The last time Lacey had been here, she had to sneak out, drumsticks at her ribcage, and sprint down the hill until her lungs were close to bursting. How the universe works astounds her, because at that moment, if you'd asked her to sneak back in again, she would've laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world. Here she is now, though, placing her feet carefully around the house until she's beneath the wooden poles that prop up the back of it, until she's weaving between the pillars that keep the balcony wrapped around the entire home from collapsing. No, last time she wouldn't have been able to see herself here, not at all.

But last time she didn't know this window was down here. A carbon copy from the one Stella had pulled herself through in her last moments of desperation, last moments that Lacey had seen in the comfort of her own bed. The burn of bile rises up her throat but she swallows it back down. Come on. We're already this close. Don't back out now, pussy.

She moves away from the window, wrapping around the rest of the house to triple-check to make sure the van isn't up front. A thin fog sits where the vehicle ought to. Kathy and her creepy son won't be here, thank heavens. However, this isn't the only silver lining to her caution: she finds a sliding door back here, a back door she hadn't known about even with the vision. After a proper amount of time spent hyping herself up - lord knows she needs it - she presses her palm to the chilled metal and pushes.

It gives easily, left unlocked. She sways there for a moment, staring solemnly into the darkness, but ultimately, she crosses the threshold and slides the door to a close behind her.

This must be a smaller room hanging off of the basement, because she doesn't recall this door from the vision, nor does she recall it being so cramped. Sure enough, guided by the light from outside, she finds a door a few feet forward and jiggles the knob. It, too, gives, and the door creaks open to show her the place from her dreams, nightmares, whatever you want to call them.

Her throat tightens and a small noise squeaks out of her of its own accord, something akin to a whimper. Stella was stuck down here for days. Afraid. In that corner, right over there. She sets her sights on an old washing machine and slowly approaches. A rusty nail pokes out from under the washer. She makes a mental note that Stella's prints or DNA or whatever could likely still be on it, so she gives it a wide berth until her heel bumps the stairs. She whirls on them. Her stomach feels like it completely tilts over inside of her, but she proceeds upwards.

Up the stairs. There's the kitchen where she'd shared tea with Nefyn and Dolly. She passes it by, trying not to let these old images permeate through the main point, the main reason she's here. With teeth gritted to the point of pain, she advances down the hall. Another set of stairs. She takes them, reminding herself to skip the creaky step.

There's no reason for it. The pale floorboards upstairs moan with every step anyways. The hall is dark, and her shadow stretches down it, the silhouette of her head sitting outside the doorless opening to the canvas room. Another head stretches out to overlap hers. She rests her hand on the wall just outside the room. I can still run back down and out. He can't follow me fast enough. Her finger twitches against the plaster. No. There's nowhere for me to run to but back home under my own bed. I'm not gonna do that. I'm not.

And so, with her head held high, she steps in front of the opening and, with a deep breath, into the room. The floor groans beneath her. There's no way the man sitting in front of the wide, open window on the opposite side of the room doesn't know she's there; there's no way he hadn't known she was there since she first pushed open that sliding door downstairs. But still, he sits there, stiff in his wheelchair, his back to her, staring out at the mist-laden lake between the trees.

A long stretch of nothing passes. Then, without turning: "You could have at least knocked before breaking and entering into my home." His voice is low, absent of the harsh amusement that usually undertones it.

Her skin prickles with gooseflesh, but she dares to take a few more small steps into the room. "They've got Clint and Dolly," she says, loud and clear. "I'm sure you heard."

"I did." He sucks his own lip for a minute, contemplating. "I take it Dolores told you all about it. About my role, too."

Lacey shrugs in response even though he can't see it. "No. She never even mentioned your name. I figured it out on my own. Ro was helping an older man with errands before she went missing, like Gideon does for you. You and Dolly clearly have a history, a close one. And Erie's flannel was here. It wasn't hard to piece together after we found that."

"So what are you here to do, then?" She flinches at the sudden raise of his voice, the gruffness of it. "Tell me you caught me and that the police are on their way? Here to call me a son of a bitch and tell me I'm gonna burn in Hell, because, ho, I've heard it all already, enough from Dolly, that hypocrite woman, as if she hasn't done the same."

She narrows her eyes. So far she's repented for it. That's one clear difference.

"No. I want to hear it from you first. Did you kill Ro-Anne Foster? Did you call Dolly to come clean up your mess?" She already knows the answer. She knows, and still, she wants him to say no, that's berserk, and for him to be right, because she doesn't hate this man. She's come to enjoy his company, the bitter banter between them, the calmer moments when he's almost kind. She's come to appreciate Nefyn Lore, but he's nothing but a man crafted by his own namesake, a storyteller who spins quite the tale. A passionate enough narrator to make her believe him.

Maybe that's why she's not as afraid as she probably should be.

He doesn't spin more words from the spindle, doesn't sing an epic to defend himself. The only thing he does is bristle and straighten up in his chair. Clears his throat once, twice. Lacey waits, gives him time to speak, but the only thing that fills the air is the strong smell of acrylic paint fumes dizzying her head.

Eventually, he places his hands upon his wheels, still marked by youth. The fingers tremble but he remains composed as he rolls back, then around until he's stopped at the island set off to the side. A collection of paints sits there and he starts to fiddle.

She wants to say something. Her lips part but she clamps them shut again, can't bring herself to make the words come up. Heat flushes her cheeks and she turns to the left, meanders slowly towards the wall where the murder board used to be. Someone must've ripped the papers down, cast the yarn away. All of Gideon's hard work, hours of it, gone. Trashed. In its place a large mirror sits, reaching all the way to the floor, and wide.

Her eye twitches but she huffs and tries to calm herself. In this place, right now, it's not the time to let anger drive her. No, if Nefyn sees her running purely on emotion, he'll use that, worm his way out like he must've to get Dolly on board, to do whatever the fuck else he's done. Instead, she lets her gaze wander to distract herself from the aggressive buzz in her chest. It drifts from painting to painting, some finished, some not. Some colorful, some not. Some beautiful. Some not.

After a few sweeping glances at the canvases leaning against the wall or stuck upon easels, she knits her brows together. Reds swirl into oranges, fiery blazes, faces crawling from the flames, faces with mouths shorn open in screams. Blues drip into purples, and what ought to be the human body is something else entirely, pulled in a dozen different directions, quartered and drawn by invisible forces. Over and over again, she scans the canvases, and over and over again, she feels the anguish portrayed in them, really gets it now that these colors broil in her own chest. The wheels start to turn, and the whispers of the fates return to her ears full force:

To give insight into the manner of their taking, it was little Ro's curiosity that took her, Stella's trust with she, and Erie, well, he's a boy with too many suspicions. On the other end, it was rage that took Ro, but not her own; fear that took Stella, but not her own; habit that took Erie, but not his own.

The fear was there when Dolly lay in the water at the bottom of the stairs, the habit in her jaw before she'd taken the fall. And here, in these paintings, is the anger.

Perhaps it will be her own curiosity that will be her undoing, too, just like Ro. Because when she looks back to the mirror, just to get a good look at the back of Nefyn's head, she finds his face, twisted and quivering. She finds his hand, too, twisted and quivering. And then the world follows suite, twisted and

quivering in his hand is a gun. She doesn't know what it is, not at first, not in the dark of night with only the moon streaming in through the open window to light the stretch of floorboards to the doorway. The metal glints, and it looks cold. She remembers Kathy showing it to her after she'd asked about the woman's collection of guns, after she'd asked how they worked, where she kept them, how to clean them. Ro remembers touching this gun with her own bare hands, and now it's in his. Pointed right at her.

A shaking sigh leaves her parted lips. "Oh." She doesn't dare move, not a muscle. She stands there, stiff. Only the hem of her dress waves at the knees, and that's only the fault of the breeze from the window ruffling it. "Can you put that down? You don't- you don't need it." Her voice is meek, she knows it. It's always been soft, but this, this is- "I'm scared. Please put it down."

The folds in his distorted, blotchy face drip with tears, and he doesn't put the gun down. "You have no right!" he spits. "No right to bring that name to me, those accusations! No right to dig through my business!"

"You don't understand, Mister Lore, Darcy wanted me to talk to you! I just want to help her, that's all, I swear it! I don't want to hurt you, sir, I never would've wanted that in a million bajillion years, but she's hurt, too! Darcy is hurting because she wanders, lost, in a purgatory, with no idea why she's here."

A gust swoops in and throws her hair in front of her eyes, blinding her with mousy copper. In a desperate fit, she smacks the hair away and sets her wide eyes on him, pleading in silence. He's in a craze, though, she feels it wafting off of him. "Stop!" he thunders. "You get her name out of your mouth and stop dirtying it, stop, stop saying this, this- this shit. It's bull."

"But it's not and I can't. I know you pushed her and I know it was an accident. Just make your peace with the girl and let her finally rest, Mister Lore, please! She's suffering every second she has to roam this plane alone."

"Nobody can know that I did this, Anne." His voice is just as meek as hers now. He's scared, too. Oh, but that's worse than his rage. She starts to hyperventilate, she can't help it. "They'll beat me like they did before. Leave me broken. Send me over the edge. Nobody can know, Anne."

"And nobody will. Nobody but me and Darcy. Please, just put the gun down and come talk to her with me."

"I told you to stop."

"But-"

"I said stop!"

It's a twitch. A lurch of emotion that drives his hand to squeeze around the handle. It's hard to tell whether it's something he does on purpose or whether it's an accident, but his rage gets the better of him, and regardless of what he meant to do, his hand squeezes what he holds, and there's a pop.

There's a wet noise, first. It comes before the heavy thump of flesh dropping to wood, of a body going limp. It comes before Ro's anguished cry as she stares down at herself on the ground, splayed out. A puddle of blood seeps from her head, her very own head! No, no, put the blood back, call someone, call a doctor, make it better, they have to, why can she see herself? No, no, go back! Go back!

She screams again and still, there lingers a deafening silence at the same time, in a world where Nefyn only stares wide-eyed at the bloodied body of the little girl laying on the floor in front of him. His hands shake and the metal slips free of his hands, landing on his lap. "Oh. Oh, my."

The wind stills to nothing outside. One breathless body becomes two. A steady drip emanates from the corner of a canvas, where a thick splotch of red slips like venom from the linen and plops into a small pool on the floor. A similar discoloration speckles the white walls at the back of the room. Speckles his cheeks, too. Sticky. Probably warm. He lifts a finger to the spray on his face and cries out at the first touch. He blinks, sees the body again, wails. The remainder of his body that can still move quakes, and he sweeps hands through his full head of hair, tugging tugging tugging "fuck!"

The emotions flit over his face. Guilt, remorse, fear. It spins and spins like a jackpot machine but he only gets three of the latter in a row, and so he wheels to the island and fumbles in the dark until numbers light up and a rapid beeping overpowers the drip of her own blood off of everything. She crumples to her knees, knelt over her own body, trying to beckon the life back into her with whatever magic she thought she'd once pulled from this world, but there's nothing.

Nothing but Nefyn's voice breaking the silence. "Dolores. Dolores, I've done a, a bad thing, a terrible thing. I need you. I didn't mean to. I didn't mean to do it, she just, I just- I need you."

His voice dies off in an echo and then his face is back, and the gun, both staring at her reflection with equal fervor in the mirror. Lacey stares, unblinking, stiff as a board. In that moment, an image returns to her: Gordy, his little hand motion. Ching. Pow.

Fuck me.

She whirls, top blown. "Can all of you psychos stop pulling fucking guns on me? And why? Why pull out the gun again when you know what happened last time?"

"Because last time I was protecting myself and I have to protect myself now."

"From what? From who? Yourself?"

This strikes a nerve. Chartreuse lands on each of his hands, like he knows there is a sick danger in these hands of his, hands that have pushed and pulled one too many times. But he denies it in himself, refuses to see the risk in himself and pins it all on her. He grits his teeth. "No. From this world. I just got my life back from it. I've finally forgiven myself. Found peace. I can't let anyone take that away from me again."

"Was Ro-Anne taking your peace away when she brought up Darcy, when she asked you about her and forced you to confront all this old shit you're trying to avoid?"

His nostrils flare and a fresh terror sits behind his features. "Stop it. There's no way for you to know about that, so stop it. No fucking way, none."

It strikes her again, the memory that just because the air here is full of his secrets doesn't mean hers have entered the mix. She disregards his shock at her knowledge of the situation - it's not worth it, and she remembers the way Ro went about it, went rambling on about things he couldn't possibly understand. No, she'll do it right this time. She'll do it right and make it right.

"You aren't a bad man, Nefyn. You've lived with guilt and fear your whole life. You've lived with an anger living inside you. A tragic accident put these things in you, and as the years kept coming, it all stacked up. You snapped. You made a mistake. But this is the time, Nef. This is where you turn it all around and do right by the wrong you've done. Make it right for Ro-Anne. For Stella and Erie. For Darcy, for fuck's sake. For..." She tastes the words in her mouth before they slip out. "For Gideon."

Nefyn's mouth parts and he stares frozen as the words settle in his ears. His eyes sit wide, clear bottle-green, and dark brows lift above them. The jutting edges in his face juxtapose with the soft curves, and he, as a human being, embodies confusion. "What d'you mean 'for Gideon?'" he asks, quiet. "What's wrong with Gideon?"

No. She doesn't want to talk about this, doesn't want to see his face in her mind again. She swallows sharply and drills her gaze into his. "Put the gun down and pick up the phone. Tell the Fosters you're sorry and turn yourself in. I know you're capable. You made amends to Darcy. You confessed to that accident, so confess to another. Make amends to the others you've hurt."

He doesn't hear her, though, too clogged up with two to comprehend these added dozens. "Lacey," he says. It's firm. He won't let up. "What happened to Gideon?"

Her exhale is shaky. She licks her upper teeth once, twice. Nods in defeat. "He was shot. Clint shot him."

There it is, that shift in the green, the return of the wilderness to his face. His brows twitch and his lips curl into a deep frown, one that quakes at the corner. "Is he going to be okay? Where is he now?" But the gun, it's still trained on her, and she can't make the words go. It's too much like the wilderness Ro had seen just before the life had been ripped out of her. Has she overstepped? "Lacey, tell me what happened. Tell me."

Cooperation. That's what she needs. So she nods sullenly, her jaw set. "They don't think he'll make it. He lost a lot of blood. They hit him...they hit..." Gently, she pokes her left side beneath the ribs. Phantom pains still throb there and she winces.

Meanwhile, Nefyn stares on in horror, his gaze never leaving the spot her finger had gestured to. His eyes well up. The green brightens. She takes it as the go-ahead and allows herself to feed on this, to fuel her own dark rise of frustration, of just call the cops, damn it, of you selfish fuck.

"This could've been avoided. All of it. And now my best friend is gonna die. Again." Warmth appears in her face in splotches and the room blurs. "It's too late now. We can't go back. Accidents happened, people died. Now you make it right. So get that motherfucking gun out of my face, and call. Nine. One. One. Y'know, in case you forgot."

There's a shift in his face, like he wants to put the gun down, but he doesn't. "I'll die if I'm arrested. I'll die behind bars. All I've done, that we've done, it was for a reason. If I'm arrested, it was for nothing. I can't do this."

Unbelievable. "It was all for nothing anyways! It's not fair for these families to not know what happened to their children! Can you even imagine the sort of hell you've put Elijah and his family through? The fuck, Nefyn, it's not fair for you to only care about your own peace after you've ripped it away from everyone else! It's not fair that any of this happened at all! And now you're gonna try to justify it?"

He meets her with equal fervor but he knows she's right, he must, and his hand shakes. He has nothing better than a bark to preface the bite. "Life's not fair."