In the beginning [before all time] was the Word (^[a]Christ), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ^[b]Himself.

² He was present originally with God.

³ All things were made and came into existence through Him; and without Him was not even one thing made that has come into being.

⁴ In Him was Life, and the Life was the Light of men.

The Book of John, 1:1-4

The Angel rolled her eyes as the pretty much ever present key logger who spied on whatever she created on her laptop caused her text to hiccup across the screen. The arrogant announcement of unrepentant , unsanctioned yet paid for presence was usually waved through towards what had brought her to type anyway, ignored like a cloud of gnats one had to navigate through on autumn days when the world made them heady with the scent of pending rot and decay.

“It’s your own fucking death warrant you’ve already signed with your stalkerish stupidity, so I don’t care if you keep it up or not. ” she muttered through her slender, ringed fingers.

The space around her shifted into the semblance of ones and zeros she was but a wisp between , ensuring that the potency of everything the procurer of the surveillance read would result in unadulterated lean, a lowly high he’d not be able to fully extricate himself from until she felt like releasing him from it.

“& understand that I am going to enjoy it to the almost unfathomable depths of which you’ve orchestrated this dumb shit against me. I am so grateful you’ve pissed other people beyond me off. To do this… as just another cop-out of your sitting your flat ass down to figure how to write is just an underscoring of why God picked HIM for me instead of your ‘need a crutch in every corner of your fucking life ‘ you. You’re propped up on stage with the one dude who actually likes you & nobody’s showing up who isnt paid off. So enjoy scanning that crowd for someone genuine showing up for your hollowed out by your own shit ass.”

The first seam in his threadbare ass opened as he sat hunched over his iPad at the vanity table in his dressing room. He looked away from the blinking screen into the dead bulb at the base of the ringed mirror. She’d snarked in his ear about it when she’d showed up over him inserting his fuckboy hack’s fingers into her bank account, trying to get a rise out of her.

“You’re only not requesting a new one to keep up the sham of you being the unassuming nice guy to the outside world.”

The comedic vitriol in how she had said it splashed it across the walls in his mind’s eye then and it seeped back through the surely leaded paint now. Because it was the truth. He wanted someone, anyone to feel bad for him and change the light without him having to ask, and hated every single one of them that had entered his dressing room, seen it and done nothing.

” & look at you …sitting there…desperate for the energy in my words because you are fucking less than a vesper these days, aren’t cha? & not even in a worthwhile, holy way. Eat up, jerk. Ya know… he has to do Nothing to be top of mind with me. Not one thing. No one’s ever loved you for real like that. That’s part of why you jealously patch in… paying off that fucktwat in the dumb shoes to let you peep the way you used to at Showworld back in the day, in the carousel of trannies. Those were the days, right?”

He winced over the root of his current fucked up predilections being laid bare by the one he’d started all of this trying to victimize. “You forget…I’ve been around long enough to …have access to…those…who… know it all, don’t you?”

“Even with all your coin you don’t have enough of you to make loving you fully worthwhile. You’re begging me to write a satire of you because you know it’s the only way you’ll get a chance at being sincerely presented in this laughable life you lead these days, the closest you’ll ever get to having a standalone caliber worth commenting on outside of the characters you Buffalo Billly boy, Ed Grimes slide into to animate.”

“That’s WHY I don’t even bother calling you a corpse fucker. Even the characters you pick to play you don’t have the balls to inhabit enough to bring alive for the audience. All they see is just hapless, Heroin-micro-dosed up you, up there listlessly flailing around for showers of gold, coins or otherwise. & it’s not due to absence of skills- You’re literally the son of a prostitute, prostituting for the king- this land is your land…”

“But no- You suck at it because you’re inconceivably more of a fucking coward the older you get. ” she hissed, taking a swig from his glass. She watched his eyes bulge as it turned to holy water in his face, snapped her fingers to draw his attention back to her and viciously poured the libation out on the rug before continuing.

“You’re too scared to even really ACT anymore. What a fucking waste. & as for targeting my bank account shit like the scummer you are…” she paused, then sighed. “Like you haven’t been curating from slop throughout this shit in search of some show of power over me? It lines up with every other bad business decision you’ve been suckered into, even threatening to fuck with my money. The only good fiscal investment you’ve ever made was in him, and then your own hubris tried to take him down for the investment paying the fuck off handsomely. You hate the money you made alongside him because it made him look good with or without you, and to your dumb ass, that’s not fucking allowed, right? Your spite has damn near killed a studio that could’ve been able to say they got their oscars in part due to you. You being petty. So no, you having a fuck try to lift credit card info from me in real time aint beneath your stupid ass at all. We all wish it was. Everyone YOU have involved in this mess-“

“This- thing you had yer code monkey interrupt today? That you were so sure was going to be your fucking debut after fucking with my money?” She chuffed. “It was a fucking paltry writing exercise in a group session… one I am putting to use on the fly by even addressing you… and I am running fucking circles around your spying, flaccid ass at not even 1/8th of mast! And look at yourself in that dirty fucking mirror- you’re fucking salivating over seeing it,” she snarled.

“I do it with nothing in my pocket. Yet look at what you’re willing to writhe in and for with your pockets fucking full. Fucking pitiful, you are-“

{ding dong}

*

“Fuck! Man…”

The guy paid to spy on her looked away from his remote screen that mirrored hers at the sound of the doorbell. He glanced over at the screen that showed the one paying him to do this nonsense, a guy even he couldn’t stand. His eyes danced down to the account accrual at the bottom of his screen that made it worth it by the reported upon keylogged word, then zoomed in on the jaundiced face of the dude who was insane enough to try to harass this woman who’d flagrantly rejected him, surprisingly before she’d realized she wanted to possibly fuck the brains of out of the man who’d taught the jerk how to pantomime like he Was a man in the public eye, instead.

The only explanation was that the procurer was already dead. And even as he was paying him to rape the sanctity of her writing space (only to find out he was not even a bit player upon its stage, after having had the audacity to build bleachers around it for his sycophants to ogle him abusing her from- like he was ever not going to be a lamb in any tale he told that featured this wolf)she abused him instead. But her words hit him like a defibrillation, propping him up. They made him at least look like he was alive, positioned as a victim of the bitch he thought and put money on the line to victimize.

Her refusing his script had made him pivot, the fastest his mind had moved in ages, and now he wanted them to cry for him instead. He was a rich on paper, petulant, coddled and presently retarded masochist, completely attached to the gaze of those outside of him as long as it was an adoring one.

Too kind for this world Guy paid him to cyberstalk and spy on some seemingly random chick not even in his realm of whathaveyous, and did so handsomely. But it was almost not enough to watch him flinch as his eyes slowly meandered to the end of each sentence his dyslexia made him have to struggle through, only for the full intent of her lyrics to slam into him like a shiv she hadn’t even hidden from the first syllable. A stupid, rich sociopath, he was. Only his target was a fucking …

The doorbell buzzed again.

“Alright, already! fuck!”

*

“Stop hanging onto my every word, ya fucking piehole!” The Angel roared. “Look at you! Braying to ANYBODY who’d feign listening to your dumb ass that I couldn’t write yet here the fuck you are, trying to fucking sup from this fucking teat. I get why it seems comforting to you. Your fucking mother hated you so trying to get me to the point of despising your presence kinda feels like home, right? Just like that corn husk that was the right skin shade for you to dogwalk and shame in public for being the grifter you picked her to be, trying to passively trigger people to pity you.”

What remained of his faint brows rose in indignation, momentarily. The Angel sneered.

“What? Pray tell are you going to defend her hornswoggled ass for fucking once? Or are you still punishing her for seeing you as profitable to her bottom line a leetle too loudly? You want me to string you up so badly. That’s how much you bear the brunt of having gotten me to pop him in the head the last time all three of us were on this plane. But you will Not get it this life. No. You will carry the weight of it. All of it. I am not helping alleviate your geist. You chose this shit. Just as much as you chose that shit that surrounds you in MY fn city. I am not doing it. Unless you kill him.”

He opened his mouth , thought the better of it and closed it again like the lizard spawn he was.

“Do that …then I will release you from this miserable life of yours… I’ll slice you fucking open on national fucking tv. & you’ll know it’s me, you’ll see me in the eyes of whomever I choose to ride TO cut you fucking open. You already ARE experiencing that aspect of the shit. Have you told any of them That?”

The wannabe rapist looked away.

” Lol. Think they wouldn’t believe you if you did, huh? That whole “mwahmwah she’s haunting me~” wouldn’t be as well received this time, Petyr? Fiiine. Outing myself. You’re not crazy. I HAVE been doing…what you can’t tell them. But it’s not due to us, you & I. It’s due to what I know you had to do with Theseus getting hurt.”

She grabbed her wannabe abuser by the face. “So what are you gonna do? I’ve already lost him before. Because of you. If you find the balls TO do it, it’ll hurt, forever change me, but I’ll get through it. Again. But YOU? Not this time. You only survived last time because you were my … . but you’ve done nothing of merit with the time you were given from that tale-” The Angel looked up as her biggest fan the Code jockey ambled back to his hub with a redbull in his fist.

She tilted Petyr’s chin up to make him look her in the eye with one hand, pulling the blades in his breadbox and the space where his spleen used to be out of him roughly, one at a time, before spooling two of her extra arms back into her core. The two arms she’d had him pinned to the back of his chair with by his shoulders eased up a bit, the palm pressed firmly into his diaphragm did not. The fingers that held his face loosened then grazed his chin as they danced around his throat to the side of his neck that had once fused. Her spiritual knee to his groin did not move. 

Petyr the aight hissed like the weee penis he had and was. He tried to buck his beady piggish eyes balefully at the ‘holy black thing’ he had wasted the best part of the last 5 years trying to classify as less than for not being enamored by his lazy Glamour-ish tendencies like the rest of the world. She laughed in his face.

His arrogant rage shifted to alarm when he realized the mirth actually made it into her eyes this time. She was enjoying watching him squirm against his own hard-on over her being willing to fucking break him right there.

The Code monkey stood stupefied by being able to see the apparition of the wolfish bitch he’d taken money to target somehow openly tormenting the asshole that signed his checks, for himself this time.

She looked at Codee and grinned. He blinked in shock as she disappeared in a shaft of fluorescent light that suddenly started to swing in the dressing room due to Petyr the Aight’s demon walking out of the backstage room in utter disgust with his charge.

*

A knock at the door pulled the craven faced, richly coddled man back to his current, listless, pay to play reality.

His partner in crime with the genuine eyes always ready to carry his weight poked his head in.

He was as happy to see his best friend as usual, beaming like Beatrice on the outskirts of purgatory. “You ready to try the take we were riffing about the other…” he paused and really looked at him for what felt like the first time in ages.

His cheeks were more sullen than made sense, considering the physicals they’d both had to pass to even be allowed to pull this off this late in the game and the joyful feast they’d had together the night before. “Hey, are you alright? I mean, we are on the Great White Way and all but you… you look like you’ve seen a ghost-”

*

He reached over and spun her laptop towards his line of sight due to the ribald laughter that had kept seeping out of her as she’d typed.

She sat back casually, defiantly even as his fingers tapped on the arrow keys, silent. She watched the animated catepillars that camped out languidly above the crazily reflective lipid pools of his eyeballs suddenly shoot off of his brow-bone in shock, gather themselves into a furrow and spin to look at her.

“Fuck is wrong with you?!” he yelped.

“What?!” she yowled back.

“Why don’t you just fucking Kill this Guy?? For fucks sake! Why are you always tendering the fuck up and out ? Kill him! Kiiiiiiiilllll Him!!! Geez!”

“…You are a horrible coach!” she laughed.

“ I am a world renown ELITE coach of-”

“Mercenaries, murderers…” she muttered.

“Punkass-” he chuckled.

She hissed in shock “…WHAT?! Tooo FAR, man!!” 

He leaned over and kissed her before she could punch him.

“Look,” he murmured, coming up for air, “I know your Kago character has all that… spider woman ancient stuff going on with her and all but… it’s time…for his narrative to fucking die. Kill the fucker- bash his fucking brains in, take him out, in whatever way will get this pattern all the way offa you-”

“Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” she growled.

“Not with tongue,” he said flippantly and continued, not missing a beat. “Kill him. Dont make me take the gun again and hafta shoot his one too. We have no wolves here to eat the remains.”

“I didn’t even wanna USE this arc! It’s so corny! The entire premise is just some shit a cloaked Incel would do to a -” she fussed.

“Yeah, but still…here we fucking are.” he muttered, “…And for the record, that we are flies in the face of every face that got forced to even be involved with this-nobody wants this shit. But… Use it. So the toxins from it don’t metastasize in you…or me-“

She sighed, “fiiiiiiiiine.”

After a few beats of dragging her fingers along his jaw she looked away and muttered “What part made you feel I was going easy on him?” 

He leaned back in his bouncy chair and flicked his hand in the air like he was knocking a chip off her shoulder. 

“The knife placement during the hindu Kali trope. You put one of the blades where you knew he had no organ, and the bread basket cut wouldn’t gut.”

She groaned, “for fucks sake!”

“No! -AND! And… you in yer lil poltergeist mode had yer other Kali appendage skirting the fused neckbones. Like a pussy!”

“Hey!”

“it’s true! Kali woulda crushed the neck bones to dust and then let him live if she was going to let him live! You were dilly-dallying …you keep trying not to kill this asshole- Just Let the fucker Die!”

“He’s your-”

“Not anymore- not after all the shit of this year. Nope…nah. Fuck him. Stop playing with your fucking food and …do what you do-”

“Well damn, Professore!”

“Look-” he glared sincerely at her, “If you’re holding onto Your humanity when it comes to ending this fucktwat of a cloaked narc … If you’re doing that for me still… Stop. End it.”

She looked at the Professor beseechingly. “Do you really mean that? Or are you gonna guilt me after I go the fuck off?”

“I do. I am tired of this weighing on you.” he muttered. ”When is your next-?”

“Twenty minutes.”

“Go get some sun on your neck… and think about it. But if you really are only not assing the fuck out solely due to me, consider those shackles melted the fuck down. You are free to be…who you are alongside me. & yes, I know you don’t want blood on your hands, but-“

“It’s like in zombie movies- If you get splashed by-”

He grunted in awareness. “…Yeah, yeah-ok. Then come up with a way that keeps all the contagion in the meat sac. But hurry up and move the fuck on. You know how much shit you have to finish before we go.” He slid his bouncy chair back over and hugged her. “Hey! Be glad…this timeline isn’t one of the ones where you’d actually Have to get yourself filthy with his body fluids for real, like our olden ones.” 

She smirked in remembrance, nodded and sighed against his sinewy neck. ”Okay, fine. & fiiiiiine you’re a good coach, Professore… or whatever.”she murmured.

“Hmph-Like I need your Profession of that” he snorted, “& you’re the happiest, willfuly crazy, brimstone-blazing Angelic being I’ve eva known- Be your self and Kill him for fucking with that.” he muttered, “…with the weight of a thousand burning suns if you feel like it-” The Professore gently shoved his sweet, trying to be reformed psychopath out into the sun. “Now…Git! Go Warm up before your session. You’ve got 16 minutes to have your head right.”

The Angel headed outside, groaning. 

He watched her turn the corner and then went back to his desk.

He opened the hidden tab on his screen just in time to see the one he knew she nicknamed Beatrice for trying to get her wannabe abuser out of dodge leave his dressing room. The affable grin on the man’s face fell into his lap.

Petyr angrily grabbed his iPad and scowled, slowly rereading the litany of insults that had spewed out of her cybernetically cornered, indignant that she’d had the audacity to start actually enjoying it.

*

Codee sat hunched over his desk, head in hands, disgusted with himself.

What the fuck have I gotten myself into? I don’t fucking want to do this anymore. I don’t even know what I’m fucking with anymore! & if that- If she can- why the fuck wouldn’t he just leave her the fuck alone? what even the fuck Was that?-

An alert went off that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up straight. He stared mawkishly at the screen. His knuckles began to sweat as his hand made its way to the mouse, knowing not to let it ring a second time.

“Ah…hullo… Sir-” Codee said a lot higher than he intended to. Sweat slid down his temple as he sucked his own tongue trying to tamp down the sensation of it swelling in his mouth to shut him up.

“Keep the camera on him. If he tells you to do anything with that fucking account of hers and you fucking do it I will shoot you in the fucking face, do you understand me?”

“I- I understand.” Codee whispered “For the record I-I wasn’t-going to-“

“Too late. & it’s done. The fact that you didn’t think to just not transcribe it? The fact that she told me before you thought to, knowing the piece of shit he is… no going back from that. Pure. Dee. Done-“

The last remaining color drained from Codee’s face as he fumbled for the words. “Uh… I wasn’t even paying attention-I-” he stammered.

“Bullshit- You switched from letters to numbers. There’s no way a beat was missed- don’t lie, this is already fucked up enough for you.”

“Sir… I don’t want to Do this anymore- I saw~ I think I-” Codee wheezed. “What in the fuck even is she? What the fuck, man?! What did I just fucking see?!”

“Nothing. You… Saw.. Nothing. Except what he started. Understand?” The Professor hissed. “Nobody made you do this! You were Not backed into a corner. He offered you shit and you took it. Now nobody can get you out of it. You are going to finish this. Shit…you were paid to start.”

“Yes, I-“

“Even if you see him hang himself in that fucking dressing room, you saw fucking nothing. You hear me?! That’s what he pays you for, right? Right?!”

” Yessir-I just-“

“Keep… deleting the coverage… he’s had you collate. In reverse. While he’s…” The Professore sighed, thinking of how far the guy who had everything, a man he’d once called his big brother had fallen. ” He’s too drug-addled to recall much. That’s your out. Utilize it.”

Codee’s voice hitched in his chest. ” Yes- yessir, I-“

*click.*

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