Maybe it was a bunch of things, really. Does mass murder and kidnapping at one fell swoop count as one thing or a group? But that is where I measure my life from now- the day I almost died, the day my family was shattered by evil. Obviously it has molded me- I was the second oldest, the one to protect them when my mother disappeared and my father faded into his own shadow. I was a mother, a wife, a sister, a protector… and I failed at all my roles.

Evil is. That’s the only reason I can see for that massacre that I had the dubious fortune of surviving. Evil just is. But I don’t know why I couldn’t- correction, didn’t- save my kin. It was too late for Victor, Eve, and Mischief… but not for my son, or my sisters, or my brothers, or my father. Was it the fear? I wish I knew.

I know I can’t explain why I failed. I know I tried during the battle. The scars are no longer visible, but I know where they should be. I still feel them during those nights when sleep is hard to come by. But it didn’t matter. A thousand years of love and devotion to friends and family, gone in the space of hours, those that I held dearest torn body, mind, and soul. Maybe there never will be another cadre of good guys like the ones we were. But if there are, maybe they’ll learn from my example not to get attached, and if they should happen to, well: ‘tenen cuida del tesoro’ is all I have to say. Have care with the treasury, as my mother taught me so long ago. Just one of life’s little lessons.

I never appreciated the true meaning of passing time… not until now, not until I saw the end of immortality and I thought of what my family would never know. Devon, Mischief, pretty little Gail, all of my nieces, nephews, and other young kinfolk: their lives were ended so abruptly, before they understood what they were born into. I guess la perranegra taught them that herself, with her sword and her stone. The pendulum swung razor sharp, just like in that story by Poe, and it stole away their lives.

I keep going back to that stupid watch I gave her on our birthday. Beatrice laughed at us, silly dark sister, and asked what did she need it for? After all, Tacy had a million ways to keep time, all of them more accurate, efficient, and sensible than an unwieldy antique wristwatch. But I still remember the smile on her face when she put it on and saw the initial design and how it changed. I had planned it to shift design randomly as she saw fit. She knew how much it had taken for me to create that watch, because she knew how I had formed it using my gift and my body. As long as I can remember after that, I never saw her without it. Even the day that la perranegra led her and half my siblings and in-laws into her foul demesnes, Tacy still had that watch on. I even still recall the design she had chosen for it… the one it had had in the beginning, of the mask over the hockey sticks. How ironic and cruel that a gift in joy is now the symbol of the worst pain of my life!

I still can’t get my mind around the idea of being alone. I got so used to having my family around. To think that I might be the last… it’s just so eerie, surreal, wrong. I keep expecting to wake up in my bedroom, wrapped in my husband’s arms with Devon’s granddaughter Tyna running amuck in the living room… except that Tyna’s over a century old now, well beyond running amuck. Ay de todes les dioses, I never knew what blessing I had until it became cursed and torn from me, thrown away like archaic trash out onto the streets. I suppose I should have been more careful, but it’s too late now.

Frozen in fear and stone, I saw Tacy go, her, Elena, and Megan, Justin, Ronnie, and Patty Wry, them and all their children. And I watched, silent and dispassionate, as my father died, as Beatrice, born at my birth, died. Tyna’s bloody corpse was left at my feet and I did nothing. All the time I could have used to play the heroine, I spent losing. I admitted defeat, and that more than anything is the mark of my failure. Now I have to hold on to over a millennium of history, tradition, and memory. I’m not strong enough to do this, not any more! I can’t cope with being the last Clark!

It’s hard for a telepathic quadruplet to keep secrets, but I know we all had them. Tacy and Bea never knew how much I wanted to be them, the younger ones, with few or no responsibilities. Megan never discovered in just what disregard I held her for shirking responsibilities as the eldest and leaving it to me. Because I was the other mother figure to this insane family, I couldn’t show how much I resented being in that position. I had to give it my all- they were my family, por todes les dioses! And all I gave wasn’t enough. We scattered, shattered, destroyed.

If I survive this constant trackjumping… if la perranegra’s goons don’t catch me any time soon… if I don’t get caught by an anti-witch mob… then I suspect that the memories of my crazy family will fade until I come to believe that I was born an only child. Everything I know is already a faded recollection, almost like a dream

It doesn’t seem fair! A thousand years I gave to this task of protection and nurturing. Between us all, we raised generations of young men and women to maturity- only to see them hunted down, no matter where in the multiverse they had gone. So it didn’t really matter. It never really mattered after all.

Only that d-gate opening up under my feet saved me, or did it? Was I saved or cursed? Or does it even matter? Maybe fate has the same plans for me at the end of every road.

The tape running in my head just won’t stop: the blood, the death, the failure. I still hear Victor and Eve and Mischief, grown-up Mischief, all calling to me from different rooms of the house- but that was just one phase of that horror I can’t even think about any more. The knowledge that I failed in my duty is just too much… I pray to gods I don’t even believe in that I am the last to ever go through this mental torture. Some nights I even pray for it to all end, for me to stop. But nothing is ever so easy.

Not hard enough.

I never told Victor what I had figured out about him so long ago, how he combined his parents so completely. Yes, he had his mother’s intelligence and his father’s chivalry, but from both of them he got a jealous streak a mile wide. He was adorably protective, but sometimes just downright possessive. And he was quick-witted, but sometimes just as quick with a cruel and acidic remark. I remember those up-and-down nights between Eve moving out and Devon being born, when a furious bout of wordplay would turn into a war of words by one ill-spoken phrase, and then we would make up in the bedroom. Fire and earth, water and air: we had all four elements in our marriage, pushing and pulling us in and out of harmony. It boggles the mind how we survived it sometimes… patience and love, I guess.

Even if I was wearing my own shape instead of hiding… disguising myself… lying to the world, I doubt even my mother, les dioses rest her soul, would know me if we passed in the street. I know what burns in my eyes, what shapes my expression, how I have lost the grace we all shared. I cannot say I have lines around my eyes and gray in my hair, because I never have shown physical changes. But stripped of all but my basic birthright skills- my telepathy, my trackjumping- I am a shadow of myself, and what person now will stop to recognize a shadow? Such gestures kill.

I did too good a job of hiding my true emotions from everyone. They all assumed that I was happy being who I was, Eve and Devon’s mother, Tyna’s great-grandmother, the steady and reliable one anyone could come to for advice and be assured of getting it. Even my mother, even my three closest sisters, even my husband of centuries, never knew that I was a rebel in my deepest heart. Now it doesn’t matter if anyone knows it or not. I have no one to be the mother figure for now. I am a sky without sun, a woman without a nation, a song with no name. To the universe, I am nothing. I have no one to call my own.

Am I the only one who took secrets with me into that fateful meeting that day? What was everyone else thinking? What did Megan and Tacy and Beatrice think of me or my husband and children? What dreadful secrets was taciturn Lauren keeping under her hat? None of us will ever know now. Time and la perranegra took that chance away from all of us. Everything that if we had known what was going to happen that we would have told each other… I know that doesn’t make sense, but it has meaning. Subjunctive tense I would say it is if this language had it, but it doesn’t, and that closes a whole group of expressions that I grew up with.

The fall… the physical fall through the d-gate, the spiritual fall to the depths of my soul: were they elements of the same thing in the end? I have no idea. I have never been privy to the secrets of the universe. I guess it doesn’t really matter, though. In the end, nothing does. As much control as you think you have over the events of your life, in the end, it’s blind chance and the deeds of others that decide how your life is completely lived.

It’s very peaceful on this rooftop, isn’t it? The night breeze feels cool on my face. Ever since that day, I have felt a curious comfort in the cold, almost as if the stone la perranegra tried to trap me in had seeped into my soul after all. Or perhaps it is the chill of loneliness that I’ve gotten used to. I wish I knew so I could find out how to handle it. I don’t like feeling so cold all the time. I never thought I would ever find anyone I could take heart from.

It isn’t so far to go down from here. Just a couple of stories, really. It wouldn’t take a lot to get off of here, and I’m so tired. It would be so easy… can you stop me? You, who I’ve told more than anyone in the last hundreds of years, who I think I may yet be someone I could live for- can you save me for the second time?

I don’t have the strength any more. I gave it all during those long battles with the forces of evil and whatnot. We all thought we had it in the sack, but we were wrong. But now, after losing the battle, I wonder… when people are being killed and worlds are being decided by those to whom they don’t belong, what is the difference between good and evil, anyway? For all that we who fight the fight do, for all that we know, how much do we really know? And in the end, does it really matter? Is there a fate that shapes our ends, that decides the destinies of every world?

It took the fall, the descent of my soul into itself, and my body through the d-gate, to make me wonder about all this. Only when I lost everything I ever had, everything I could ever call mine, did I learn to question everything I had taken as gospel. Only when I wondered about everything could I realize that when it comes down to it, none of it really matters… nothing really matters.

Sweet Spot: Oy, how deep and dark is this? It all started when I heard one of my classmates in my music appreciation course analyze the song and play it in class, as well as hand out the lyrics. After having heard it a few times, I started to vibe it as Dreva’s theme. A couple of renditions later, the framework for this fic began to fall into place. Yes, I know I skipped a chorus, but I ran out of inspiration for those lines.

Dreva- Andria Eva Clark-Clellos, for those who are short of memory- is one of my original characters from a universe as yet unpublished. She has a long history, as can be told. The massacre of her family has yet to be explicitly written, but in some of the stories that are still in progress and/or still hidden in my computer, it is explained. Dreva is sort of my avatar for the Clarks, but not very much.

A few notes: For one, her sister’s full name is not actually Tacy; it is a nickname, but I can’t give her full name without confusing you people. Let’s just say that if the ladies of the team had been named as they were originally going to be, Tacy would be Macy. ‘Nuff said.

This is obviously the song by Linkin Park, "In the End". Just to confuse everyone, though, Dreva quotes another song in the body of the fic: the line "I am a sky without sun, a woman with no nation, a song with no name" is adapted from the beginning of "Eyes Like Yours" by Shakira, from her English-language CD Laundry Service. I don’t work for whoever makes it, but as a service to you wonderful readers, I’m highly recommending it.

As for the story, I see it taking place during chapter 7 of "Surreal-Life Story", when Dreva and Grin go up to the roof, just before she departs out the d-gate. I don’t even know if this is technically part of the story, but you all know what it’s like to have an idea that you can’t shake, so I wrote it.

Oh, and the language Dreva occasionally lapses into to curse and to blaspheme, as well as to quote her mother, is called Oplang, and it is a degenerated form of Spanish. La perranegra means ‘the black female dog’.

I own very little. Dreva the narrator is mine. The song "In the End" is not mine. "Eyes Like Yours" is quoted without permission but with much respect.