The cart, entirely quiet and void of any voices, rolls to a stop a while later, their tempo having slowed now after they lost the wolves. Basil looks back at everyone and then jumps off, going to the panting anqa to lavish it with praise for its hard work and to check on its condition. Fresh gets up to climb off as well, rubbing her burning eyes.

“Sorry,” says Shamrock, letting her pass. She nods to him, even if her body hurts a lot where he had arm-barred her, she knows that he only did it to stop her from falling off. She slides down off of the back of the cart and takes a step to the side, wandering towards the edge of the forest. She expects someone to tell her not to wander off too far, it might still be dangerous. But nobody says anything.

Heading past the first big tree, she places her back against it and slides downward until she sits, her knees arched upward and in against her chest.

Fresh isn’t really sure what it is that she’s doing. Just sitting here, she supposes. She isn’t really sure why. She just wanted to get away for a while. The cart was starting to feel really cramped. Jubilee was right, the lap-stack idea was a bad one. Sometimes a little space is a good thing.

Fresh leans her head back against the trunk and stares upwards. She can’t see the sky here, because of the thick canopy hanging above her. So she just stares at that instead. It isn’t really about seeing something, she’s just trying to not see anything, so the light-less tree-crown is as good a thing as any to look at.

Once again, the bad-thing has found her.

The bad-thing that creeps through the entire world, like a serpent, always on the prowl, always on the hunt to bite and inject everyone with its venom. Every time she tries to build something happy, the bad-thing comes. Every time she tries to build something nice, the bad-thing comes. Every time she tries to show everyone how good things could really be, if they all just started paddling in the other direction, fighting against the current of the world, the bad-thing comes and sinks its teeth into them.

She doesn’t know what it is, exactly, this bad-thing. The force that seems to propel this world further and further towards the black-water, the thing that makes every single soul in this domain heavier on a day-by-day basis. But she knows that it is here. It’s not following her, as if intent on making her life and the lives of those around her miserable, no, the bad-thing isn’t bound to a location. It’s everywhere. Everywhere all at once. In every house, in every cart, in every bed, in every boot, in every face and eye and expression and moment of intimacy and safety and trust and companionship, the bad-thing lays in wait, waiting only for the clock to strike the right second, so that its attack will be deadly and precise.

So that it can befoul everything warm and whole.

Is it evil? A tangible, physical aspect of literal evil that has overtaken the world? Or is it just that everyone’s survival instincts have gone haywire and now the cycle is intensifying in a self-feeding loop, as things continue to get worse? Is the bad-thing even here, or is she just making it up in her dazed mind? Maybe it’s just everyone. Maybe everyone is the bad-thing, including herself. Maybe there isn’t some force to blame the heaviness of the world on. Maybe the world is just bad, because they’re all just bad.

Maybe that’s all there is.

“You good?” asks Jubilee’s voice from the other side of the tree.

“Mm,” replies Fresh, hoping that they don’t walk around it right now. It isn’t a confirmation of either ‘yes’ or ‘no’, it’s just a noise indicating her presence.

Jubilee doesn’t walk around towards her. She hears the crunch of them sitting down on the foliage on their side of the tree. It’s oddly nostalgic for her, this separation. She appreciates that Jubilee knows not to cross over to her side of the world right now. Jubilee is crass, but there is still a sensitive part of them that knows how to weigh people’s feelings.

Neither of them say anything for a while, both of them just sitting there on their respective sides of the tree.

“I was just fucking around,” they say. “You know I wouldn’t have actually done it, right?” asks Jubilee, sounding worried.

“Mm,” replies Fresh, this time as an affirmative. She knows that Jubilee wouldn’t have actually thrown Pentti off of the cart. That was just their initial ‘bargaining chip’ to allow them to open the door to their real strategy, without fear of later social consequences. Even in a high-stress situation like that one, Jubilee can’t help but still consider what people think about them, as they always have, hence the mask. Jubilee probably cares what people think about them themselves more than anyone else in their group. It’s not because of vanity, it’s more an avoidance of creating a perceived weakness that could be exploited later.

This is the venom that the bad-thing had tainted her friend with.

But that venom had seeped out of them and given the fairies the idea, or at least encouraged it. Can she legitimately be mad at Jubilee for that? She doesn’t know. Is she mad anyways, despite the questionable legitimacy of such a feeling? She doesn’t know.

“It wasn’t always like this, you know?” asks Jubilee.

“Mm?” asks Fresh, wondering what ‘it’ Jubilee is referring to.

“The world,” explains her friend, catching on to her question instinctively. “It used to be really nice, not even that long ago,” they say, sounding almost nostalgic. “Sure, some things were fucked in this way or that way, but -” There is a brief silence. “- not like they are now,” says Jubilee. “Now, everyone is fucky, no matter where you go.”

“Mm?” asks Fresh in a higher tone, lifting her head.

“No matter where you go,” repeats Jubilee, hearing the question out of her mumble. “There’s nowhere left that isn’t… like this. Not the north, not the west, not the east, not the south, not the center.” Fresh lowers her head again, she had expected as much. Her theory is true, the bad-thing has crept into every corner of existence. “I wish you could have seen it. You would have fit right in.”

“Did you?” asks Fresh, breaking her self-inflicted vow of mumbling.

Jubilee is quiet for a while. “I fit in better now,” they say. That answer makes her sad, not because she thinks it’s true. But because she realizes that Jubilee thinks that’s true and perhaps this latest catastrophe is simply a reinforcement of that belief. It seems like it’s about that time, when Jubilee is going to make their escape, before she can force them into a ‘moment’. “Anyways, I’ll get back to the cart and let you do your thing, okay?” they say, just as she had predicted.

“Hey, Jubilee?” says Fresh, looking into the dark-forest ahead of herself, where she can hear something creeping and crawling its way towards her. The bad-thing. “Can you stay here for a while?” she asks, sliding her right arm back behind the side of the tree. “Please?”

Jubilee makes an audible show of sighing. “Sure,” they reply, apparently willing to forgo their escape. She hears them sit back down. This was the same thing as before. There is something that Jubilee wants, but they can’t always just come out and say it. Even if they know that Fresh would never laugh at them or tell the others, the venom of the bad-thing, of the thing from the black-water, runs deep in the hearts of those it has reached.

There is a second sound of something hitting the foliage. A small piece of leather. A glove. Fresh feels a warm hand grip hers. She doesn’t look around the tree to get a glimpse at it, she doesn’t take this opportunity to forcefully unravel a little bit more of the mystery of Jubilee. Because that is what the bad-thing would want her to do. Instead, she sits there, squeezing her fingers and rubbing her thumb over her friend’s hand.

“This is the first time I’ve touched your skin, Jubilee!” she says, leaning her head back against the tree again. “It’s so soft!” she beams in a half-truth, as her thumb runs over the many, many scars that cover the exterior of the hand. Jubilee has been using Basil’s cream, she can feel it.

Fresh blinks, looking up at the forest for a second, in a moment of spontaneous realization, as a dozen things click into place all at once inside of her head.

Basil had made the anti-scarring cream on purpose. It wasn’t a convenient accident. It wasn’t for her lightly rubbed shoulders. It was an unspoken, unrequited gesture of friendship between the two of them, Basil and Jubilee, passed off as mercantilism.

“Shut up, goo-brain,” sighs Jubilee and she feels their fingers moving over hers.