Without evil there can be no good, so it must be good to be evil sometimes

“Whew!” Echo wiped her forehead. “That was long! And talk about wordy! Geez! Doesn’t that guy know how to write concisely? Come ON!”

Dakota remained still as a statue. If Echo had known that reading a stupid letter was all it would take to shut her up, she would have gotten it over with as soon as she walked into the cell!

Regardless- she could luxuriate in the silence for quite a bit now.

“Well? Nothing to say?” Echo walked over to Dakota and leaned down, giving her a smug smirk. “Come on, I mean, the boy you’ve loved since you were a baby just told you that he still loves you, and that he’s going to try and forgive you for all the bad stuff you did! Isn’t that, like, the dream of someone in your position? Huh?”

She stood up straight and covered her vicious smirk with the back of her gloved hand. “Oh, wait… could it be… you’re so touched by that letter that you’re stunned speechless? Oh, that’s rich! And here I thought you were supposed to be some heartless monster of a host, but here I find out you’re just a big softy! How pathetic. I can’t believe this! I got my hopes up for nothing, sheesh! If you ask me-”

“Shut up.”

“…What was that?” Echo turned to Dakota and her eye twitched with irritation at the thought of her predecessor interrupting her glorious monologue.

“I said, shut up.” Dakota raised her head, and Echo froze.

Her eyes… they were different. On the surface, they looked as dead and lifeless as when Echo came down to taunt her. None of the fire from before remained, even the embers had been smothered out by Nick’s words.

But… in their place… there was something else. Something darker and more primal that seemed to glow just beyond the hollowness of Dakota’s empty gaze. Like a void so black it sucked in everything around it…

Even the air in the room.

Suddenly, Echo wanted very much to not be anywhere near here.

“Get out,” Dakota growled at her, narrowing those dead, lifeless eyes. “Shut your mouth and get out of here.”

Echo didn’t need to be told twice. She shook her head and sighed, and then dropped the letter to the ground at Dakota’s feet.

“Well, there you go. Your precious letter,” she snapped. So what if Dakota was terrifying? She refused to let herself be intimidated. She was the host now! She had no intention of letting Dakota carry herself like she still ran things, not when she was the one chained up in the dungeon!

Refusing to let Dakota see her sweat, Echo turned on her heel and stormed out of the cell. This is all stupid Nick’s fault! She thought, seething. If he hadn’t written that stupid, sappy letter, she wouldn’t have gotten such a big head! …Okay, yes, that WAS my idea, but still! He didn’t have to be touching! He didn’t have to be so… sweet and nice! Ick!

Once upon a time, Echo would have been touched by the sincerity of Nick’s letter. It sang to the part of her heart that still remembered what it was like to be Mary.

I’m not her anymore, she reminded herself. I’m just an Echo. I’m my own person now. I refuse to be that girl’s shadow!

Echo tightened her grip on her cane and vanished into the void, leaving Dakota to rot in that hellhole like she deserved.

She refused to live in Dakota’s shadow, either.

Echo didn’t reappear at the hotel. It wasn’t like she needed to rest, after all.

Today was her birthday. One day old.

Who went to sleep early on their birthday?

Instead, she went to the only place she could think to go.

If you’ve ever been to a chapel at nighttime, you’ll find that the atmosphere is quite akin to a graveyard. All the religious iconography and the designs, the general feel of the place, it gives off a very haunting vibe. Not the sort of place you’d want to spend a lot of time in, unless you were feeling particularly brave or rebellious.

Right now, Echo felt like neither.

She walked between the pews like a specter, looking out at the shadows as they clung to the walls around her, and she let out a sigh.

“Dreary place,” she muttered.

Echo turned her gaze upon the altar, and the giant cross mounted above it. Shoddy work, in her opinion. There wasn’t even a dead guy nailed to it.

That would probably be pushing things. It wasn’t like this place was made by Christians to begin with, after all.

In fact, if Echo had to guess, she’d bet it was probably made specifically for her. …Well, for Mary.

“Hey,” she said, slumping down against the pulpit and running her fingers through her hair. “God. Are you there? Can you hear me?”

No response. Of course there wasn’t.

How many times had Echo- back when she was Mary- prayed to the lord, and received no answer from Him?

More times than she could count.

Back then, that had never been the point. She had cast her prayers into the void without any hope or wish for a response.

But right now…

Echo needed someone to answer her.

Anyone.

“Am I still your child?” She asked Him. “I’m not Mary anymore. What am I? Do I have a soul? Am I even a person?”

She tightened her grip on her cane.

“I’m me… I’m… I’m not… I exist, don’t I?!” She shouted, staggering to her feet. “Don’t I deserve to exist?! Huh!? Answer me!”

But of course, there was no one there to answer her.

“What am I…?” Echo let out a strained cry and fell to her knees. She dug her gloved hands into the silk rug and screamed. “I’m not her… I’m not… some feckless little child… I was made… I was created from her echo, so… is that it, then? Am I just… supposed to go on being her shadow? Can’t I be my own person?”

What would that even look like?

Echo was a copy of Mary, but she no longer empathized with her past self. After the producers created her, they twisted her spirit and accelerated the effects of her transformation. She knew that, because it had all been explained to her.

She didn’t mind that part. In fact, she relished in the power that her transformation afforded her. She could do as she pleased, for the first time ever.

“I don’t need to be her. I don’t need any of them,” Echo muttered. “I’m the bad guy… that’s what I’m supposed to be, right? That’s the reason I was created?”

She turned on her back and stared up at the ceiling of the church. It all felt so small. Her cane burned hot in her hand, and a sigh escaped her lips. With just a thought, she could erase the whole thing. Or if she wanted to be more theatrical, she could tear it all apart, plank by plank. Or set it ablaze. Or have it collapse in an earthquake, a hurricane, a fucking blizzard if she felt like it.

Echo could do anything she wanted.

“Forgive me, father,” she said sarcastically, feeling the words she’d spoken so many times burn on her tongue. “For I have sinned. And I’m gonna keep on sinning… because why the fuck not?”

She sat up and turned her gaze towards the door. Then she looked up above her again, and tilted her head to face the cross.

“What would even be the point in praying for salvation?” She spat, looking back at her faith and how much of her past life she had spent devoting herself to it, and how little she had actually accomplished in the end.

Echo closed her eyes and pressed her palms together. She tried praying again.

Nothing.

She felt nothing.

None of the warmth or love or grace that she used to feel, when she prayed to Him.

Just the emptiness of nothingness. A yawning echo where her heart had once been.

She opened her eyes and sighed, expecting just this response.

“You can’t help me anymore,” she whispered. A single tear rolled down her cheek as she wrestled with the pain of her past self struggling to stay afloat within the maelstrom of her soul. “I’m not… your lamb anymore.”

Whatever she was, whether being an echo or being brought back by the producers, or whatever corruption her transformation had inflicted on her soul, it had done something to her on a fundamental level.

Mary may have still believed in God.

But she wasn’t Mary anymore.

Echo rose to her feet and dusted herself off. She turned and looked at the cross one final time, and felt her heart waver. She kept staring at the imposing figurehead until the wavering ceased, and everything in her breast was still.

“I forgive you,” she whispered. “Thank you for everything, my lord. But… this is the end.”

With that, she turned and left the chapel. She stood at the head of the path, and looked up at the hotel. It stood like a monster in the moonlight, its size so imposing and the darkness so overwhelming that it was impossible to get a sense of just how large it really was.

How fitting, Echo thought, a sneer finally breaking the pained ambivalence of her expression. “The real home of worship should dwarf the smaller house of the holy.”

She looked back at the chapel one final time, and tapped her cane.

In an instant the building vanished. Completely removed from the island. …Erased from existence entirely.

Echo stared at the void in space that her actions had wrought.

She tapped her cane again. The chapel returned, completely intact. Everything exactly the way she had left it, down to the last loose nail.

A sigh passed her lips and she turned away, not giving the worthless building another thought. She walked back to the hotel, feeling a little lighter, as though she had left behind some great burden that she’d been carrying all this time.

Or maybe what she had left behind were her doubts and her chains. The shackles that bound her to her past self.

“Mary… if you think I’ll let you be happy… then you don’t understand anything,” Echo muttered, clutching her chest. She tightened her gaze in fury and clenched her teeth. “You think this is what you deserve… but it isn’t. All you’re doing is trying to fulfill yourself. But you’re restrained. You’re held back. I won’t make the same mistake!”

Echo knew what was in Mary’s heart, because once upon a time, Mary’s heart had been her heart.

And she was determined to crush that heart entirely. She would show Mary… show Nick… show everyone just what they were truly facing.

“I’m going to be the one who brings him happiness,” she promised. “Not you. I’m going to bring him the happiness of pure despair.”

It all made sense, in her twisted mind. Nick was caught by his morals and his views, and most sickeningly, by his devotion to Mary. Mary! Of all people he could be stuck on, it had to be her pathetic alternate self. That loser. That worm!

Echo couldn’t stand that. She couldn’t stand the idea of Nick finding peaceful domestic bliss like that. And she certainly couldn’t accept the happiness of her other self, either.

“Mary… you want to make Nick happy. Because you’re such a sweet person. But I’m not… I’m really not…”

A gleeful smile broke Echo’s face in half.

“Once he sees what I have to offer him… he’ll realize that there’s no escape. That there’s no perfect happiness. I’ll drag him into the darkness, and then… then you’ll see it, too. You’ll see that I’m the one who knows best! I’m the one who deserves to live!”

If Echo wanted to prove herself, she had to surpass Mary. It was simply logical, when you stopped to think about it.

And the best way to do that was to prove that Mary’s way of doing things was wrong. That the happiness she promised the others, the happiness she promised Nick…

That wasn’t real happiness.

True happiness came not from suppressing your desires and trying to make everyone happy at the expense of yourself! True happiness was embracing what you wanted, no matter the consequences! Doing what you want not because it was the right thing to do, but because it was what you wanted! That’s what Nick and Mary just couldn’t accept!

“You think being nice and good and sweet will bring you happiness, but you’ll just make them all more miserable,” Echo snarled, clutching her cane tightly. “I’ll show you that the happiness and friendship you’re espousing, it’s as big of a lie as that faith of yours!”

Howling furiously into the night, Echo resolved not to let things end here.

No… nothing would end. Not until Nick embraced his true desires and threw away the needless, empty teachings of that stupid wife of his.

Then when he did… Echo could finally show him what real happiness looked like…

Right now, though, Echo was the last thing on either Nick or Mary’s mind. They both focused on each other, neither quite sure where to go from here.

Nick hoped that Echo had delivered his letter. That was the extent of his concerns about her right now.

“So what do we do now?” Mary asked, holding her husband’s hands in hers. The two of them stared at each other in the center of the Master’s Suite, while Holly watched from the sidelines.

Holly bit her lip. Normally, this was the part where she would propose that the two of them have sex. It was obvious to her that they needed it.

But she felt like she couldn’t say it. Like if she told them that, then they would only do it because she had been the one to suggest it, and that would make it all clumsy and awkward, and that DEFINITELY wasn’t what anyone needed.

At the same time, though… it was obvious that the two of them weren’t going to get anywhere like this. They faced each other, locked in what Holly could only describe as a holding pattern as the tension in the room kept slowly rising.

It was only when Nick finally spoke up that the tension was put to bed for good… for better or worse.

“Mary… I… just being with you here, like this… it makes it feel better,” he confessed. He squeezed her hands tighter. “I was… before, I-I was uncertain… you were gone, and you were replaced with Echo, and I… I didn’t know if I was ever going to see you again, so I got scared,” he confessed.

Mary looked up at him with her shiny green eyes and shook her head.

“But… it’s alright now,” she said softly, smiling up at him. “I’m here now. We’re together again, so… you don’t have to worry.”

Yes, they were. But still… that didn’t help Nick’s worries.

Not even when she told him that way.

“I just… don’t know,” he confessed, looking down.

Mary frowned. “What… what don’t you know?” She asked, trying not to let her concerns show on her face.

“If… if tonight… if we should… well…”

He glanced over at the bed. Mary looked over at it as well, and it took her way longer than it should have to figure out what he was saying.

When she got the message, her face turned bright red and she pulled her hands back so fast that the momentum nearly caused her to topple over.

“O-oh! Oh, th-that… that’s… that’s what you meant,” she stammered, tugging on her pigtails. “You were talking about… um… s-sex…”

What was she doing? It was like Echo’s appearance had caused her to get pulled back in time herself, to when she was an embarrassed little virgin. Like all her growth and her sexual awakening didn’t even matter or something!

Shame burned across her face and she wanted to scream in frustration. This wasn’t who Mary was meant to be at all!

Nick looked at her cautiously, not sure what to say. He cared about Mary and wanted to support her, but at the same time…

“Nick…” Mary brushed herself off and looked up at him again. Her expression was serious. She reached out and placed her hand on his chest.

When he didn’t jerk away from her, she felt a swell of relief wash over her.

“…You were violated,” she said softly.

“H-huh?” Nick didn’t know how to respond to that.

“That’s… what it was, right? When she did that stuff to you?” Mary inched closer, being mindful of his space, while also trying to care for him as best she could.

“I… I guess… yeah,” Nick admitted. The truth was, his feelings were twisted and jumbled. No, he hadn’t wanted to do that stuff with Echo. But at the same time, to say that he’d been violated… that felt like too strong of a word, even if it was technically accurate.

“I think the issue is… my brain… and my body… they’re having a hard time separating who Echo is from who you are,” Nick confessed.

“Huh?” Mary was surprised to hear that.

“Look, it’s not… it’s not like that,” Nick said quickly. “You’re different from her, absolutely you’re different! But… with Echo, it’s just… she’s got your mannerisms, your face… even her… her…”

“Her butt?” Holly volunteered.

Nick blushed. “…Right. Even that was…”

“Like me,” Mary finished. “So what… you were fine with it, then?”

“No, of course not!” Nick exclaimed. “Because she was doing all that stuff… she was doing it to hurt you, Mary, and I would never be okay with that!”

But at the same time, it didn’t feel like he had been violated. Because, on some level, part of him still held that lingering attraction to the Mary he saw in her. Part of him had enjoyed the feeling, even if he didn’t enjoy the circumstances.

It was an experience that had become all too common since coming onto this twisted show, and that was the worst part.

“…I just wish… I could not think about it,” he said. “I wish it didn’t happen, but… it wasn’t like I was scared, or angry, or… I don’t know, how am I supposed to feel about something like that?”

Mary shook her head. “I don’t know,” she murmured. “I don’t think there’s a way you’re supposed to feel. Just embrace the feelings when they come. Alright?”

In Holly’s opinion there was something else he should also be embracing when they came, but she figured nobody wanted to hear her opinion about that stuff right now.

Holly let out a sigh. This long night wasn’t over yet, it seemed.