she’s either a ghost or a monster, but either way she knows how to be quiet, and she learns it because she has to. the streets are silent late at night, though, and sometimes she hears her own footsteps double up behind her.

she doesn’t turn to look, anymore. she knows better.

for a long time, she felt remorseful, any time one of her creatures got loose. she can’t control them, she tells herself. and it takes them less than a day to dissipate back into the aether. they’re barely real – outside of her eyeline, outside of the reach of her frantic, devouring consciousness, they’re nothing more than smoke.

but the first time she stumbles across a body surrounded with police tape on the streets of birmingham, and realizes she’s the only one who can see the spiders clambering out of the open, ghastly wounds, she remembers. smoke still has teeth, if it’s hungry enough.

---

her name is zeta, but she doesn’t like it. it’s greek for ‘the end’, so it’s certainly apt, but that wasn’t what the parents meant when they named her that. she was meant to be the end of their struggles, the end of their poverty, a celebration of their new jobs and new fate and new dreams in england.

zeta. the end.

their dream, their precious bouncing baby, became a channel for chthonic doom beyond their understanding. she doesn’t know where she got that word, chthonic. it’s a good word. not good in the sense of ‘blessed’ or ‘holy’. nothing she touches is that. but good in the sense that it sounds like her. it sounds full moon-ish and wrong and sharp.

besides, she guesses it means much the same thing.

chthonic.

the end.

---

after she starts finding the dead, she tries to hold it in. i’m supposed to control you, she screams into the shattered night, but the lines leaking black ink like blood just criss-cross the sky and whisper her own words back at her. and the more she panics herself to tears and endless exhaustion, the more she finds herself in the wrong corner of birmingham, the more she realizes minutes or hours too late that she’s standing motionless in an alleyway trapped in her own brain – the more everything else creeps out through the cracks.

she doesn’t live in the same world as everybody else. that much has become clear.

she gives up, finally, or tries to, and curls into a tiny little ball between the curb and the gutter one night. sleeping isn’t an option. she isn’t even sure how people do it. every time she tries, she just ends up back in that world. she’ll sleep when she’s dead, whenever that is –

-and it gets more inviting all the time, but standards change. when she finally gets sick from eating the moldy leftovers in the dumpsters of the back of the restaurants, she starts grabbing at pigeons. the first time she bites one of their heads off, though, she cries at the taste of blood in her mouth. some sort of hellion of evil she is if she can’t handle something so small.

the roadkill is better, if she gets to it quickly.

it’s cold in the gutter. winter’s on its way, and she doesn’t want to think about that. but it’s okay, it’s okay because the rain is starting to fall, and the first drop hits her head and sizzles, she doesn’t know why it does that but she can feel it sink into her skin.

she can get up, now. it’s midnight, in the slums, nobody will see if she just – yes – she takes off her oversized, tattered hoodie and her torn up jeans and stands there in her underwear, bare feet in the gutter runoff and she can breathe with the rain washing it all away.

when she rubs her eyes, there’s a crackling noise as the grime slides away, down her face like dirt. it might as well be dirt. it’s the leftover rust of bad dreams.

“D-dzień dobry?”

she freezes and turns around, automatically flashing her teeth to make the intruder go away. but it’s not an adult, or a policeman, or a social worker.

it’s another little girl like her. she forgets how little she is, until she sees somebody just as small and young as she is, and she remembers that right, i’m not supposed to be here.

the girl’s holding an umbrella, but it’s the newest thing she owns. other than the umbrella – red with black ladybug spots – everything else she’s wearing is tattered and dirty, patterns overlapping each other and probably every piece of clothing she has piled on top of each other.

they stare at each other, and then zeta picks up her clothes and storms away. she doesn’t even care that she’s naked. it’s the staring. eyes are like drills.

---

the storm ends too fast, and she cries out in frustration as the pressure returns too fast. “I need more TIME!” she screams at the sky – and then before long, the wall in front of her is rupturing, and she can’t tell if it’s actually happening or if somewhere between the gutter and here, she’s slipped back into-

A hand grips her shoulder, and her first response is to bite it, but she doesn’t – she doesn’t, because, at the touch, the static shuts off and leaves her with echoing silence.

she looks up and over her shoulder, and it’s the first time she’s ever looked somebody in the eyes and actually seen something there. usually their eyes are scratched out with black lines or just carved out completely and missing. that’s if they have faces at all.

but it’s the girl, the little polish girl with the chestnut-brown hair and the umbrella. her eyes are curious but soft as well.

“H-how did – how did you do that?” she tries to say, but instead it comes out of her mind. she struggles with her tongue, trying to make it work –

<I don’t know,> comes back the reply, in what sounds like english.

<What’s your name?> she asks.

<Gamma. I think.>

<Z-Zeta. But…But I like it when people call me Zimmy.> it’s a lie, only in the sense that there’ve never been people who called her anything but ‘abomination’. but it’s a nice thought, and she doesn’t realize it right away, but she’s holding her breath.

<Zimmy.> Gamma’s hand slides down to hold Zimmy’s. <I think it is going to rain again.> Then she smiles. <Are you going to take your clothes off again?>

<So what? I like the rain!>

Gamma nods thoughtfully. She lowers her umbrella and closes it, and smiles in a small, shy way that tells Zimmy that she’s not used to it. <Well, if you like it… it can’t be that bad.>

She leans forward, pressing her forehead to Zimmy’s, and it’s so overwhelming, seeing the curiosity in her eyes. Seeing her eyes at all.

It says something about what’s going on with their minds, their thoughts, that neither of them knows who kisses the other. It’s not a proper kiss. Just lips meeting lips. But the smiles on their faces are contagious, and Zimmy tightens her grip on Gamma’s hand.

For the first time in her life, she has something good – something she’s afraid to lose.

she has a beginning.