Week 433: Jester's Burden

[Micali Alsara]

Jester's Burden
(2506)

Spoiler: Author's Notes

Hiatus has ended! I honestly contemplated dropping this story altogether or doing some kind of time-skip, as towards the more recent chapters I began to feel really demotivated about the direction I had taken things and just a general creative burnout.

However! I can't in good faith just drop this story after the literal years of effort and thought I've given it. It may have its flaws, but I would never forgive myself if I didn't see it through to the end. So we will resume with Micali's story exactly where we left off! Hopefully things will wrap up well, as we're now moving into the final act of her story. From here on out, we get to explore all the things I've wanted to write ever since I first came up with this story. Hope whoever's reading this will enjoy!

Content Warning: Typical stuff for Micali's story (violence & mentions of child death.)

Early morning mist curled around the cool cobble of Canis Street. Brown eyes scanned their surroundings from the alleyway alcove they peered from. Dawn had come and gone - but she couldn’t shake the words of that kid. Ritz. He had begged her to go before dawn, and as she suspected, she watched two more kids walk in as part of some kind of shift change. His friends, she supposed.

He was likely still tied to the bed back in that seedy bar - alive. She had heard all the time within the Insidiis that Lupanar District in Terminus was a lawless place where everybody was already dead. Perhaps it was pettiness and not mercy that spared the boy. It reassured her to think she hadn’t lost her edge - an edge she so desperately needed now.

She would infiltrate the apartment building, incapacitate any guards she needed, and find Olivor on the sixth floor. He was always a smooth talker, but she could always see through it. He had always been close to Cidisti, so she couldn’t kill Olivor until he told her where he was. No matter how badly she wanted to see his smarmy mouth shut forever. He - who had kept an eye out while they tortured her for hours, who had dared look at her with tears in his eyes when he peeked in to inform her tormentors that they had to leave.

She wanted to kill him slowly. As slowly as her own partner had taken a knife through her guts, her limbs, her womb. But to do that, she needed to get inside, get to him. On her intel and what her eyes had seen throughout the morning, it seemed that there were indeed thirteen bodies inside the building, with one guard stationed out front, leaned against the building’s cool bricks and a cigarette between his teeth.

If Olivor’s gang - if the Coronators were just a bunch of street rat kids, she couldn’t kill them. She couldn’t. Even now, as she fantasized of all the ways she could make his silver tongue shriek in agony, she had her morals. It wasn’t just for Cora anymore. It was for Rosa. For Dom. To let her remaining prey know that their end would be just as painful, just as horrible as the losses she herself had faced.

Olivor, Cidisti, Talrigori, Foss. The speaker, the strategist, the spy, and the sniper. The names ran through her mind on a loop. The last one caught on the edges of her brain, and a fury grew in her. She should’ve held him down into the fireplace at Industria Manor, should’ve cut him to pieces and locked him in boxes so he couldn’t come together again. She would find a way to remove him from this world, one way or another. She felt it poetic to leave him for last - if he was going to let her live, to spur her on this journey for revenge, she would accept his challenge. To see the look in his eyes when he knew he had lost. To outsmart the man who had ruined her life. For justice, for their daughter - the one he killed.

That bubbling rage was all she needed to slink across the street and around the corner of the apartment building, using the fog as cover as she lunged at the guard on watch and wrapped her elbow around his throat, only letting him down to the ground when he fell limp from consciousness. There was no telling how long he’d be out for. Perhaps she could take Olivor somewhere far from here, where they wouldn’t be bothered while she worked.

Leading into the foyer, nobody heard the door silently open and close. She caught a glance of a body heading upstairs - leisurely, unaware of her presence. So upwards she climbed, her years of training as an assassin coming in handy to subdue most of the occupants of the building quickly and quietly. They stood before various stations - exa printers, some drug labs, other clandestine materials. Then, they fell.

xx-----

Until the fifth floor, where she happened upon the two kids she had noticed coming in that morning. “...noticed that it got really quiet downstairs suddenly?” The voice belonged to an enlil with almost blindingly vibrant sea-blue feathers. They faced away from the stairwell, obviously unconcerned with the silence.

“Maybe they finally learned-” the voice was close, too close, and the girl cut herself off as she turned the corner to see Micali crouching up the stairs.

The laicar raised her pistol, holding the girl at gunpoint. Shit. She had to get this situation under control. “I have business with Olivor. Get out of my way.”

The girl, a pale spurii with rose gold hair, moved away from the stairwell with her hands raised. “Do what she says.” The enlil hesitated to act, their hand curled around their lowered gun, possibly intent to raise it. The girl spoke again. “Telumi, remember what I said yesterday? We have to stick together, and we can’t do that if we’re not alive, okay? So just let her through.”

“Did she…did she kill Ritz? How do we know she isn’t going to kill us the second we run?” The enlil’s deep voice shook with uncertainty. Just another kid.

Micali countered immediately, with a voice unwavering. “Ritz is alive. In a seedy bar halfway out of the district. I didn’t kill anyone downstairs. I’m here for Olivor, and him alone.” The kid grimaced before dropping their gun. Micali raised hers to instead aim at them, and gestured to the stairwell behind her. “Get out of here. Now.”

The two youths looked to one another before fleeing past her and down where she had come from, her pistol trained on them the entire time before their footsteps faded away. Loyalty had no place in this business. She knew that better than anyone. She took the leftover pistol and emptied the ammo into her bag. Navigating towards the last stairwell, she put an ear to the door and heard…music. Soft, muffled tones that echoed across what had to be an empty floor aside from her quarry.

She opened the door, and stepped into her last ascent. At the end of this path was vindication, justice, closure. With every silent step she took, her heart beat faster in her chest. She hadn’t seen him in four years. Would he look the same? Would he have any new scars? Would he recognize her, the battered broken woman she had become?

Micali heard humming. Whimsical, content humming. The noise a man makes when he enjoys a moment of respite from this hell. She afforded him that much before she turned the corner and stalked down the hallway towards the source of the music. The building gave a creak under her footsteps, and she had to curse circumstance. The music stopped, and she ducked into an adjacent office. Silence followed. Deafening, awful silence. Then, music. Quieter now.

She crept back out from the office and pressed onward. When she peeked an eye past the corner, she was met with an otherwise empty office - before a gunshot rang out and sharp pain seared from her torso. A familiar pain. She pivoted on her heel to the office across the hall, where she was met by the shocked visage of Olivor. He looked…the same. Almost exactly the same. His eyes were wide with shock - no, horror. She took his moment of weakness as one of opportunity, and repaid his gunshots threefold. He collapsed backwards into the wall, clutching his gut as he screamed in pain. She ran forward, kicking his pistol from his hand. She looked to his blood - it wasn’t black. He wasn’t a member of the replicari. One of the eight. He was just regular old Olivor. But she was left with one question as she approached him.

Why hadn’t he killed her?

Once the pistol was away, she grabbed him by the collar of his shirt as he groaned through the immense pain, back to his office, where she threw him into the chair and held her pistol up to his head across the desk, her other hand resting on her side, where blood flowed like a brook along pebbles. Olivor seemed to adjust to the pain before gritting out his first words to her. “I told him it was a matter of time. I knew it. Fuck, you really got me good. You treat all your former abusers this well?” He chuckled through what had to be blinding pain.

She kept her aim resolute, her eyes focused as she moved to turn off the phonograph that still churned out soft music. His laugh sounded the same. He had the same charismatic cadence, the same jester attitude that had kept the Seven Devils going through their hardest times. She wanted to hear him scream, to make him suffer a thousand deaths. So why could she do nothing but stand there as he rambled on?

“You look good. The braid really works for you,” he sighed between grunts of pain as his innards presumably fluttered around his gunshot wounds. “Fuck. Just - what do you want? Just gonna stand there?”

So many times she had imagined this moment, had hoped for the opportunity to call him any assortment of words to befit his cowardice. But here, watching him squirm as he slowly lost blood and scrambled to talk his way out of it, she could only feel…pity. Almost…remorse. But no. She had to see this through. She would never have another chance like this. She mustered the only word she could manage while the maelstrom in her mind screamed for her to turn back. “Cid.”

Olivor widened his eyes with a laugh and a grin. “Seriously?” When she didn’t respond, he shook his head and looked back to her, tears beginning to fill his eyes from the pain and the panic. “Fuck. How many…” He couldn’t finish the thought, but his words had a clear implication.

Micali stared him down, her body beginning to tremble from the pain she felt in her own body. “Pallorus and Valgora are dead.” She tightened her grip on her pistol as she nearly felt herself losing her stance. Why did saying it aloud to him make her ears ring?

He blinked and tears began to fall down his face at that. “Ah, I see. Well. That’s great, isn’t it? You got those people that wronged you. And look at you,” he joked as he became more and more miserable in appearance, “the image of a woman at peace.”

She stepped forward and held her gun up to him. “Cidisti. Where is he.” It wasn’t a question.

He clutched his stomach, applying pressure to his wounds as he hunched and spoke. He knew how this worked. “Village, north of Terminus. Cold place by a river. Fratrea. Small place, great for an assassination. Hear the weather’s lovely.” He held her eye contact, and she could see it - he wasn’t too proud to beg, his eyes were doing it for him. “Foss made me do it. He had shit on me - shit on all of us. It wasn’t-”

“Shut the fuck up!” Micali insisted, gesturing towards him with her gun as her anger reared its head again. “You didn’t…you didn’t have to do shit. You were my friends.”

Olivor sputtered. “We didn’t know what he was planning to do! We didn’t know, Micali! We didn’t! If we didn’t help, he could’ve killed us, or ruined our lives! By the time I knew what was happening, it was already done!” His tears flew freely, his voice cracking and his clever facade crumbling. Micali was taken aback by his break in composure. “I never asked to help kill some kid! I didn’t…fuck, I wish I could take it back. I wish with everything in me that I had said no, fuck the consequences. But I didn’t. I made the wrong decision and that’s something I can never take back. But I’m trying to figure my life out. I barely talk with Cid anymore but he feels just-”

The woman shot the ceiling above him, and he flinched as dust flew around him. “Fuck you. I should torture you, should pull you apart one piece at a time so your body can be as spineless as your mind. You are weak. You were always weak. You will always be weak, pathetic, nothing.” She needed to hurt him just this bit more before she could leave. Because as much as she wanted to plaster his brains across the room, she saw in his eyes that he was genuine - he regretted his part in the events that had destroyed her life.

“You could,” he conceded, voice falling again. “You’d be justified. I can’t deny that, I won’t. But nothing you do will fix what we did, no matter how many of us are dead. We haven’t come after you since then. None of us have seen or heard from Foss. We barely speak with each other.”

Micali remembered a detail she had lost in her emotions. “You sent an assassin to kill me. Eight months ago. He sent your regards.” She felt tears land on her outstretched arm - when had she begun to cry?

The short laicar man looked aghast. “No, I- I never! I didn’t- who would fucking…what?” He looked around himself in disbelief. “I never sent anyone. Micali, I haven’t left Lupanar, haven’t heard anything about you for three years. How could I possibly send someone to kill you?”

He was being honest. She could see it from the parting of his lips to the crinkle of his eyebrows. He didn’t send the assassin. So who…?

It was a problem for later. Silence deafened her. She had to decide, right there, right then, whether she would spare him. But she already knew - she had no choice. The man who admittedly had the least to do with the death of her daughter, who had shown remorse, had tried to start anew, far from her. Who she had thought sparked her on this journey in the first place. The same pathetic, insecure boy she grew up with. Micali lowered her gun and sighed before she turned away.

He groaned behind her. Relief?

Something changed in her. Something snapped, something shifted. This was the only thing left for her to do. She couldn’t turn back, she couldn’t save those she had already lost. From birth everything in her life was out of her control. This was the path she’d been set on for years now, she just didn’t know it until recently. Micali took a deep breath before she turned back to Olivor, her expression dark and her pistol raised.

Olivor had always been so dramatic, so boastful to hide his shortcomings. He was short, he was witty, and he was joyous. It made it all the worse as his face crumpled into a lax shock when Micali put a bullet through his skull.

xx-x---