13:HUMOURLESS_COMEDIES

Killing the old couple had not been easy work for either of them. The woman had revealed herself to be a demon and the man her conduit. The pair of them had been in a strange state of shock. Adelaide had certainly been surprised that those two old things, which seemed ready to cough up a lung and die at any moment, had posed any real threat.

When they had left that bunker, they left it mostly confused and stumbling. They made a gentlemen's agreement to never discuss the strangeness of that scenario again. From there, the two of them continued on.

It was strange to walk through a world so utterly empty and singed. All had been destroyed in the blast, and there were, for the most part, no bodies to look at, the people thoroughly destroyed. Their bodies and homes erased in a singular blast. Entire lives and histories turned to ash and rubble.

The sun had fallen and instead of setting over the horizon, it had opted to crash straight into them.

The sun must have fallen because it could no longer illuminate its champion. It could no longer provide the backlighting for Jisako, and had instead decided there was no more purpose to living. From its own pillar high in the sky, but never high enough to reach Jisako, the sun had chosen to jump. In the vain hope it could have her attention, even if covered in disapproval.

When Jisako had been on earth, the sun must have been watching her every movement. It must have been cataloguing every second, from her birth to her death, and been so wholly devoted to her. After all, it would never have fallen on those people if she were still alive.

Such was what was true in Adelaide's deluded mind, anyway.

They wandered for ages, passing strange sight after strange sight. There were structures which remained just barely standing, singular points of verticality in the utterly devastated landscape. There were a handful of dead baby rats, with birth defects all across their bodies Adelaide found hidden under a couple layers of rubble.

Rainmaker had pulled a human hand from the rubble and dropped it with a scream. That scream had attracted another demon. The demon was stronger than they were used to, and the two of them were weaker then they were used to being. Even when they managed to kill it, they were left dragging their broken bodies through the world.

They ran across the remnants of a poster which made them laugh like fools. It wasn't a particularly funny one. It was a poster about the importance of politely asking local politicians to not blow up the planet, drawn over with marker by a young child with no sense of aesthetics. That child was dead now, but the image amused them so utterly. They stood there, in front of it, for thirty minutes, as if it were the funniest thing in the world– to them, it was.

When they walked past it and found a bunch of dead rats, Adelaide noticed that their bodies were utterly beautiful. They were a bunch of pure white bodies, utterly beautiful. They laid amongst the burnt remnants of a museum. Ancient artworks which laid around them like trash, worked as a beautiful framework for the bodies of the rats.

She had dubbed them the immortal ones. After all, as she had once heard, art was immortal, and the rats had turned themselves to art. Art which they could never comprehend nor understand the value of beyond raw materials. Rainmaker had bent down and scooped up the smallest of the rats in his hands. The one rat which was at the farthest corners of the group, and clearly not too close with the rest of them. He placed it into the marble hand of a broken statue, and whispered something to it that Adelaide did not hear.

They continued, running into thing after thing along the road. It seemed the trail of bizarre happenings was not going to stop any time soon. Despite how much they had come to feel a discomfort brewing between them, Adelaide and Rainmaker were stuck together. They walked in silence until, both at once, they felt a violent burning in their chests, passing by what looked like the remnants of any other building.

The one, because it would forever be ingrained into their minds as the one, had once been a solid bricked structure, holding firm against storm and strangeness. It had fallen like a child's blocks, though much more messy. And from inside, some of the blood from patrons crushed inside could still be seen leaking onto the ruined street.

There were the remnants of signs which had been blown away. They were now entirely unreadable in their charred state. The building had seemed so innocent– but it was the one which made their crosses burn. Hot enough to mark their skin and leave patches of black on their already dirtied clothing.

They hadn't known why at the time.

It was at least a relief to Adelaide to know her cross would still burn, though it had burned through her sleeve, starting a small fire she had to desperately pat out. She had been wearing it tied around her hand, too tired to put it back around her neck over and over. She peeled the chunk of her sleeve away and tossed it among the piles of debris. She glanced at Rainmaker, to see if he'd have anything to say, but he didn't really meet her gaze.

"It's burning you too, isn't it?" she asked, pointedly. Rainmaker's cross was still around his neck, so the burn it had left around his neck was bright as day, and obvious as all get out.

He touched it by instinct when Adelaide spoke, as though she would steal it away the moment the opportunity presented itself, and he needed to protect it. "It's cooled," he said. "The flash was strong though." His tone was no less stiff than it was back down in the bunker. In fact— it bothered her rather badly when she realized. She desperately wished he'd just talk the same as he had at an earlier point, but he didn't. She regretted it, but she didn't want to go back on her own word. She didn't want to feel so weak.

Adelaide nodded. "It was agonizing."

"I wouldn't go there."

"It's our job to go where the cross leads us."

"There's something different about this place, though," Rainmaker insisted. He continued clutching his cross like a woman would clutch her pearls. The edges of the wood were left with burn marks all across them.

Adelaide huffed a bit, but said nothing further. She knew better than to start an argument. Not here, not now, and not again. She picked up one of the bricks laying on the ground– what remained of it, anyway. She held it firm between her fingers for a solid moment, before Jisako's ghost appeared once more, striking it from her grip.

Jisako's ghost was covered in strange jewellery– insect like and disquieting. Her head tilted violently. One side, to another. But she didn't say anything. Adelaide stared on in confusion, wondering if Rainmaker had seen what she'd seen but evidently he hadn't. He was just looking at her, wondering why she'd chosen to throw the brick down for no reason. He didn't seem as if he'd, even as an exorcist, be terribly receptive to listening to her about the ghost of Jisako haunting her, so she just had to put the thought away.

It was when the ghost jumped forward she screamed.

The restless dead were usually rather inhospitable, but even then, Adelaide hadn't expected her wife to attack her. She attempted to use the cross to strike at the ghost. Nothing. The ghost didn't even waver as most would have. She grabbed at Adelaide's neck, and squeezed.

Adelaide had once believed those hands would've been gentle. A grip pulling repentance and life from her body in the same sweet manner as Jisako had always operated herself. She could see those hands now. They were less mistlike than back under the floorboards. They were solid as brick. She could feel the nails digging into her flesh, leaving crescent marks under their weight.

You ran. You abandoned me, Adelaide could imagine it saying. Though it felt much less like imagination now. Why were you always so cut off from me? Why would you never look at me? Why did you let him take me into the woods that day? You saw me, didn't you? Didn't you know what he was going to do? Why didn't you stop his car? Why'd you let him get away? Why did you kill my sister? Why are you always starting fights? Why? Why? Why?

Adelaide could most definitely imagine those hands managing to strangle her now. Jisako's soft touch had withered away. In its place was something expert in being swift and cruel. Something which specialized in being the opposite of everything Jisako had once been, condensed into a vague approximation of her old form crawling with beetles and chains. This was not a Jisako. Adelaide stared at it.

It still bore Jisako's face. It still spoke in what must have been her voice, pressing into Adelaide's mind. It was still so close to Jisako that there could not have been so much of a difference, could there?

So she reached out, and pressed a hand to the face, caressing the creature as the last of the air in her died out. If she would die, best it be by Jisako's hand. And if she lived, best it be making clear something. There was a moment the expression of the ghost changed. Somewhere between disbelief, rage, and desire coagulating into a mess of feelings, none of which could be sorted.

She sucked in a breath as violently as she could– and finally something went down.

The ghost had gone. Rainmaker was watching her. "That… Jisako?" he asked.

Adelaide nodded. "Took you long enough to notice," she wheezed out.

"I didn't want to get involved in your personal life. You've already said I seemed too invested."

Adelaide then realized he was picking a fight. And some small part of her felt vindicated, despite the pain she was in. The idea he still had the will, the desire. That he hadn't become lost in apathy and wasn't leaving her the way Forrest had left. Adelaide looked at the boy– who in her eyes, seemed a bit like a four year old trying to pick a fight, and smiled. "It's good to have the world be right again," she declared.

Rainmaker didn't get to ask what she was yammering about now, if he was even going to, she wasn't sure. Instead, a man walked out from inside the building the two of them were in front of. Rainmaker stared at him for a moment, and seemed rather starstruck.

Adelaide got off the ground, to try and see what Rainmaker was looking at with so much intention. The man seemed to be suffering the after effects of radiation poisoning, but he harboured no burns or visible injuries. He didn't seem to have been caught up in the blast. The best Adelaide could guess was that he'd been inside a bunker but for whatever reason, it had been faulty, and not he was poisoned.

"What's a celebrity like you doing all the way here?" Rainmaker asked. Adelaide narrowed her eyes at the man. She had no idea what he was a celebrity of. He seemed like just any other man.

"Dying," he replied. "Same as you."

Rainmaker made a show of laughing at what the man said. He threw his head back, belly laughing as though there were somehow a great genius hidden amongst the generic joke. He stared at Adelaide, as though prompting her to also laugh gor his sake. She couldn't understand why. He didn't even seem like he was really amused in the slightest. The laugh was the most forced thing she had ever heard.

There was not a single thing that made sense about the situation, and Adelaide wondered if some brain damage from being strangled by her wife's ghost was getting to her ability to understand what the hell was going on.

As she debated her sanity, Adelaide's cross burned against her wrist. It burned her skin, singing her flesh without mercy, and sticking to it in a manner which embedded itself in. She couldn't pull it off. The thing was practically molten. She pressed her wrist into nearby snow, allowing the radiated cold onto her skin.

"Who is this?" Adelaide asked, as she crouched over the ground.

Rainmaker laughed again. A fake, hollow laugh. Adelaide shuddered. It was an unnerving display. "Just a soul I know. A great comedian, really. Famous as famous gets," he insisted. "Jorahai, this is Adelaide. She's a traveller like I am."

"I never thought you were interested in cougars," Jorahai responded, looking Adelaide up and down. He focused his attention on her face at first, but his eyes trailed over her body. They lingered on her chest. Jorahai let out a disapproving noise.

Adelaide felt something die inside of her.

"No interest in cougars," Rainmaker said. "I'm not dating her."

"Likely story."

Rainmaker looked at Adelaide, before deciding something in that broken head of his, and saying, "Alright, you caught me. Sorry– guess it's just hard to resist. It's fun to be a bit of a tease about these things, right?" Rainmaker looked at Adelaide, with an expression feigning fawning. Adelaide stared back at him in utter disbelief.

"What the fuck?" Was all Adelaide could muster the energy to say. She was utterly dumbfounded and could not figure out why Rainmaker was just agreeing with what the strange man was saying for essentially no reason.

Jorahai walked closer, looking Adelaide over. He began focusing on the melting cross which had bound itself to her wrist. Or what remained of it. The damn thing was nothing more than a lump of scalding metal now. The comedian laughed. "Well then, we ought to go inside," he declared. "Come on, come along with me. Come along with us. Come on now, right now."

The man's actions were no less forceful than his words. He grabbed their hands and began dragging the both of them in with rough yanks. He did not care that Adelaide was stumbling and that Rainmaker was bleeding. He dragged them anyway. He reminded Adelaide of Solko.

As they walked– she saw more of his face, his features. They were rather damaged by radiation poisoning, but something about his air felt familiar. She hated it. To recognize a face but not understand why.

Suddenly, Adelaide wanted nothing more than to not have to be there, because it felt like something bad was going to happen. Worse than getting strangled by her wife's angry ghost. She leaned backward, but Jorahai kept pulling her. Jisako's voice screamed in her head– no words, just an endless, mind tearing scream.

Adelaide swayed on her feet as she walked. Jorahai pulled harder– and she staggered forward, falling onto him. They were both thin– bones barely held together by their skin, and so they both went tumbling to the ground. Jorahai got up rather quickly, and continued pulling her along. Adelaide fainted.