This blip was posted as a bridge/teaser/appeasement sometime several weeks before this publishing date. It is meant as a bridge to the action that occurs in the transition from SWAN to ISH. It's actually not needed to understand either, but it gives you the advantage of knowing what is going on when some characters don't.

And, you know, people were asking about Tess.

-LYX

A Bridge of Sorts - A Justified 'Meanwhile'

She never considered herself an angry woman.

She questioned things, she knew a stupid thing when she saw it and was keen to point it out in the proper company, but she never ascribed 'angry' to herself as a basic personality description.

Or she hadn't before. Now she wasn't sure.

There hadn't been a 'fade to black' for her, a convention she'd seen done so often in movies she felt it just had to have been the way things would happen. It had just fizzled out, someone had trouble getting the plug out of the wall, but gave it that one last tug that not only cut the power put threw the puller across the room, and everything was gone.

She'd been surprised when it all came back. More than once, though she'd lost count by now of how many times it had been. Lost count. Lost fucking count of how many times she'd lived.

The world grew crazier with every blink. She knew, because not only had she seen crazy on television, but she'd indirectly died at the hands of crazy, and sometime later, stood on the sidelines while crazy grew up.

Tess saw Johnny for the first time in a town neighboring her own very small one. He had been sitting on a high stone wall, alone, listening to headphones. People walked by him, people looked through him, people didn't see him there. She'd wanted to say something, but had had no idea what. The line between 'Hey, remember me?' and 'I think I understand what you were doing, even if it was madness,' was still blurry. Congratulate him, or punch him in the face?

When she'd made the decision to just say something, he had vanished, and she'd assumed it to be better that way. She'd never see him again and just go about her business like usual. Maybe even die and stay dead this time. They'd both go through invisible lives and not alter the course of anything or anyone again. Maybe it would be relaxing.

Saw him again in a street, holding a baseball bat, and laughing with a girl. Some kid was lying on the pavement in front of them, but seemed to be just as amused, if not dazed.

And again, breaking into a run-down building with the girl.

Another time, following the guy who'd been on the pavement the time before into a deteriorating trailer.

Once more, dragging an overwhelmed-looking guy in glasses behind him through the school parking lot.

It wasn't that she had been following him, or even looking for him on purpose. She'd have been happy to never see him again, but the more she saw him the more she became bitter that she could see him, and then the more she did. He never saw her, and yet she saw him everywhere, despite her only occasional visits to his little town. The group she'd begun to see him accumulate at a rapid pace frustrated and confused her. Didn't they know what he was?

Didn't they know she was there, too?

Once Johnny had assimilated the guy with the glasses into his little harem, Tess had watched the group dynamics change. Johnny still firmly at the center of it, but Guy-With-Glasses came in closer than the others. They still ignored her, still didn't see her there now that they all had been seen themselves.

Perhaps this was some kind of karmic thing, she'd thought. She'd been cursed to be invisible in this life for pretending to be fringe and oppressed, or at least associating with people like that, in another. She'd hoped then, and still did to some extent, that her last time spent trying to escape Johnny's house with her life had redeemed her somewhat. Sure, she'd rationalized a homicidal mad-man's actions, and had even felt some regret at not having the moment her disgusting companion died captured on film, but it was human to have thoughts like that, and surely that situation had been a special case.

Whatever the reason, she felt sure what had been dealt to her wasn't justified.

She'd seen Johnny on the roof, and seen him visit Guy-With-Glasses-And-Goatee and been amused when said guy started looking longingly at Johnny. Johnny couldn't see that either. She'd laughed at them, and then wondered if she would regret it or if she could somehow take it back.

She'd seen Johnny's other companions meeting without him, and then suddenly all together in the school. She thought nothing of it until she began seeing them everywhere on top of everywhere.

On television, in radio broadcasts, in newspapers and on flyers. She'd stood there, alone, holding image after image of a formerly invisible skinny teenager while remaining one herself. The thoughts she'd then entertained weren't of congratulating or punching any longer. They were of jealousy and rage at injustice. The almost-man in the images she'd crumbled in her fist was a twisted and sick creature who'd somehow made mocking the very things he'd done to make himself a monster into entertainment.

When she saw that this sick bastard had charmed Glasses Guy, who, through the magic of media, she'd learned was called Edgar, she decided it was time to do something. But just what something, she was not sure. She only knew that she'd been left invisible and alone, disappeared at the tentacles of something she still had nightmares about, and that it all, disgustingly, was the fault of this man who had reeled in and deceived not only this poor love-sick Edgar guy, but three other people and most of the musically inclined population.

She wasn't an angry woman.

But she was justified.

She didn't think the house would do what it did.

Finally, in the back of yet another pit of teeming mad-people, Johnny saw her standing there. He looked horrified. He looked, delightfully enough, scared.

"Don't I know you?" he asked.

"Something like that," she answered.

She tried to speak to him, intended to convey some great revelation to him, and while it never came out, he heard it anyway.

"I do know you."

He'd spoken too quietly to be heard, but in the way that he had heard what she hadn't said, she understood him.

"I wondered how long it would take," she told him. Speaking to him, hearing something the same and altogether different in his voice stalled her from acting. She still wasn't sure what she was going to do, but she was on the verge of it, for sure.

She told him not to worry, and that he'd see her again. When he turned long enough to find the girl she now knew was called Devi, Tess ducked away from the scene. 'Mystic Woman Routine' could only be upheld for so long.

While she debated what she would do to him, she heard the news.

Johnny was dead.

"If a plane were to fall from the sky
How big a hole would it leave
In the surface of the Earth?"

She regretted one way and then the next. Regretting not having done it herself, knowing full well that, at the time, she wouldn't have been able to, and then switching to regretting that it had happened at all. That Edgar guy had such pained expressions when she saw him on the mass of televisions in the electronics store downtown. Johnny had fooled him so well.

A funeral, a van, and wanton graffiti made sure that Johnny never died, and she couldn't escape seeing him. The little tribe he left behind spoke through brilliantly faked mourning or out of mournfully brilliant deception. Tess rolled her eyes at every word they spoke, going so far as to dub over their voices mockingly when she saw them on television. Except for Edgar. Edgar gave her pangs of doubt. Edgar made her wonder.

His pain looked real.

The next she knew, Edgar had someone in his house who was and wasn't Johnny at the same time. When she went to confirm, he was already Johnny again, and this time, for reasons she wasn't sure she grasped, he was terrified.

She caught a glimpse of Edgar and without thinking, waved to him. For a moment, she thought he'd wave back, and was slightly disappointed when he didn't. The door closed, and she remained in her spot across the yard for a few moments.

When she made her way across the yard and crept into bushes that felt as though they were used to that kind of thing, she glanced in the window. Poor Edgar.

She wasn't angry, but damn it, she was justified.

"If a plane were to fall from the sky…"

Lyrics are from The Editors' 'The Racing Rats'. I claim no ownership of them, or the characters portrayed here.

Thanks to PolyesterRage, for beta services on this and future things related.