Rattlebones (bxbxb)

Crack Motel

"I don't know if I can do this, man." 

"Come on, Wilder. Darcy needs our support, it doesn't matter what he looks like. He's still the same person we fell in love with."

"Why are you so okay with this, bro? Did you bang your big-ass head trying to get out of the mansion? Darcy looks like the baby version of Skeletor. I can't even tell what he's thinking anymore because he doesn't have eyebrows or a face." 

"I'm okay with it because I'm tired of fighting all the weirdness, Eugene. And if that means accepting Darcy for who he is now, then I'm going to do it."

I lay in the back of Iggy's car and listen to him and Eugene as they argue, just a few feet away. I couldn't even bear to look at my own boney face at this point and had retreated into Iggy's much larger jacket to hide away from the world. 

The truth of the matter was, that I had asked for this and that I had nobody to blame but myself. The path to being humble was a gruesome, ruthless journey, and it would break my back before I relinquished to its casual whims.

"Hey, Darce?" I hear Iggy's footsteps crunch on the gravel and he comes over. "You okay?"

"No," I reply simply, hood pulled over my head. "I've been denuded of everything that I was by a supernatural entity. I can't go home looking like this, let alone face my peers without sending them running. I have no place in this world anymore. My life is over."

"Oh, God. Here we go," I hear Eugene sigh. 

"Don't say that, Brown." The seat sinks down beside me when Iggy sits, and then I feel him gently touch my head, smoothing his hand over the top of my covered skull. "You're always going to have a place as long as Eugene and I are around."

I peep up at him from where I lay. "Really?" I sniff a little. "You're not just saying that to be nice?"

"No way," Iggy replies, and then he smiles at me. 

I sit up and hug him as tight as I can, my boney arms wrapping around his neck. "Thank you, Igor," I whisper. "I don't know what I would do without you."

Eugene stands nearby, his expression a mixture of troubled and distressed. "This is nice and all, but can we go or something before the cops show up and start asking questions? Like why the mansion's on fire and there's a talking, emo skeleton boy sitting in the parking lot?" He reaches up and runs his fingers through his hair a little. 

"He's right," I pull away from Iggy and straighten my clothes a little. "The sooner we leave, the sooner we can figure out how to complete the agreement that I made with Nigel."

"Who the hell is Nigel?" Iggy questions and he furrows his eyebrows. 

"I'll explain more on the way there," I answer, and then I clamor into the driver's seat. 

"Nah-ah!" Eugene opens the door and he grabs me by the jacket, hauling me back out in an instant.

"Cretein! Can't you let me take charge just for once?!" I snap at him, and I take a punch at his stomach. 

"Um...let me think about it. How about no?" Eugene extends his arm so that I swing and spin around uselessly. "Every time you try taking charge, everything goes to hell. So why don't you let the professional drive us around this time?"

"He's got a point," Iggy pipes up from the back seat. "You literally just burned down a mansion."

At this point, I reluctantly agree and we all quiet down in our seats. 

Eugene settles on a motel with what I believe is stamped with the lowest rating in the city. None of us have much money, even combined, and Iggy ends up having to use his mother's credit card to rent a room. 

The parking lot is cracked and weeds pop out from the gaps as our car rolls into the parking spot in front of our new, temporary home. Several prostitutes and pimps are standing around outside looking at us, and one guy's even dragging a large black trash bag into one of the rooms, a trail of suspicious fluid leaking behind him as he goes. 

It's all remarkably refreshing. 

A breath of fresh air from the confines of our comfortable lives.

"So who is this Nigel guy that you were talking about earlier, Darcy?" Iggy questions as he grabs the crusty key to our motel room to unlock the door. 

"A nightmare," I reply as I stand beside him outside the door, hood drawn around my face. I feel small and vulnerable without my skin, and I'm almost certain that I would be spotted by one of the crack whores limping around. "He's some kind of demon lord from Hell. After I destroyed Rainbow's mansion, he's the one who reversed everything back to normal."

"Oh, yeah. All I remember is fire," Eugene adds in, his arm resting on top of my head. "Then nothing. It must have been intense."

"It was," I sigh, and then I look over when Iggy opens the door to the musty room. "And because of that, I struck a bargain with Nigel in favor of returning to Earth and sparing your lives."

Iggy flicks on the single light in the room and we all peer in. 

Prison would have been more comfortable. The walls had been painted a generic sand color, and several hideous landscape pictures were tacked up over the two full-sized beds.