taxonomites | [ Voice ]

I'm all kinds of fucked up. Got a story that'll make Stephen King shit himself.

What keeps me going is knowing that what I do helps people. Saves them. Stops them from becoming a victim like I was.

You do good, try to make lives better, and th-that makes you extraordinary. There aren't many like you.

Do you have...friends, people around you?

[Cassies exhales a short, bashful chuckle] Trying to make me seem like I'm some kind of hero. I'm really not. If I'm not careful, I'mma end up like the things I hunt.

A few. the majority of them are people I've saved. Vlad, though, he's the Robin to my Batman. If Robin was practically seven feet tall and made of muscle. He's there to make sure I don't go over the edge.

Not all heroes are the conventional types that they show in movies. You're the wiser sort of hero, I-I think. You know harder truths, you've had so much pain in your life, and it makes you...real, better at what you do. You know the dark, you-you've felt it, and you have to fear it, and...it makes you stronger.

How long have you known him?

Can't be a hero if you've killed children. They were feral...but still. And my own mother...twice.

[Cassies swallows the tightening in her throat, forcing it down.]

Been two years or so. Give or take.

[Okay, that makes Tara pause. But she doesn't know all the details]

Different circumstances...i-it's not a rule. There are no rules. The things you have to do, to save others, to save...yourself, those things always hurt the most. And it makes it hard to be alone, because you remember, every day...

[She's not necessarily speaking from experience, she just...knows and understands these things]

But it still makes you a hero. Because...because not many people have that kind of strength.

[Cassie's quiet for a long moment. She hates how understanding Tara is. How she can explain Cassie's life in a way that it gives her reason to live. Not that Cassie's suicidal, but she figures if she hadn't been born, her mother might not have snapped and that sends Cassie in a downward spiral, making her feel more like shit.]

Somehow, I don't feel like a hero.

[They've been talking this entire time on the communicator, and Tara senses that the girl might prefer it that way, at least for the time being, but it seems like, if they were face to face, it would be the perfect time to at least offer her a smile, if nothing else--something reassuring]

You don't have to be a hero. You-you don't. But...you are.

[Pause]

I don't even know your name. I'm Tara.

[Cassie fights back the urge to say 'No, I'm not' and is quiet for a moment before replying:]

Cassandra. But I go by 'Cassie'.

[Tara waits another moment before continuing]

We should...meet? Somewhere? I-I haven't seen you yet, and we've been talking, I-I just...

[She trails off there]

[Cassie's tentative, but Tara seems like a genuinely nice person.]

Where? The Sanctuary? That's the only real landmark I know.

I could show you some other places? But we should meet at The Sanctuary for now.

I'll be there in a few minutes.

Tara walks briskly back to The Sanctuary; once she's there, she crosses her arms over chest and waits for Cassie.

Cassie, having followed the blip on her radar to a random street in Osten, found herself in possession of of the white van that she and Vlad drove cross-country. Filled with the various tricks of their trade. The first thing she'd done once she realized she had her ride again was go to the hatch and get several large gallons of gasoline and fill the tank, just in case.

Not three minutes after Tara arrived at the Sanctuary, did the same white van pull up. Cassie threw it into park, then climbed out of the driver's side door, slamming it closed. She walked around the front of the van, looking at Tara. She hopes this is Tara. Otherwise, she'd feel really fucking awkward.

"Uh, hi," Cassie guessed that if she heard the woman's voice, she'd know if this was the young woman she was talking to not five minutes before.

"Hi," Tara smiled softly at her. "Cassie?"

It had to be her, of course, so the question was more rhetorical than anything else. Her arms fell to her side and she walked closer to the young woman.

"You brought a van?"

Cassie glanced back to the van. She really needed to name it...something.

The Revenantmobile? Too Batman.

The Slasher Machine? Too Scooby Doo.

She nodded, before looking back to Tara, "Yeah. It's what Vlad and I rode around in. We had to drive around an RV for a short time, but that got destroyed. Thanks to a buncha fucking wooden doll things."

"What...what, specifically, do you do? You and Vlad. When you drive around, saving people, wh-what are you saving them from?"

In the meantime, she examined Cassie a little more closely. They seemed to be similar to each other in age, but it was easy to see with just one glance that Cassie had lived multiple lifetimes in a short time.

Cassie sighed. A loaded question. She'd crossed her arms beneath her breasts and moved to lean against the side of the van.

"Okay. There's bad people in the world, right? Murderers, rapists, etc and so on? Well, they get caught and they die a violent death. But they don't stay dead. They become 'Slashers' - or 'Revenants' as the G-Men call 'em - they're harder to injure and they hate everything good in the world. And they don't stop unless you put them down for good. Serious mortal wounding."

Cassie was quiet for a moment as she let that sink in. "And that's why I do. I hunt down Slashers and fuck them up before they can hurt anyone else."

Wow. So Cassie was dealing with soulless demons of a different variety. Enemies that had once been mortal, but still never 'human,' never with a soul. It was a world difficult for her to imagine in some ways, but not so much in others.

"You slay them, these--these soulless, undead creatures. My friend slays vampires. I-It's not much different, in some ways. But...are you the only one? D-Does anyone else try to stop these Slashers?"

Cassie wanted to correct Tara in saying that they weren't soulless. For a brief, shining moment, her mother was alive recently. Thanks to that psycho Dr. West and his reanimator potion or whatever the fuck it was. Her mother and father were together as they should have been.

But then something went to shit and her mother had accidentally stabbed her father - accidentally being that she'd intended to stab an innocent and he'd leapt in the way to save the woman - and Cassie, with the help of Dr. West, killed her mother again.

Heartbreak burns in her chest, her eyes, her throat and she blinks several times. "I haven't run into anyone else who does. Vlad, I told you about him, he's the only one I know for sure. And that's only because we go everywhere together."

"You kill Slashers, and Slashers...all Slashers were once bad people? B-Before they died?" Tara wanted to clarify this, anyway, because this was an entirely new subject to her, after all. "And Vlad--how did he...start doing that? The slaying?"

"Apparently, slashers come from a specific type of people. Loner. Individualist. Obsessive. Prone to violence. My..." Cassie swallowed hard, her throat tightening up on her again. "My mom was a good woman until my dad left us. Then when the kids at my school were mean to me, she snapped. She just wanted the other kids to be nice to me." If she'd been any other person, Cassie might have broken down crying as she said those words.

"So she started murdering the kids. And when I'd found out, I'd called the police. She committed suicide by shoving her head in a pot of boiling gravy. So, I guess...either they started out wrong, like the Freddy Krueger kid or they get pushed over the edge."

Cassie cleared her throat, wetting her lips before answering Tara's question about Vlad. "There was a slasher in Chicago and I mistook Vlad for him. When I realized I was wrong, I offered him a chance to help me hunt down the man that was to blame for the murders. He was raised by a butcher who taught him how to be handy with a knife."

Tara is bereft of words at the moment. She's never been much of a talker, like Buffy or Willow, so that doesn't come as a total surprise, but this is the sort of subject that makes her pause those extra few seconds longer than she normally would.

She honestly didn't know what to say about Cassie's mom, and it was a delicate subject, so she wanted to tread carefully.

"People...they can be pushed far enough sometimes, so-so far that they seem completely different. It happens, I-I think, when it comes to the people they love most. So when your mom saw you in pain-it pushed her far enough."

Tara hesitated again. But she wanted to give her answer more meaning, so she finally continued, "My girlfriend, Willow--in my world, she struggled with an addiction to magic. She wasn't like that when we first met, but...she changed. We--I had to leave, for a while, for her own good. And-And then she was killed."

She swallowed heavily. "Since I've been here, I found out that in-in an alternate reality, it was me who died, not her. And when I was killed, it was the thing--the thing that pushed her over the edge. She almost destroyed the world because of it."

Tara met Cassie's eyes again, full of sincerity and understanding. "I thought you were a hero, before, but now...I know. And I'm glad you have someone like Vlad."

Cassie listened to Tara, a small frown marring her features and she took all of it in. Everyone was capable of something. They could be capable of great things or terrible, horrifying things. It was all a matter of their surroundings, how they react to them.

Hearing about Tara's girlfriend caused Cassie's chest to hurt. To be away from someone, then to reunite, only to have her murdered. That had to be seven kinds of heartbreaking.

The alternate realities thing made Cassie's head spin. Was it possible that in another world, she was regular Cassie Hack, college student? With a mom and dad who were happily married with 2.5 kids and a pickett fence.

Cassie couldn't keep Tara's gaze when Tara called her a hero. She lowered her eyes to the ground, her brow furrowing. "Please stop calling me a 'hero'."

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[Location: Sanctuary]

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