LEGACY OF THE BLAZERS - CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

It took Lux ten minutes to pull her eyes off Blowhole’s stinking corpse.

She wanted to spit on him. She wanted to kick his body until his head burst open and all the stuffing came out. She wanted to drag him home, string him up in the middle of Blazers territory, and leave his body there to remind everyone what happened to the man who had fucked them over.

But she wasn’t that kind of person. Despite what had happened in her battle against Cheese, she wasn’t going to let her lust for revenge turn her into someone she wasn’t. She’d won. She’d…killed him. That had to be enough because nothing would fill the hole in her heart that his ruin had left behind. Brutalizing a dead body wouldn’t bring anyone back.

“You fucker,” she said. “You absolute fucker.”

Her vision grew muddy as tears flooded her waterline, but she scrubbed them away. She couldn’t break down, not while there was so much to do. She had to check on Cy, and save Tegan before Bon got any stupid ideas, and…

Fulfill Jess’ wish …

Their battle down the hill had left the blunt bent and torn in several places, definitely not something you’d ever want to smoke under normal circumstances. But still, she took a hit off of it, letting the smoke flow into her lungs, hoping that when the snakes looked at her, they’d return to the warriors who she grew up with, not the vicious monsters they had become.

But their blood red eyes, warped scales, and serrated teeth remained.

Being controlled by Blowhole…it had corrupted them for good.

She shook the thought off. It was pointless to think about what she hoped was going to happen. Reality was reality, and she’d learned that no matter how much you want to twist it to fit the narrative inside your head you can’t. Sometimes the good guys lose, and bad things happen to those they leave behind. It was just a part of life.

But the idea of them being gone forever stung. The blunt was the last piece of Jess she had left and once it was gone, so was she. Memories fade, and time moves too quickly. In ten years, what if she barely remembered Jess’ voice? Barely remembered what she looked like, or what they did together?

When people’s memories start to go, they look at pictures. They smell cologne. They visit specific places or do specific things because they know it’ll give that memory the boost it needs to stay alive. But with almost every piece of Blazers history gone, Lux couldn’t do that. And once this was gone too…

Once again, her vision grew muddy, but this time she couldn’t fight the tears off. They attacked her all at once, heavy as anvils as they tried ripping her soul free in hopes that it would convince to just crush the blunt quickly and get it over with. To not think about herself, but instead what she had been asked to do.

In a dream, after I’d gotten knocked unconscious by a fall…

How do I even know that this is what Jess would truly want and that it wasn’t just some crazy hallucination?

“Because I know Jess, and if she saw them like this, and saw all the horrible things they’d been used for, she would do it herself without a second thought.”

They were no longer her old friends—they had been turned into monsters who thrived on chaos. Even as they glared at her now, it was obvious they were hungry to fight something else. Though Blowhole’s stuffing was still stabbed between their teeth, they had already forgotten about him. They wanted something new.

And that wasn’t who they were.

Crushing the blunt wasn’t a merciless act of brutality—it would save them, save their legacy, and let them return to being them.

She had to do it.

She rested her back against the barely-standing wall of a mangled building as she glossed her eyes over them one last time. Then, without so much as a word, she opened her palm and dropped the blunt into one of the wolves’ mouths. As it chewed, it stole the snakes lives. Soon they were nothing but dust in the air.

That dust floated up into the smoke-stained sky, and then they were gone—the last bit of Jess, the last thing she would’ve had to remember her by, was a pile of crumbs in her hand and smoke in the air. “Goodbye,” she said. “I hope you get to see her again, and I hope when you do that you’re back to being your true selves.”

END OF CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

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Hey all! Sorry about the super short chapter. I wanted to make it longer but I was incredibly busy this week working on a comic script and wasn't able to. Next week's chapter will be longer, promise! :)