A/N: I – I'm not sure how this happened, to be honest. One second I was reading Chlerek fluff, the next I was thinking, "Oh, hey, Chloe's due to go totally bonkers soon, I wonder what that would be like?" So, um, apparently this is fluff for me? Man, I'm kind of sick. Oh, wait, I remember now. I got this image in my head of Chloe with a dead parrot on her shoulder.

A Sad and Bitter Melody

Necromancers lose their minds. It's a fact of life, an inalienable truth. The more powerful they are, the faster it happens. So when, at twenty-two, Chloe starts going off the deep end, Derek isn't surprised.

Not surprised, but not happy either. Why would he be? He – well, he loved her, that much was obvious. Seeing her stare at the same spot on the wall for hours, eyes focused and intent on something no one else could see – it was a punch in the stomach.

If someone said something, she would start and turn, no matter how long they had been in the room, or how patently unsubtle they had been about it. That was one of the least disturbing aspects too. At least seeing things that weren't there was a normal crazy person trait, a perfectly regular symptom of schizophrenia. And a perfectly regular necromancer trait too. It was practically the job description, for God's sake. See ghosts. Talk to them. Have other people thing you're insane until you actually are.

She told him once upon a time about what the demi-demon, Diriel, had said to her, that she would be able to raise an army of corpses. At the time they had both shuddered at the thought and said, no, no, that would never happen.

Now, he wonders. In a month, will she be so far gone that she thinks she has too? In a month, will she be so far gone that she wants to?

Then, he comes home from – school, work, it doesn't matter, it was away from her – to find her with a half-rotted parrot on her shoulder. The smell hits him hard, putrid and thick in the air and he gags, turning from her.

She watches with curious blue eyes, eyes that hardly recognize him anymore, and says, "Don't you like my pet, Derek?"

He forces himself to breath through his mouth and looks at her, the smell of the parrot coating his tongue and lips, and he's sure when he brushes his teeth later that night he'll find feathers and rotting meat stuck between them. "Where did you get it, Chloe?"

She frowns, her brow creasing and the parrot clacks its beak, the tongue long gone (Who's a pretty bird?), eyes long gone, just sockets remaining. "I think -" she starts, and pauses. "I think he found me. I was lonely – and then there he was. They had buried him, and he wasn't even dead!" she says, outraged, and he closes his eyes because – because what else can he do? He can't leave her, not now. If he did – he doesn't want to think about that, but he does, because he's always been a fan of the facts, and facts are, if he leaves her he's signing her death warrant, and that of countless others.

"He was dead, Chloe," he says, the words heavy on his death-sticky tongue, the words slow and ponderous, falling like rocks into the water of her eyes. "You brought him back. He was dead."

She frowns, the big blue eyes confused, and – and, oh God, why did it have to happen this way? "He – he was?" she asks in a hesitant whisper. Then – "I guess – I – you're right. He was dead. I found him – I made him better. He is better now, isn't he Derek?"

He wants to hold her – he wants to hurt her. How dare she – how dare she be so weak, giving into her powers so easily.

How dare she do this to him.

"No," he says, the word running up from his lungs and throat and swan-diving off his lips, hard and harsh, and oh God, are those tears in her eyes? "No, he's not better. Chloe, please – let him go. Release his soul."

She closes her eyes and tries. He can tell that she tries, just like he can tell it isn't working. She opens her eyes long moments later. "I can't remember how," she says, miserably. "I can't make it go away."

He moves forward then, ignoring the stench, and holds her close, holds her shoulders, presses his head down against hers. "You can," he says, and tries to believe it. "Just – push. Let the spirit go."

The parrot clicks its beak again, an aborted word, then runs the beak through Chloe's hair, preening her, grooming her. Derek wants to kill it. She closes her eyes again, and breathes, a long, slow exhalation that stirs his shirt against his chest and tickles his throat. The bird collapses from her shoulder, clattering and smashing on the floor, the skull separating from the body, held near it by a single long suffering tendon. It reeks even worse than before and, sighing, Derek gets a garbage bag and some paper towels to clean it up.

Chloe stumbles away, collapses into a chair, holds her face in her hands, every so often peeking through her fingers like a child afraid to be seen.

It's hard for him to believe that this is only the beginning of the end, and that it'll get worse from here.