What Is Your Name?

Chapter 26: Powerless (Lillian)

Guess my father did have a flair for the dramatics. It didn't matter. I was a gung-ho love-conquers-all believer, and I had just watched my favorite person in the world get the amazing girl he deserved.

"We're not here to talk to you, Eli," Sky continued. "We want to talk to Beelzebul."

Eli's eyes started glowing red and he started shaking violently. In a deep voice that was not his own, he asked, "You want to talk to me?"

"Let me just start by saying we have zero respect for you." Yes, Tempest cut right to the point. I suppose I could call her Sky's girlfriend now? I better be able to. "We are not trying to win your favor, nor are we trying to negotiate. We want you to stop giving power to this psycho and go back to literal actual hell where you came from."

"I can," this deeper voice cut in, "for a price. The Shadow's goal is to take back what is his. His daughter, his girlfriend, and his guitar."

"His girlfriend?!" Sky fumed. "His ex-girlfriend has been dead for thirteen years!"

"And you are not taking Lillian," Grey added, stepping in front of me.

"As for the guitar, you left it, along with everything else it was assumed you cared about," I pointed out. "It's Sky's now, and of course, it's up to him to give it to you, but you can't just take it. You can't just claim what you want, Dad, and you certainly can't have a demon claim it for you. You can never claim anything that isn't yours. As in, you can't make me love you."

"Lillian, if the guitar will help..." Sky began.

"Sky, you can't negotiate with these people!" Tempest shouted. "Remember who the Shadow is? You give him what he wants and when you're done he'll kill you. You made a promise to Lillian, remember? You have to be ok. You have to accept the guitar and everything else life throws at you. If not for you, if not for me, then for Lillian. She needs you as much as you need her."

Sky picked up his guitar. "I can't risk Lillian for the sake of an inanimate object that gives me emotional issues anyway."

"Sky," I called. It was like shouting into a void. I felt like I had to say just the right thing to reach him. "Sky, listen to me. You need the guitar. And that's nothing to be ashamed of. You love your music, and you are amazing at it. You can't keep running from what you need, Sky. Why do you think I was having problems? It's because people in the most random places, people at the freaking grocery store, invalidated how I was feeling. They made me feel like I wasn't enough. They made me feel like I was crazy. And that is why I decided I didn't deserve to be happy. Or even healthy. That is why you found a knife in our room. That is why I was crumbling. And I can't be ok without you, Sky. You said you're a flower, that I'm your sunshine. But I'm a flower, too. And I'm a dying one. Sky, you need to be ok because I realized, a long time ago, that a flower can't be watered by a broken sky."

"But Lillian, that's where you're wrong," Tempest told me. "When it starts raining, people always say the clouds are breaking, or that... the sky is breaking. You can never expect everything to be going ok for everyone in the world because there is always going to be someone hurting. That person might be me, or you, or Grey, or Sky. It could be someone we've never met. And... I can't believe I'm about to say this... it could be Eli. We have a human right to be upset sometimes, and all you can do for those people is be there for them, and pray for them. It doesn't matter how upset Sky is; he can always do the most for you just by being there, and that's always what he's done."

"And it's not fair to expect anyone in this world to stop their coping mechanisms just because they annoy us." Grey directed this at my father, and possibly Beelzebul, too. "Sky and Lillian are doing the best they can, and that's never going to be perfect, but that doesn't mean they aren't amazing people. It's not fair to expect them to cope if we're not going to let them have the tools to do so. It's just not fair."

I suddenly noticed that Sky wasn't making any attempt to hand over the guitar. No, he put on the shoulder strap and sat down on a charred pile. And he began to sing one of my favorite songs: "Edelweiss", from the Sound of Music. He was slow, and quiet, as though he wasn't sure of himself. And maybe he wasn't. But I was. I knew what he was doing. And I also knew that this was my mother's favorite song.

My father stopped. His red eyes flickered. He moaned. In his deep, scary voice he demanded, "What are you doing?!" His usual voice answered his own question: "It's her song." Before I could tell what was happening, the voices were separated. Beelzebul exited Eli's person. He was terrible, red with rippling black moving through him like some sort of disease. Eli fell to the ground. It was only through his dark magic that he could fly. Beelzebul had taken it away.

"What do you mean, 'it's her song'?!" the monster demanded. "I told you I'd get you what you wanted, and now you're just standing by, watching him play your guitar?!"

"I taught him how to play that song." These were the first words I ever heard him say... quietly. "He wanted to play it for his sister, so I taught him how. And soon after..." He turned and looked at me. "What have I done?"

Sky wasn't stopping, either. He played the song a second time. I sang with him, eyeing my father for a reaction.

I got one. He turned to Beelzebul. "You have no power over me, worm. Go back where you came from."

Beelzebul watched him just as steadily. "Without me, Shadow, you are powerless. Completely and utterly powerless. You are nothing without me."

"Go to hell," my father repeated.

"Was just headed there. You do realize this doesn't change anything, right? Being sorry won't bring her back." And with that, he was gone. But my father...

"Shadow isn't my name," he muttered.

"Then what is your name?" Grey asked. "How, after all this time, have you not realized that a new identity won't save you, won't change anything? What is your name?!"

"Eliott Aphelion," Sky said calmly. "Welcome back, Eli."

My father then whispered something unidentifiable, but I knew what it was. See, Eli had problems, and given his messed-up mental state, some of them probably weren't preventable. His parents, my other set of grandparents, no less, had hurt him. And the problem was never that he didn't tell anyone, rather that no one did anything. Part of my father's problem was simply that no one helped. Yet there was one person who had tried. It may have seemed like she failed. But see, she hadn't. Not completely. Because you know who was spared? Me. You know who was spared? Sky. A 5-year-old boy and a one-year-old girl could never have made it out of a burning house without help. No matter how much trauma Sky had blocked out, he and I had been saved. And I knew by who. Because he had been saved. By the person whose name he was saying.

I knew without even hearing him that my father was whispering my mother's name.