AnimeCon Harem 14: 14 pt 7 (Patreon)

   “Well—well, you shouldn’ta fuckin’ trashed his phone, then!” Emily huffed out after a moment of hesitation. “He’s not even with us right now. So—”

   “Rebecca said he was with you,” Chloe cried. “She said he was. Can I, can I just—please? Can I talk to him? I, I need to tell him, I need him to know, I-I’m sorry, how sorry I am, for all of this, for everything. Please? Please?”

   “He’s really not here,” Emily’s tone remained sour and exasperated. “Fuck. Can’t you just—urrghhh, I hate you so fuckin’ much. Hold the fuck on, then. I’ll grab him.”

   The rustling of Emily adjusting her phone and some almost inaudible muttering indicated that the shitstain goblinoid midget was actually moving about in search of Brian.

   Perfect. Perfect. Perfect.

   The width of Chloe’s smile was clenched rigidly into place and her eyes were staring down at the display with such intensity that she could feel them straining. It didn’t matter—something was finally fucking working. A droplet of blood landed on the knuckle of the hand gripping her phone, and she sniffled again. Just an errant drop, the bleed hadn’t opened back up again. It was going to work this time.

   Silver shards ground themselves into a gritty snarl of glass within her head. The phantom edges of glinting light were collecting, coalescing, forming into a twisting knot the size of a fist. Whenever she tried to wrap her mind around whatever the fuck the unique feeling was, Chloe was forced to recoil back away from it as the silvery sharpness stung and cut at the probing thoughts. She’d never had a migraine that was so distinct in it’s flavor—this one had such a specific color to it that it made the roots of her teeth itch, the pieces of pain were so clear she could almost define the shapes of some of the larger ones.

   “Emily?” Chloe asked, fighting to keep the steadily mounting impatience out of her voice. “Please? C-can I just—can I talk to him?”

   “Fucken hold on,” Emily swore. “I’m finding him. Jesus.”

   *     *     *

   “911, where is your emergency?” A dispatcher was on the line almost immediately after dialing in the number.

   “I think I—I need to—I’m reporting a rape,” Kelly fumbled the awkward words into something like a sentence, feeling her mouth go dry. The tears were back again, she could feel the hateful things making lines down her face as she fought to regain her balance. She felt sick to her stomach. She was going to throw up soon, and now it seemed like it was only a matter of when and where.

   The several gawking girls and the rubbernecking guy or two who’d apparently caught the tail end of the impromptu sex with Brian all overheard her words and physically recoiled from them. The grins of amusement and disbelief at seeing people fuck behind a vendor’s booth dropped away to looks of horror, and the vendor herself brought both hands to cover her mouth in disbelief. Kelly shoved past the small gap between booths and took a stumbling step down the aisle in their direction and they all backed up.

   “Where is this at, so that I can get help to you right away,” the dispatcher was saying. “Are you still there?”

   “I’m sorry, I’m—” Kelly let out a small sob into the phone as she hurried on through everyone as fast as she could. The people near enough to have seen what was going on parted in a wave and Kelly ducked her head and hunched her shoulders as she passed them, unwilling to let them see her distraught face. She hated this. She hated this. She was going to throw up.

   “I’m at the convention center, downtown,” Kelly cried as she stepped through an intersection and whirled in place, momentarily unable to get her bearings as to which way was which. She’d pulled her yoga pants up but everything about her still felt like it was in total disarray. “Can you send someone to the convention center? It’s the AnimeCon convention.”

   “Of course, I have the call started and help is already nearby and on the way,” the voice on the phone assured her. “Can you tell me where at the convention center you’re at, so that they can find you?”

   “It’s—” Kelly paused, took several steps past the intersection, and then backtracked, making a right and heading down another aisle as fast as she could, searching the sea of faces as her stomach threatened to spew its contents back up. She could feel her throat clenching up. “It’s just outside. Just outside the furthermost entrance, to the, uh, to the right, the west side. There’s an alleyway or something right between the convention center and where the next block starts.”

   “I’m seeing—there’s an access point just west of the convention center’s Hall D? Does that sound correct?”

   “It’s— yes, that’s correct,” Kelly managed out, brushing past a straggling group of shoppers and through the next intersection of aisles. Her free hand fought to unsmear the wet tears on her face and only seemed to make more of them spill out. “There’s a, there was a girl there, she. She was screaming for help, and I, I—”

   The pink warmth of attention fell on her, and when Kelly instinctively looked to her left, she saw Stephanie and Emily break into a run towards her. Bitter revulsion and shame washed through her with such strength that Kelly wavered and nearly fell to her knees at the sight of them, but she saw that Emily already had her phone out and up to her ear. She was going to throw up. She wanted to die, she’d never hated herself with every fiber of her being like this, and the sight of Stephanie’s shocked concern for her twisted her insides into a mangled mess, squeezing out a greasy film of guilt and rage.

   “What happened?!” Stephanie rushed to carefully embrace her, looking terrified and bewildered. “Kelly—Kelly what happened?!”

   Biting her lip hard enough for it to hurt, she ended the call to 911 and tossed aside her phone. It clattered away somewhere between their feet across the carpet of the vendor’s room. Emily arrived just a few steps behind Stephanie, so Kelly shouldered aside the pink-haired love of her life and snatched away Emily’s phone before the speechless girl could even form a question. More tears bled from her stinging eyes, and Kelly’s insides lurched.

   “Ch-Chloe,” Kelly said, swallowing back bile. “Chloe?”

   “Can I speak to Brian?” A plaintive voice called out through the phone. “Please? Please can I-I just talk to him?”

   Chloe’s vocal register was too flat and devoid of any of the thickness of emotion that actually made it a struggle for Kelly to speak. Of course it was—Chloe’s acting was fucking terrible. She had no ability to empathize with anyone who actually felt things. No understanding of what it did to a person, outside of this pithy caricature of what a real human being conveyed when they were in this state for real. Chloe’s attempt at vulnerability was so utterly laughably bad that for a moment rage and hate bubbled up past the throw up and kept Kelly from vomiting.

   “Yeah, he’s right here with me,” Kelly forcibly battered each word one by one into a calm speaking voice, working with incredible difficulty to enunciate them into clarity without allowing anything else to leak out. “What do you want?”

   “I-I want to apologize to him, for—for everything,” Chloe performed a melodramatic sniffle that turned Kelly’s inside. “It’s—I didn’t, I didn’t mean for any of this, I just wanted to, I want to—I want to apologize, for, for all of this. Can I just talk to him? Please?”

   “Where are you?” Kelly asked in a clipped tone. “I should—I should apologize too. That all went too far. Where are you?”

   “I’m—can Brian come alone?” Chloe begged. “Just him? For right now? So I, I can just apologize to him first? If that’s okay? I-I’m so, so sorry for everything!”

   “Yeah,” Kelly mechanically replied. “Yeah, of course. Maybe that’d be better.”

   “If that’s—is that okay?” Chloe cried.

   “Yeah,” Kelly said again. “He said—he said that’s fine. Where do you want to meet him?”

   *     *     *

   What the ever loving fuck is going on?!

   Emily felt the steady stream of blue within her backflow, like a sinkhole had opened up beneath her metaphorical river somewhere upstream and was draining her feelings backwards into a discomforting mire of wrongness. As if rediscovering Kelly like this with tears streaming down her face and a trembling chin wasn’t insane enough, Brian was nowhere to be found, and crouching down to retrieve the girl’s phone she’d thrown showed 911 Emergency Services—call ended through a now cracked screen.

   The fuck happened? Where’s Brian?! What HAPPENED?! Emily was so completely stunned that she had no idea how to parse the fact that Kelly was speaking into the phone as if Brian was standing there with him.

   “Okay,” Kelly said, her beautiful face collapsing into a silent sob even as she maintained a steady speaking voice. “Yeah. Just outside, there? West side? He says—he’s on his way there now, said he’ll be there in like, a minute or two. Okay. Yeah, sure. Bye.”

   The taller girl stared down through her own mussed tangle of red hair in disbelief as she ended the call and held the phone out. It looked like she was going to be sick.

   “Kelly—Kelly, what happened?” Stephanie demanded, absentmindedly passing the phone from Kelly back to Emily. “What happened? Can you—can you talk to me? What happened?!”

   “I. Just,” Kelly screwed up her face and kept Stephanie at arm’s length. “I got a thing from the future. Again. Had to make a call. I mean a choice. With it. Had to make my call. I—so I made my call. I made the really shitty call. I just—I had to.”

   “Where’s Brian?” Emily asked, all at once feeling empty and cold. “What did you do?”

   “I—” Kelly broke down into another sob. “Sent him to Chloe. He’s on his way there. I already called the police. But we, we need to go to Rebecca. Upstairs, right fucking now. We need—we need to be as far away from this as we can.”

   “You sent him to Chloe,” Emily repeated. “You sent Brian to Chloe. Alone? No. No, why would you even—”

   “I don’t FUCKING like it either!” Kelly cried, grabbing Stephanie by the wrist. “S-so, so back the fuck off my case, okay? We need to go.”

   “Kelly, just, Kelly talk to me, can you just, can you explain what’s going on?” Stephanie asked, her eyes now wet with tears of her own.

   “I fucked it all up,” Kelly couldn’t even meet Stephanie’s gaze. “Told you all I would, I, I fucking warned all of you over and over and over that I would. Th-the us in the future, they had a plan to fix it, they had it all worked out! Well? FUCK THEM AND THEIR PLAN! They don’t, you—they don’t fucking control me! I’m not their fucking puppet!”

   “Kelly,” Emily’s breath hitched. “Kelly what did you do?”

   “I completely fucked it all up!” Kelly all but screamed. “I told you I fucking would! I tried to tell you! I tried to tell you this wasn’t gonna fucking work! I’m my own fucking person—and I make my own fucking future!”

   “Kelly stop, please!” Stephanie cried. “This isn’t—this—I know you wouldn’t hurt Brian. I know you wouldn’t. I know you wouldn’t.”

   “I’m the only fucking one who can hurt Brian!” Kelly sobbed out. “Don’t you see? This is what he wanted. All of you, fucking all of you trying to FIX it, going around behind his back?! Th-that’s not what he wants, and I’m the ONLY one who can fuckin’ see that and just—completely fuck over your stupid fucking plan. Yeah. YEAH. Had to. Had to be me. I’m the only one that even could. I’m my own fucking person.”

   “Kelly we don’t know what the fuck you’re even talking about!” Emily was unable to stop herself from stepping forward and shaking the incoherent girl. “What the ACTUAL FUCK is going on?!”

   “We, we—we need to leave now,” Kelly babbled. “Get further away before it’s bad, get to Rebecca. If we don’t, you both get hurt. I already called 911. We need to go.”

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