HOME | DD

Description
Had she hoped some piece of her old life would be waiting for her at the Empty Set?
Had she expected anything more than the scene of a crime? The stripped-bare remnants of the place where her life had gone to pieces?
No. No, she hadn't. Yet something had still drawn her back to the club's carpeted runners and rippling velvet curtains, the wan overexposure of its spotlights and the stage where she had once been loved.
Where she had once faced hundreds of seats and the eager shadows arranged there, their eyes turned to hungry sparks by the spotlight's stray rays. Where she had stilled every murmur of conversation with a soft intake of air, a breath echoed throughout the auditorium, drawn and held as they awaited the first note from her lips.
More than once, she'd considered singing of how their hunger unsettled her. The eager spark in their eyes, the hands clasped in their laps, the forward lean from their seats. The way they seemed to bend their hunger and eagerness towards her, a whirlpool of need and ravenous hearts her song could never hope to fill. A maelstrom into which she sang anyways, in self-defence and rapture and a deep-set need of her own.
They had fed each other in that auditorium, night after night. She had fed the need they exposed to her in wide eyes, and though their need had frightened her at times, she had needed it as badly. To be needed, to feed something insatiable and wake something beautiful. If she couldn't satiate them with her song, it was only because the human capacity for beauty was bottomless.
It only confirmed the best in them. She closed her eyes on rows of seats standing empty, and imagined them full of fidgeting shadows, faces turned to her and defined in the stage's strange chiaroscuro.
She imagined the voice lifting from her throat as it once had, as a flawless, vibrating instrument, expanding into the perfect acoustics of the room, spreading to the size of the building itself. Like writing her heart large across the Set's glorious architecture, inviting the eager audience to explore, to read her from the inside out.
Yet all she could raise from her throat was a wordless hum, like the distant overture of a thunderstorm thrumming through sturdy windows. An undertone remnant of a song she had loved, swaying her side to side with its rise and fall.
They would never be back. Nothing would ever be as it had been. Whatever she was yet to discover about the spreading crisis, she knew that already. She'd known it, perhaps, since the moment she had first tried to speak and had failed to break the silence. There would be no audience, or soaring song, or mutual need satisfied beneath the spotlights. She had awoken all the beauty she ever would in the world – not because the need for it was satisfied, but because human cruelty was more bottomless and voracious still.
The best she could hope for was to understand and stem the tide of that cruelty. Before it swept over everything she and they had ever built, all the beauty they had ever cultivated. The best she could hope for was to preserve, and sometimes, when she looked at what was lost already, she didn't see the point.
Sometimes. But then she remembered how it had felt to raise her voice to the roof, to soar in word and breath like a bird of prey, igniting awe on the faces of all before her. Stoking inspiration in the furnace depths of hungry eyes. Her words may have abandoned her, but what she had accomplished with them still mattered. It was still worth protecting, even if she had to defeat every heartless shred of the Process herself.
As if in accord, or in challenge, a lower, grating hum intruded on the remnants of her song.
A feedback sound divorced from the microphone, the speakers, and any human means of production. A spiralling static mockery of the song, coalescing into light and spark and metal on the opposite side of the stage.
A face and form malformed almost beyond recognition, but she knew them still. The traces of a fluttering gown, the idea of a parasol striped in rose red and tapered to a lethal point, the voice racking that hourglass frame like a smoker's cough.
Calling out to her with a hunger she'd never seen from on stage, or heard in the yearning voices of fans. A cold, rampant, furious avarice, a hair-tearing, clawing, never-let-you-go need. That bright distortion of a face fixed on her, the parasol raised in threat or salute, and if she could have spoken, Red would have uttered one word of stunned recognition.
Sybil?