A Curse Upon Thee 23

Wrought iron was strong…

But not that strong.

Not against the raw power that was Cursed Energy, at least.

The gate shrieked against hinges frozen stiff, the noise high and teeth-rattling as Finn pushed the rusted barrier aside. It only took seconds of effort, molars set tight and red sneakers firm on cracked pavement, until it finally gave way.

“Okay…” Finn jerked his head forward. “Let’s get in there.”

“…we could just say we did and not.” Ruby walked up to his side, sliding through the gap in the gate. “Like, we don’t really have to.”

“Eh, well…” Finn could see exactly why Ruby felt that way. The hospital looked infinitely worse in person than anything he had imagined. What had to be a good thirty-or-so years of pure Maine dampness and complete neglect had left the psych hospital more than a mess, the place rotted away into a warped nightmare. Ivy choked brick and mortar both, green veins crawling up the sides of the looming structure as nature threatened to swallow the place up. “You don’t have to, Ms Secretary. It’s kinda my job though.”

“Executive.” The first word was hissed in his ear. “Assista-!.”

The second was cut off with a yelp as Finn’s palm met her ass at velocity. “Yeah, but secretary’s hotter.” He smirked her way as she pretended to grumble, Ruby rubbing her butt.

“Lucky you’re cute.”

“Lucky, huh?” Finn grinned wider as his sneakered feet pushed past a thick layer of rotting leaves, sticks and glass. He shook his head as his eyes slid back to the building standing tall in front of them, wordlessly sidestepping a rusted piece of something half-sunk into mud. 

“Granny said it closed down sometime in the ’80s.” Ruby’s bright red boots crunched loudly on gravel as she answered a question he didn’t ask. “Might be squatters, but who knows?”

“I know this place is fucked.” Finn clicked his tongue as his nose wrinkled, the scent of old Cursed Energy wafting off the brickwork. Like old pennies. Old pennies and… He sniffed again, nostrils flaring. Old pennies and lithium.

“Yeah…” Ruby pulled her black jacket closer around her as she tightened the red scarf around her neck. Dark eyes scanned over shattered windows on the second floor. “What do your spooky senses say?”

Spooky senses. Finn shrugged at the words but couldn’t argue. “Yeah. Decades worth of wrong.”

The bad vibes didn’t fade or wash out as they moved through the main entrance, whatever doors that would have barred the place long gone. The lobby had been exposed to the elements for a while now, and it definitely showed. If the smell of Cursed Energy was bad enough, the smell of the actual place managed to stand out even more.

Much more, from how Ruby gagged every thirty seconds.

Steps echoed loudly as they walked the ground floor, heads on a swivel as they checked each room that flanked the main corridor. Most were completely empty, stripped down to water-stained drywall years ago by whoever had ventured into this place before them. From the looks of the place, it seemed most of those were scavengers.

Finn blinked at the faded graffiti already peeling from cracked plaster walls.

Correction: scavengers and teenagers.

His sole met a heavy wooden door, the hinges flying free from the force of his knock. Without a word, Finn took a step inside to peer into the gloom of what had to be some sort of patient isolation room. Huh… A skeletal bed frame sat bolted to the center of the floor, stripped of its mattress, rusted to nothing more than a waste of metal. Iron bars on the single window were bowed just a little bit outward, the narrow metal warped like someone had tried to pull the things apart as if to escape.

“You know…” Blue eyes lingered on the bars. “If this place was still up and kicking, they’d probably stuff me in here.”

A snort came from behind him, the sound as incredulous as any Finn had ever heard. “Why? Is it cause you see dead people?”

“Well, none yet.” The absence of any Cursed Spirits all around was still fucking with him but that was a question for someone way more into theory than he was. “But pretty sure everything else about me would get anyone a one-way, all-expense paid trip to the padded room.” One hand waved all around the miserable grim space. “Assuming they actually even bothered with the padding. This place looks like it went straight for restraints and electro-shock.”

“That’s dark, Red.”

“Eh, but am I wrong, though?” He kicked at the crushed plastic casing of a broken syringe half-buried in the dust on the floor. “Mental hospital before the ’80s? In a conservative small town not too far outside of Boston? Yeah, I’m guessing ‘humane and progressive treatment’ wasn’t exactly a big priority on the ol’ org chart.”

“The what?”

Finn blinked back. “The org ch…” After a second, he shook his head. “Not important. Let’s just do a last sweep and call it a day before it gets too dark.”

They kept moving, footsteps a steady echo against the silence as they checked each room up and down the east and west wings.

Empty.

Empty.

And wouldn’t you guess it? Empty.

After two dozen empty rooms in a row, Finn stopped dead in the middle of a long hallway, blue eyes narrowed in the dimming light. “It’s weird, right? That this place even exists?”

“Huh?” Ruby paused a few steps ahead of him, dark eyebrows pulling together to match his own. “What do you mean?”

“I mean…” One hand came free from his pocket to wave around the massive sprawl that was the Storybrooke Psychiatric Treatment Center. “Storybrooke is really big for a town that’s so damn small.”

Dark green eyes blinked back at him as his girl tilted her head, the point clearly not landing. “I… I don’t… know what you mean?”

“No, that’s…” Finn turned all the way around to face her, the absurdity of the math and Ruby’s lack of understanding sticking in his jaw. “Ruby, for a town of like four thousand people tops, is this whole place we’re in not completely crazy to you?”

She frowned, teeth catching on her bottom lip. “I guess? I mean, I’ve never really thought about it. It’s just how it’s always been.”

“No, no, no, think about it now. Like right now.” He held up one hand, snapping his fingers out one by one as he started to count off what he had in his head. “You’ve got Granny’s, but also like five other restaurants on Main Street. A public library way too big for the population. A fully-decked out brand-new modern hospital with an entire ER and a surgical wing. A dock down by the water with…” Finn pulled a face. “What, twenty, twenty-five spots? For a town with maybe four boats?”

Ruby’s expression shifted slowly, the casual confusion melting away as she clearly began to think about Finn’s words. “I… yeah. That is kinda weird when you say it like that”

“Not just weird.” He dropped his hand, looking down the dark windowless stretch that was the rest of the wing. “It’s like someone built this place for twenty thousand people, set the table, and only four thousand showed up to eat.”

Finn stared at her, Ruby quiet for a long moment as she chewed on her lower lip. After a few silent seconds, she shook her head and pulled her eyes up from the cracked linoleum. “Okay, but what does that even mean? Maybe they just over-planned? Somebody got overly ambitious with the local zoning board?”

“I don’t know.” Finn shrugged, leather of his jacket creaking loud in the emptiness as he moved down the hall toward the stairwell. “Just feels off.”

“Off, huh?” Ruby kept at his side, her strides long and her boots clicking with each step. “Red?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I ask you something?”

Finn raised an eyebrow. “You’re gonna anyway.”

“Do you still think about before?”

“You mean…” Finn glanced at her over his shoulder. “Before I got hit by Emma’s Volkswagen and got my brain scrambled?”

“Yeah. Like…” Ruby hesitated, her boots scuffing the floor. “It’s like you just rolled with it. You act like you never even wonder? About who you actually were? About what you were doing before you ended up here?”

“Sometimes.” He pushed open another heavy wooden door, staring at the empty darkness that could have hidden who even knew what. “Not as much as you’d think.” Honestly, trekking around abandoned buildings made him feel right at home. “This is pretty close to what little I do remember.”

“That’s what I mean, though.” Ruby let out a sigh over his shoulder. “You don’t really… try. Like, you could be working with Archie Hopper.”

The therapist… Finn rolled his eyes so hard he practically saw his own brain. “What about him? The guy’s so twitchy I’m surprised he doesn’t carry an umbrella indoors.”

“Well, he told me he offered you as many free therapy sessions as you need.”

“Yeah…” Finn glanced back at Ruby again. What, are you talking to him for me?  “Yeah, he did that. I told him nah.”

“Why?”

Finn shrugged again, shoulders rolling like water. “What’s the point? Either I remember or I don’t. Sitting in a chair for an hour isn’t gonna make my brain work faster. I’ll just be… Idunno, bored. Bored and annoyed.”

“But don’t you even want to know?” Ruby pressed as she stepped in closer to him. “Like… Red, baby, you had friends? Family? Hell, I know you had a girl before you got here?”

He bit back a sigh. “Bee…”

“No, come on, I call you Cherry Boy ‘cause it’s funny, but there’s no fuckin’ way I’m your first the way you move, in bed or out.”

Finn stopped dead and turned around, eyebrows raised high over searching blue eyes. “Ruby, what exactly is this about?”

“It’s about you, dummy.” She crossed her arms tightly over her chest. “You’re just way too… I don’t know. Too smooth with it.”

Finn couldn’t help the grin that burst to life. “Thank you.”

“Shut up.” Ruby’s sigh was harsh and gravelly, eyes dropping to his jacket before flicking back to his face. “You know what I mean.”

Did he?

Okay, he did.

But the point was worthless because he couldn’t do anything about it anyway. Like what does she want me to say? Dark green eyes stared back at Finn as he held his tongue for all of five seconds.

On the sixth, a sigh slipped free.

“Okay, fine. Fine, Bee.” He threw up one hand, the other running through his thick head of red hair. “Maybe I had a girlfriend back in Boston or Kyoto or wherever the hell I’m from. Or maybe… just maybe, I didn’t.” He raised his shoulders high before letting them drop, hands out at his sides. “But I’ve been stuck here what, seven months? If I was dating somebody before all this, they probably moved on to some other guy at least two months ago. Wouldn’t even be mad at it. You don’t wait around forever for a ghost.”

“That’s not the point.” Ruby clicked her tongue.

“Then what is the point, Ruby?” Finn clicked his back at her.

“The point is you don’t even care.” She turned her head to the side, hair falling in her face as her voice cracked just a little. “You don’t try to remember. You don’t wonder who you were. You just… you’re fine with it. With not knowing.”

‘…yeah, kinda?”

“With just staying here forever?” Ruby turned back to look at him. “Hell, Finn, I’ve been trying to leave for at least two years, and you’re just okay with this small town bullshit?”

“What do you want me to say?” Finn shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans.

“I… I don’t know…” Ruby blinked at him, uncertain even as her voice maintained its strength. “I just want…”

I’m not gonna cry in my pillow every night over shit I can’t remember, Bee. Not over people I don’t even know to miss. Shit makes no sense. But he didn’t say that as he stepped a little closer. “I’m here, Ruby. Right now. In this town. This is what I’ve got. Why would I waste time whining over something I can’t get back?”

She stared back at him, emotions Finn couldn’t even describe fighting for place on her face at high speed one after another. “Because what if it comes back, Finn? What if you wake up one day and remember everything and suddenly realize… realize this wasn’t…”

The words trailed off, Ruby’s lips still working in silence.

“Wasn’t what?”

“Nothing.” She turned away quickly, shoulders hunched as she took a few quick steps away from him. “Just… just forget it.”

Yeah… fuck that. Finn closed the distance between them, stepping into her space in one quick step. Ruby looked up as his lips met hers.

She let out a soft, surprised breath against his mouth, arms immediately coming up as she held onto him like he was the only solid thing in the decaying room.

He pulled back just barely an inch to look her in the eyes, forehead resting against hers. “I’m right here in this bright-red jacket. And I don’t want to be anywhere else.”

A blush as red as his jacket crept up Ruby’s neck and bloomed brighter across her cheeks as a small shaky smile came to life with it. “I do love the jacket.”

Before Finn could lean back in, a shrill ringtone shattered the quiet intimacy, the sound of Ruby’s phone echoing violently off the peeling walls. She jumped back, one hand going to dig the phone out of her pocket. 

She flipped open her Blackberry, eyes still locked on his. “Hello?”

“Ruby! Ruby! It’s E-Emma.” The tinny voice bleeding out of the tiny speaker was tight and more frantic than Finn had heard from Emma in months. “I’m at the… the estate across town. The guy here, he’s out of his fucking mind.” She sucked in a breath, hissing in what had to be pain. “He kidnapped me and Mary Margaret. He-”

A loud scream, high and terrified, tore through the phone speaker.

As quickly as the call started, the line went dead, Ruby’s eyes wide as she stared silently at her phone.

…fuck. Finn was already moving, adrenaline replacing common sense as he started down the hallway. “Ruby! Call for backup.”

“Like who?” Ruby yelled, voice echoing down after him as she started running too. “You and Emma are the only two cops in town!”

“I don’t know—David! Fucking David! Anyone with a pulse and a gun!” Finn hit the heavy metal door leading to the stairwell at  full sprint, the barrier giving way against raw force as it rebounded off the concrete wall behind it with a crash. Cursed Energy flooded his legs, muscles coiling tight as he took the stairs a flight at a time. “Just get someone to that estate!”

He didn’t wait for her response. 

In seconds, Finn was already outside and rushing toward the trees outside, determined to make it across town faster than humanly possible.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

Cursed Energy was part of him the way his blood was part of him, constantly moving through his body and pumping through the circulatory system of his soul. When it came to physical stuff, it was just as important because whether it was about lifting heavy things or moving fast — like right now — it flooded through him and kept him going. Kept his legs going, his lungs pumping, and held his bones and muscles together while he abused it in ways a normal person’s body just wasn’t built for at all. 

Red sneakers tore chunks out of the forest floor with each footfall, Finn moving fast enough that the wind tore at his eyes, fast enough that he would easily have blown past any scar driving through a school zone.

Easily.

Dense pine trees towered above him but Finn didn’t notice as his eyes stayed firmly in front of him, everything else blurring past him in a smear of green and brown.

Eight miles straight across town. 

He could make it. He had to make it.

Inhale for three. Air came in quick but in measured amounts, breathing techniques he’d barely remembered coming back to him as his body responded in time with it. Exhale for two. He sipped the air in and pressed the air out, a method carved into his memory by instructors he couldn’t name; all of it in an attempt to regulate the chaotic power inside him.

Even still, his reserves were draining as fast as he was moving.

Pushing himself this hard, outputting this much CE, for this long… I’m not built for this.

He really wasn’t. Finn knew what he was and it wasn’t a Grade Two that could fight the real demons that went bump in the night, dodging bullets and surviving being pancaked through a concrete wall.

He definitely was no elite Grade One that could leave craters in the ground with a single stomp or leap dozens and dozens of feet in the air or move faster than you could see.

No…

No was right. 

He was a Grade Three.

Average at best, and middling at worst.

But he didn’t slow down. He didn’t even tap the brakes.

Emma was in trouble and Mary Margaret’s life was on the line. That was the only math that mattered right now.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

His foot met solid oak, the heavy wood splintering violently around the lock as Finn kicked the thing entirely off its hinges into a hundred jagged shards of shrapnel.

Finn stumbled into the foyer, chest heaving and completely drenched in sweat as his breath came in ragged pulls. His reserves were damn near empty, the barrel scraped down to the absolute bottom as the faint red aura clinging to his skin sputtered and flickered to nothing.

I… But he was here. I made it.

He did.

And what was in front of him made Finn completely sure of that.

The man from the diner — dark scarf and silver rings still on his person — stood in the center of the massive living room, already spinning around as the door gave way. Dark eyes went wide as they met his blue, pure panic staring back at Finn.

“You!” The man’s mouth fell open. “You’re not… how’d you even get here?!”

“Finn!”

Emma’s scream came from around the corner, a moment before she burst into view and lunged at the man in the scarf. “Finn, run!”

The man swung, Finn’s eyes going wide at the sight of a black handgun — Emma’s gun — in his grip. The gun followerd the vicious arc of his arm, the weapon catching Emma square across the jaw.

“Emma!” 

Finn’s raspy scream went without an answer as the blonde woman fell down hard onto the floorboards, droplets of blood landing with her. A few feet away, Mary Margaret, tied tightly to a wooden chair also on the floor, screamed high and loud.

“YOU SEE!” The man with the scarf roared, the words ripped rough from his throat. “You’ll ruin EVERYTHING!”

The black barrel of the gun came up, leveled right at Finn’s chest. N-

Before Finn could move or think, the room exploded with sound.

Three times.

Finn rocked back, something hitting him like a swinging sledgehammer dead-center in the chest as all the breath flew from his lungs at once. Something else punched a fiery hole straight through his left shoulder, hot red spraying across the white wall to his right.

A third thing hit lower.

Lower where, Finn wasn’t exactly sure, because his legs immediately gave up on him, folding beneath him like cheap paper.

He dropped hard to his knees, vision blurred to a chaotic smear of colors as his vision doubled… tripled… and then doubled again until he couldn’t make out a thing.

“Damn it,”  Someone hissed, standing above him. “I only wanted… the hat…”

Two voices screamed out loud, both of them sounding incredibly far away. 

Like they were underwater.

Finn dropped his chin, eyelids fluttering heavy as he looked down at his own chest. Three messy holes stared back at him through ruined leather, each one welling up with dark blood as they spread fast and far like little rivers.

“Bee’s… gonna kill me,” The words bubbled up through a jaw that felt numb, each syllable thick and sluggish on his tongue. “She really liked… this jacket…”

His eyes rolled back as gravity pulled him forward.

The last thing he heard was a voice screaming his name as his face hit the floorboards.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

Naked Gun – 300 GP

Take a bullet to the chest with no defenses up.

ROLL: The Gift (0) [Dresden Files] {Source}:

The ability to use this world’s magic. For free you get to be a minor practitioner, the level of the average paranet member.

Grimoire Points: 500