Snapped

It was the second snowfall of the year, and it still wasn't officially winter.

Melanie walked down the steps of her home, hair pulled back into a tight, neat ponytail, because that was all her mom would let her wear during times like these. At all, really. If it wasn't plain out, or just in a bun or ponytail of some sort, her mom would throw a giant fit.

According to her dad though, her mom had done some wild stuff when she was a student, especially in high school. Stayed out late, dyed her hair, cigarette kisses under the bleachers... but now her whole existence was wrapped in this stiflingly uptight package that Melanie couldn't even pretend she was fond of. There was no room in the Richardson house for experimentation outside of allowed parameters.

Outside of the realm of witching, which her mother knelt down and worshiped without fail. Her family craft that was so perfect and clean and better than her dad's.

Better than being a nightmare.

Melanie pushed that thought out of her head. The house was still a mess after inviting over so many people for Thanksgiving, and their fridge was still filled with leftover Turkey and stuffing. She could hear someone in the kitchen--probably Ricky--shuffling around papers and doing something. With her dad, she would loiter around him and let him show her what it was like filling out forms, but Ricky tended to discourage this behavior, and her mom chided her about her interest in 'adult paperwork' not being normal.

Not being normal....

The nightmare witch rubbed her cheeks as she walked around the house in search of something in particular. She'd left her spellbook downstairs, and she needed to check on the notes she made during her independent study.

It wasn't anywhere she normally left it though. She'd first checked with her bag, where she normally kept the weighty tome, but inside there was nothing but her half-eaten lunch and the three juice boxes she always had with her just in case she got thirsty. They weren't arranged how she normally liked them (apple on top, orange on the bottom, cherry in the middle--the order she liked to drink them in) and were instead scattered randomly around the bookbag. Normally she would assume that they had just fallen over on her way home, but she had...

A feeling.

Her dad got it sometimes, when they watched cop dramas together. Where he knew the wife was guilty, or that the obvious suspect was innocent. It was like a sense. A good cop--that is, a cop good at doing cop things--had a nose for it. A natural sense that lead them towards innocent or guilty. While those spurious, un-researched feelings couldn't be used in court, they were a beginning. A lead to the start of the trail before it goes cold.

Melanie zipped her backpack back up and walked away from it. She moved down the hall to the potion's room, a converted study. Her mom spent a lot of time in here. It was slightly ajar, as it always was, to allow fumes to disperse just in case there were... misfires.

There was no one there.

She brought the door closed and walked to Ricky's office, and saw her mother sitting there. Closed, on the desk in front of her, was her spellbook. It was a thick book that she and her mother made together when she was small. A witch's spellbook, her mother had boasted, was her most important tool. When it was made right, she'd said, it would have a connection to the witch stronger than any bond between family, friends, or lovers.

Her mother stood up and touched the book. A sound like a loud pop filled her ears, and a stabbing pain went right through her heart. It hurt... hurt more than anything she'd ever felt. The young girl leaned against the doorknob watching blearily to see what, exactly, her mother had just done.

On the desk was... not her spellbook.

It was a book, indeed, of some kind, but Melanie instantly recognized it as not being hers. Without opening it, without seeing it, she knew that her mother had destroyed her spellbook and replaced it with some other book. Everything inside of it... all her notes...

All of her work.

Gone.

The pain she felt mutated into anger, the kind one would feel for a dying friend.

"Mother!" She called, opening the door. It bounced against the wall in the particular way she knew her mother hated.

"Mel--?" Her mom was on her feet. She pushed up her glasses--rectangular with rounded edges, the kind that she said only adults could wear--and smiled, picking up the book on the table, walking towards her daughter.

Melanie's first instinct was the shy away from the book, to hide from it, like an unfamiliar dog. "I upgraded your spellbook!"

She looked at the book in front of her. It was all wrong. Her book had been purple and tan and black, suggestions of black filigree and curly-qs that delighted her eyes. This book was... it was plain. It was an ugly shade of purple somewhere between mauve and lilac, with bold stripes across it. It was wrong. It was all wrong. Ignoring her frustration, he mother continued. "I noticed your old one was getting ratty, so I--"

"Give it back."

"Now Melanie," her mothers voice was cooing, as if she was talking to a misbehaving baby. "You know we don't interrupt in this house."

"Give it back."

Mariette sighed and handed over the book. "Just like a witch, to be so attached to your spellbook."

Melanie took the book and threw it, with all her strength against the wall.

"MELANIE."

"Give me back my spellbook!"

"This is your spellbook now."

"No its not!" She was getting frantic. "My notes! My plans! They're all gone! Why would you do that!"

Mariette's face softened, and put a hand on her shoulder. "Don't worry about those, sweetheart. We can always do the potions again--"

"I don't care about your stupid potions!" Mariette's face was hurt, but Melanie plowed on. At this point, deep in her heart, she wanted to hurt her. She wanted her mother to feel pain from what she was saying, just in the hope that something she said could come close to the pain of loss clenched like a fist around her heart. "I've never cared about that stupid soup-making! I want my plans! My notes about nightmares! I can't just do those again!"

"Melanie," her mother--Mariette's voice was stern. "those aren't normal."

"Who cares about normal?!" Melanie was screaming now. "I GO TO A SCHOOL WHERE A CUBE TEACHES CLASS AND A BLACK HOLE KEEPS EATING CHAIRS AND YOU'RE WORRIED ABOUT NORMAL?!"

"Melanie, your voice."

She didn't quiet down. "WHY CAN'T I JUST LEARN ABOUT NIGHTMARE STUFF? I LIKE IT! IT'S INTERESTING! IT'S--"

"It's horrible." it was Mariette's turn to interrupt, and what she'd said stopped Melanie effectively in her tracks. "It's some... horrifying craft made to cause misery and destruction and nothing good will ever come from it. I mean," she scoffed. "Look at your father! Even a human-socialized monster like him can barely do anything right."

Mariette picked up the book that lay unwanted against the wall. "You started out with a leg up. You're already human. And if you stop this... nonsense, about nightmare studies, then eventually you'll outgrow it and those troublesome powers will go away. And you can be normal."

She turned to her daughter. "Mother knows best, sweetheart. I got rid of all of that for your own good. Nothing good can ever come from that kind of stuff."

Melanie's face twisted. It felt uncomfortable, like an expression made with muscles she didn't know she had. Her throat constricted, tight, painful, tears she could feel. "I came from it."

She walked away from her, leaving her standing in the office. "Melanie," She called, but Melanie didn't hear her. She was done hearing her. She bounced up the stairs and closed the door to her room hard. Mariette's knocking went on deaf ears. She didn't come down for dinner that night, nor breakfast the next day. Her mother had thought that all she needed was time to cool down.

But Melanie understood everything so clearly now. And she knew, in that moment, that she didn't want anything to do with her mother. By the time her mother got her dad involved--and she knew she would, because she always got him involved when she didn't know what to do or how to handle her--Melanie would be gone. She would be long gone.

When the door to her bedroom was opened, they would find that snow her soaked through the carpet, and a window that had been thrown wide open for who knows how long.

He boots crunched in the snow as she moved very deliberately. "I'll be long gone."

Melanie had plans when she dropped into the freshly fallen snow bank outside her window. He backpack was light but had everything she needed, and her secondary potion satchel clinked softly against her thigh as she strode with purpose. A few people waved at her, and she smiled and waved back. She couldn't look too suspicious. Not yet. Not while, as far as her mother knew, she was sitting in her room sulking.

A hand went to her chest. It still ached, and she could feel a viscerally pulsing emptiness there, as if something had been ripped our gouged or... destroyed.

A bitter taste filled her mouth and she shrugged her backpack on further as she made her way to the school. One of her friends offered to let her use her dorm, since her roommate had moved off campus with their adopted school parent and there was now a spare bed to be used. It would give her somewhere warm to stay for a while as she laid the foundations of what she was trying to do.

"Why do you need it?" Her friend asked when she got to the dorm, shrugging off her backpack. She kicked it under the bed--there was nothing important in it.

Not yet.

"Oh, I'm in the middle of a spat with my mom," She said with a pinched smile. It wasn't really the truth, but it was enough truth that her friend seemed content to just nod and accept that as an answer. After all, her disagreements with her mom were almost legendary among the few friends she'd made and kept.

"Well, the bed is yours as long as you need it."

She would only need it for a few days, but that was need-to-know information. And her friend, sitting at her desk with her hair in a sloppy bun, didn't need to know.

"Thanks," She said. "That means a lot to me."

With her load lightened a little, Melanie pulled her hood over her head, tucking her hair into the jacket. It was unlikely than anyone would freak out at seeing her yet, but the fewer ways people could identify her as being.... well, her, the less her dad would have to go on when he inevitably got pulled into all of this because of course he would be.

Thinking about him made her face twist up. Somehow this was his fault too. She'd think up a way. The sun was still decently high in the sky when she walked into the Underground. Hood up, body leaned forward, taking meaningful and deliberate steps while skirting around anyone who happened to be walking in the opposite direction made her blend in. Most people wouldn't pin her as a child, but probably a very small adult.

It helped that the species of beings that called Manta Carlos home were so widely varied that someone of her stature could conceivably be an adult in one of them.

Tentatively, she looked up from the ground and saw her goal. It was a house nestled between two other houses, narrow and tall with broken steps and rusted banister. The windows were thrown open, even in this heat as aromatic smoke billowed from the lowest floors. She moved to this house and rapped hard on the door. Three fast knocks, two slow knocks, five fast knocks.

There was the sound of sliding locks as the door opened with a crack.

"State your business."

"I don't want any."

There was a pause, the sound of many metallic somethings falling on the ground, before the door opened wide and she was greeted by.... probably the largest man she'd ever seen. He took up the entire doorway, and the revolver looked like a baby's toy in his fat, moist looking palms. "Come on in. The boss will see you in a second."

Melanie stepped in. On the ground were bullets--not fired, probably emptied. What a waste.

After five minutes--no more, no less--she strode up the steps to the top floor and gave knock. Three slow, soft knocks.

"Come in."

Stepping into the room, Melanie was greeted with a familiar face. It was a man she saw a lot when her dad went around looking for information. One of his shadier friends, an informant. Once the door was closed behind her, she pulled down her hood.

"Hello, Gustav," She said in her most pleasant voice. The man in his well tailored suit opened his arms. She gave him a hug, and noted he smelled like smoke and something chemical.

"Mel, mel, mel. It feels like its been forever!" He released her and she took a few steps back. He reclined in his chair, snapping his fingers. A woman she hadn't noticed before walked up to her and gave her a cup of something. She sniffed it.

"Oh, don't be so rude, it's just soda. Sweetheart, most people around here worth their salt wouldn't harm a hair on your head." As he spoke, the wiry man pulled a cigar from his breast pocket. The woman walked up to him and lit it before seeming to disappear as immediately as she'd come. Melanie would have to make a note of that. "But then, you also should know better than to be running around without your dad."

The young witch said nothing and gave her soda a sip.

Silence reigned for a long moment as the man leaned forward on his desk. It was old looking, probably taken from another building in the area. It was splotched with stains. One of them looked like it might have once been someone's brain. She took another sip of her soda.

"So," she said finally, putting her empty cup on the floor. "You must be wondering why I'm here."

"That's the million dollar question."

"As you know," She begins. "I have empire plans of my own that I want to achieve. So--"

"Let me guess," He says, looking amused. "You want money."

"Only enough to get off the island."

This seems to surprise him. "Leaving the island?"

"I'll never get anything done here. There's too many people with too few skills trying to do the same thing. Everywhere you look are more people trolling around the gutters killing and torturing like that's all anyone needs to be successful. Market saturation. Too many groundlings with no vision grasping at straws above their heads."

Gustav was looking serious now. She was talking business.

"Obviously, I don't expect a huge investment," she said looking at him. She tried to pick at his fears. In this moment, she could guess he feared retribution, from Damon or other law enforcement. "My dad figured that this would be a good exercise for me. Five hundred dollars, Gustav. You make that in half an hour."

He blew smoke into the air from his cigar. She tried not to cough.

The man in the suit looked hesitant, but she had nudged him in the right direction. Gustav had a notoriously bad poker face, after all.

With a motion that seemed frustrated, he ground the cigar straight into the wood of the old desk. "Alright, doll. But only because You're you. If you were anyone else I'd have you thrown out into the snow, ya hear me?"

Melanie only smiled.

As he reached into his desk drawer, Melanie spoke up again. "Cash only."

"Excuse me?"

"Cash only." She repeated. "I'm not stupid, Gustav. It would be easy for you to give me a check to send me on my way, close transactions to the account before I managed to cash it. In which case I would have to come back with my dear old man.

"You don't want that, right?"

Gustav shut the drawer with a frustrated grunt.

Melanie left with $500 in her jacket pocket.