-arts-school-in-Kalos worthy. That was, of course, assuming her grandfather didn’t lock him in a cell and give the key to Toulouse to melt first.
She turned to flee this hellish auditorium, certain that she was never going to return. Whether she came back to the school at all would remain to be seen. There was an emergency exit just backstage; it’d be a lot quicker than trying to go back the way she came.
Deschamps, unfortunately, read her movements like he would one of his stupid playbooks. Her heart launched into her throat, fired from a cannon. She couldn’t breathe through his arms, latching her body to his chest while his unconsenting hands took the liberty of exploring her. She felt his nose against her hair, his chest rising and falling as he took in a deep whiff. She suddenly had no voice; lost to a debilitating jolt of shock.
“C’mon,” he said into her ear. His breath felt slimy against her cheek, but it was nothing compared to his hands. They were a plague, inundating the parts of her that she’d yet to welcome a single soul into.
“You’ll never get anywhere unless you do things like this, Odette.”
The scream that got caught on her stalling fight-or-flight reflexes finally broke free, along with her will—her need—to fight for her life.
“I SAID DON’T TOUCH ME!”
It happened in a single fluid motion. His malign hold on her broke away. A ripe pain blossomed over her palm as it made dead contact with his jaw. He reeled back. She froze.
She wished she hadn’t froze. How she wished she hadn’t froze.
The tiny speck of blood that trickled from the corner of his mouth would have brought her the utmost satisfaction, had he not turned to her with a very honest, very real intent to maim. She knew in her heart of hearts that those eyes, dark as the fear that bottomed out on her stomach, were going to haunt her for the rest of her life.
"Oh. You're going to regret that."
Like a blitzle before a hungry pyroar, she bolted.
There were two things she was certain of: he was chasing her and she needed to get away, and the emergency exit was three quarters up the upstage wall. She knew exactly where it was; how fast she’d need to run to get to it before he caught up. She’d passed it enough times to make note— "Always make note of your emergency exits,” Grandpa said more times than she could count—but she never figured she’d really have to remember.
Things like this didn’t happen to people like her. She’d had a rough enough go of it. More hospital stays than she could count in her twenty-one years, hopping primary schools due to her uncontrollable anger problems, the works. Then she found dance, singing, her friends, Pokemon training, and she thought the worst was behind her. Hadn’t the universe toyed with her enough?
She’d played roles like this in the many shows she’d been cast in over the years, but not once did it ever occur to her that this kind of fiction could leap the fourth wall right into her own already-tumultuous life.
She brushed the border curtain as she ran past it. Deschamp’s breaths, sounding closer to growls to her, were right at her heels. A costume rack streaked by. Then the hole in the wall, the one maintenance was taking their sweet time to patch after dealing with the leak inside it. She nearly tripped on the extra piping they left out; the fucking lazy assholes. Then the glowing Exit sign; a beacon.
A beacon that was just a moment out of reach.
Deschamps grabbed her wrist so hard that she cried out. There wasn’t enough time for the understanding of true doom to hail upon her. Not before her head slammed into the brick, knocking the consciousness clean out of her.
Somewhere in the sea of blissful nonexistence, there was a dim awareness of what was happening to her. It was a smothered awareness, but awareness nonetheless. With it came the ultimate desire that she never wake again. Let herself never know the pain of what it was like to be violated. She couldn’t take it.
As she learned in life, most of her prayers usually went unanswered. This one was no exception.
Blinking the haze from her tearful eyes, Odette found herself standing. Her joggers were in tatters, hanging around her ankles by thin strips of fabric and fraying threads. Her jacket was gone. Her shirt had only just fallen back into place from where it was bunched around her collarbone. She shook with the pain she felt in her limbs, her neck. She tried to ignore the ache between her legs, fully aware that it was no use. It would never truly leave her, not tomorrow, not a year from now, not even a decade from now. She’d been forever tainted, she knew. Yet somehow, that wasn’t the worst of it.
She noticed the blood on her hands before she saw the pipe clasped between her trembling hands. Splattered up her arms, bruised beyond belief already, reaching her chest. She felt it on her face, around her lips. For a moment she thought it was her own. The end of the pipe, coated in an unhealthy helping of bilious pink blobs and so much more blood, pointed to the actual culprit.
The only way for one to have known the body on the floor was Deschamps was his chocolate suit. The ensemble Odette found so ugly now looked infinitely more so, with his nethers exposed through his open fly and his own brain matter splattered across the shoulderpads. There wasn’t enough of his head left to identify him otherwise. His neck now ended in a puddle of mashed gore that was slowly seeping over the wood.
Her first coherent thought was good. The next one was when did this happen? Followed by oh no.
Then she screamed.
~+~
The scream transcended her past and arrived in the present along with the rest of her. Odette returned to her blackened mind with an even harsher reminder that autonomy was far too much for somebody like her to ask for. Her flesh belonged to others; Florent, Deschamps, now Dorien, even Odile, wherever she was. She killed Deschamps when it was too late. She couldn’t kill Dorien without butchering her one lead to Florent. And Odile...well, that was more complicated. At least Odile gave her a choice when she could. But when she didn’t, it was for a bigger, more dangerous reason.
Odette understood at that moment that she missed Odile. A lot. Her head, especially now, was a horrifying place to be without the Wrath entity there to light it up and give her the mental companionship that she so desperately needed. It had indeed become the new normal, and in the excruciating minutes without her, she wanted that normal back.
All she could do was sob. Sob, hyperventilate, repeat. Keeping it together was no longer in the cards.
“Max, stop the car.”
The G-force of the moving vehicle faded to a skilled quick brake. Val opening the back door to the chilly woodland that bordered whatever highway they were racing down was a reminder of just how stuffy the car was. With energy she didn’t realize she had, not at all matching how deeply her vision was swimming, she was up and sprinting into the treeline with Val at her heels, Max not far behind.
The burst didn’t last very long. She had to stop, doubling over with her hands on her knees while her stomach threatened to lose whatever was left in it. Her wailing was only goading it closer and closer to going through with it.
There was a hand on her back, a calming voice in her ear. “If you need to throw up, don’t hold it. It’ll help purge your system faster.”
She imagined herself responding; maybe an “Okay” or a “Thanks.” But she just continued to cry. There was no getting a hold of herself. Nothing of hers belonged to her; not anymore. It was all so far out of reach and there was nothing left to do to catch it. It hurt. It angered her.
No. It infuriated her.
The onslaught of rage that overtook her wasn’t just an assault. It was a complete declaration of war. Every muscle in her body stretched taut to near distension as she shrieked months—years—of torment right into the grass. Her physical form longed for the scratchy embrace of the dirt but her broken soul forced it onward. It was an unwilling vessel for the rush of pressure that finally found release.
She wanted to leave again. She wanted to float up to the branches, or perhaps something a little further, like outer space, and watch the mess play out from that safe distance. But something, not Val’s hand, not his voice, not the occasional sound of a car cruising by, held her in place. It was a dull heat, deep in the pit of the small of her back. The moment she noticed it, it flared into something that was uncomfortable, then unbearable. White, hot, excruciating.
When she screamed again, it wasn’t just her.
Her body pulled taut involuntarily as a brilliant, fiery light erupted from her skin, traced down to the hell she’d just sunk to. It washed out the dreary blacks and blues with vibrant, scorching hues of orange, red, and yellow. She tensed her already-flexed muscles in anticipation for a continuation of the scalding burn that never arrived. It was hot, but not painfully so. In fact, she found reprieve from her anguish in it, like a lively fire amidst a raging blizzard. There was just a short second where she felt okay. Comforted, even. She felt like she was receiving a hug from a person she needed a hug from most.
Then it was gone, along with the final drop of adrenaline that was keeping her awake. As darkness regained its reign over the woods, it overtook her too, dropping her into a very long overdue slumber.
The last thing she felt was not one, not two, but three sets of hands catching her.
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