The End?

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Chapter One: The Green Shop

Leon was upset. This wasn't to say he was angry; no, those times were few and far between. But there was a certain something about that morning that just made him particularly restless. His sleep had been disturbed by horrible, violent dreams of darkness and flames, consuming his house and his sisters while he helplessly looked on, locked in a sort of invisible cage. He had awoken, white-knuckled, his sheets tightly gripped in his aching fists and his covers thrown in a heap off the side. It had simply been one bad dream in a recent series of them, all blood and death and horror in which he was somehow restrained, unable to do anything about it. They didn't particularly bother him in the daytime... but he had faced each night for the past week with growing apprehension, fearful of losing himself to the sweat-drenched terrors that seemed unwilling to let him go. But usually, the spell passed, the day moved on, and Leon usually found enough to keep himself busy, enough to keep his mind far from it. But this morning had been different; he had sat on the edge of his bed, shivering, lost in a stupor of dark thought until his mother had knocked lightly on the door, making certain he was up and getting ready for another day of school.

It had passed in a haze, or else he through it in a similar fashion; he didn't even remember seeing the rest of the Six, and that was usually a bad thing. The Six. He smiled. The Fickle Six. That's what they called themselves, he and his friends...never quite content with an answer given to them. Never too sure that what was believed by others should be believed. The rest of the high school students also called them the Fickle Six, surprisingly enough...it was just one of those names that stuck, and for good reason; within one month, Leon and his friends had explored Christianity, Buddhism, and even a brief stint with athiesm...but that didn't quite fit with the Six. They were critical, yes; few philosophies ever stuck with the group for a long time. Even the Six themselves didn't last forever; Toms and Juli had graduated, and Leon had quickly pulled a couple of gothy Sophomores in to fill the gap. But the Six...they just had to believe in something...the world would simply make too much sense any other way.

But Leon's mind was quickly snapped away from the Six; he had been pacing downtown Tanek for some time now, ignoring the other people with as much skill as they ignored him, and trying to figure out why the bad dreams had been haunting him. He had stopped for no particular reason that he could think of, other than maybe his legs had grown tired and so had decided to stop without consulting him first...but what had drawn his attention was not truly that alone. There was something... wrong. Something old and powerful and penetrating, stabbing right through his surface thoughts, branding the core of his brain with its immediate thereness. The universe began a slow spiral to oblivion; Leon watched, awestruck, as molecules of dust and dead skin and what-have-you, invisible before, rapidly appeared with startling clarity infront of him, glowing an angry, angry red. Time stopped. Leon could feel energy, something massive and rapid, slamming against him with the force of Time. History, actually. The thought came unbidden to his mind, but once it was there it stuck; something monumentous was supposed to happen. Right now. It balanced on him. Leon had absolutely no idea what it was.

Move. Forward. The Green Shop.

The thoughts hit him, alien, not his own, with the force of a monsterous ocean wave, unresistable and utterly contemptuous for any attempt to do so; he took an involuntary step forward, and the burden lessened; another, and then another, and then another until the pressure simply drained away, reality sealing up the jagged hole, the universe rearranging itself back to some sort of normalcy. Leon stared at the aged sign, eyes straining to pick out letters from the cracked and faded paint. The Green Shop.

The Fickle Six hadn't ever truly replaced Toms and Juli...Willem knew that now. He and Cary were some sort of space filler, a brief, artificial limb til the rest of the original Six moved on to college and found the old, natural one again...which wasn't far off, really. Willem couldn't even remember why he'd agreed to join the little unofficial "club" in the first place, anyway; perhaps that it was his first day in high school, that he and Cary had only recently talked again since the long and lonely summer that had seperated them; a muscular, blonde-haired blue-eyed Senior with charisma rolling off of him in waves coming up and filling the space around them with his personality, his light, his lusty hunger for the unexplained, which was at that very moment, two unexplaineds; young, skinny, gothic Sophomores that glanced at each other every so often in a way that suggested a long and complicated history. It was Cary, who decided; Cary, gazing at this powerful young man with something akin to stars in her eyes as he asked them both to join the Fickle Four, as it were; that he could see the same appetite for the stars as he had in himself, two years ago and first entering through the doors of Tanek High. Cary had agreed, wanting these strange new friends in a strange new school, and Willem, strangely jealous, had agreed as well.

So the Six were Six again; that really didn't seem to matter much, when it came right down to it...before Cary and himself, they'd gone on all the same. Even the blonde-haired blue-eyed Senior, James "Leon" Leon, had to admit that Juli and Toms, the very, very first Fickle Two, had gone on the same even with this new addition, and the group had simply built upwards from there. Being part of the Six didn't make you famous, though it did tend to make you a bit infamous, though what for Willem had yet to learn; all the Six had done since school began was meet every Friday in an old barn, reading from old religious texts and then commenting on them. Since Willem and Cary had joined, the group as a whole had changed their religion once more, now claiming to be of some obscure branch of Paganism Willem had certainly never heard of before; he had formerly been Wiccan, and even earlier than that a Satanist until Cary had "rescued" him from it, but being one of the Six meant that all ties were, necessarily, only temporary; Willem was no longer to bring up Wicca at all among these odd friends. Cary, lanky and dark-haired and to Willem utterly beautiful, had fallen right into her part. She enjoyed it all, raving to what other few friends she had managed to make outside the Six that they were unlike any other group she had hung around.

Personally, Willem didn't quite see what made the Six so great, and the rest of the Six, besides Cary and, surprisingly enough, Leon himself, didn't quite like him. Tall and smiling Tweety, her hair trailing down to her waist, thought he was far too gothic; short but powerfully built Raphael, his red hair in a permanent state of mop, said he was too narrow-minded to be one of the Six, but never really did anything about it; and last but not least, dark, exotic Ariel with her startling green eyes had trouble with his Satanist past...she'd been a devout Christian before deciding to try other things, but her old Christian habits and fears died hard. She always stared at him whenever he spoke, as if the next word to roll off his tongue would set loose a fiery Lucifer upon the world; it disconcerted him, to say the least. But he stayed with the group, if only for Cary's sake.

It was for Cary's sake that he found himself, again, sitting in the circle with the rest of them, staring at Leon as he stood, face solemn, before them; relating his odd, odd tale of ending up, one way or another, at an old little store on the corner called the Green Shop. "The funny thing is," Leon continued, his eyes slightly losing focus as his mind wandered back to the events of that day, "I don't remember going in. After all that incredible force, I just stepped towards the shop, opened the door...and the next thing I know, I'm sitting at my desk with eight rings laid out in a circle infront of me and five dollars missing from my wallet." He shrugged. His voice, usually a deep, confident tone, had a slight shake to it; Leon had been given a good scare. "So either I'm going crazy, that shop owner - who I don't remember meeting, but I get the impression of great age - did something to me, or..." He paused. Raphael leaned forward, intense and focused on their unofficial leader, while Willem leaned back, already bored with the story. Another lame excuse, and a half-hearted one at that; Willem decided he'd practiced this a few times infront of a mirror in preperation for unleashing yet another bogus religion for them to practice, something revolving suspiciously around rings, squat little men, Dark Lords and volcanoes, no doubt.

"...Well, I dunno. I brought the rings with me, if you'd care to see 'em. I'll just pass 'em around...tell me if you want to keep one, though I'm afraid you'll owe me. I'm not throwing away five bucks." Tweety giggled, and Willem rolled his eyes, earning a glare from Raphael - which he ignored - and yet another from Cary, which stopped him immediately. The things he did for her, all for her, honestly. But his pessimistic attitude slowly faded as Leon dug the rings one by one from his pocket. The others openly stared, and Willem couldn't help himself; they were the most beautiful things he had ever seen. No way those were all only five bucks. No way.

For whatever reason, the rings passed through the circle with a sort of reverance, each of the Six cupping the rings and gazing at them for seconds at a time before carefully passing them on, as if afraid they would shatter; the whole mood of the meeting had changed. Leon glanced at the tiny circle of friends new and old, noting that even the little loner Goth boy, Willem, his hair straight and black and plastered limply against his head, seemed to catch a tiny bit of the feeling passing through them all. And then...again...like the day before, Leon sensed the thing again. That monumentuous, life-altering desicion...but this time, the stream of History flowed around all of them. Leon couldn't understand why they weren't buffeted by it, smashed to pieces by the sheer force. It was then that he realized that they all held a ring, the circle of friends with a path set before them. All except for Willem; he sat, staring, empty-handed... right at Leon. The weight of history, of the past and the future, pressed on him even more strongly; this was it. This was the choice that would lead to...something. He glanced downwards. Four rings were still in his hand. They were uniform, all of them, except for the gem stone; a plain, unmarked silver band topped by a glittering jewel carved into the most interesting shapes. A white-stoned ring sat in the center of his palm, surrounded by a yellow one, a purple one, and last but not least a ring topped with a black stone that drew his eyes.

Give it to him. Do it; do it now.

Again, the voice in his head, overpowering, drawing his hand on invisible strings to scoop the black-stoned ring from his other hand, to toss it to Willem with a flick of his wrist. In slow motion, he watched the Gothic boy's hand rise, drifting upwards to stop the ring in its downwards arc...the moment the cold metal touched soft flesh, the horrible weight lifted from Leon's shoulders, and Time sped back to its rightful pace, leaving Leon gasping for breath; a feeling akin to dread, that he had just done something to seal his own doom, slammed into him with the force of a hammer. He was aware of the others staring, clutching the rings in their hands as if unwilling to ever let them go. "Keep them." Leon listened to thick words tumble past his lips. Not his words. Invaders escaping through the front gates. "Use them. Love them." What? But the five dollars...it was irrelevant, he knew, a sudden and cold thought. Irrelevant. Three rings remained in his hand; he let them drop into his pocket. "...G'night, kids. Go home."

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A/N: Woo. First chapter. Like? Love? Hate? Let me know.