Chapter Text
It was a very important birthday for Meg. She was finally turning 13 and ready for her tithing. For that reason, her birthday party doubled as her tithing party as she, her family, and her friends celebrated one last time.
Her stepfather Nero had also invited his own friends; she didn’t really like them, but she figured that it wasn’t worth it for her or Nero to be spending her party thinking about those guys. It was her special day after all.
She swept away imaginary bits of dust off her dress and smoothed the fabric out. It wasn’t a style she normally would’ve worn, but Nero picked it out for her since it was her tithing party. From everyone’s compliments, it was a good choice, so she wasn’t going to complain.
Taking a quick glance around the room, people seemed to be enjoying her party, clumped together in their own little groups just chatting or ready to dance.
Just earlier, everyone had given their speeches to Meg, speaking of their fondest memories with her and promises to always remember her even in her divided state.
With each speech, the guests cheered; the girl halfheartedly raised her own drink to toast along with them. Heartwarming as the speeches were, Meg had felt…strange.
“Meg, are you gonna dance with us?” She looked back to see her best friend Fern standing expectantly along with their other friends.
The speech Fern gave was a lovely one. She talked about the first time they were introduced to each other and how they went from shy strangers to hitting the backyard trees like they were lumberjacks in the span of an afternoon. (My mom was so mad that we broke the tree bark off, hahah! We were too good at playing lumberjacks.)
She described Meg as being such a caring and thoughtful friend. (Someone as good as you is undoubtedly made for this role. There’s much better for you out there, just waiting.)
Meg wondered if Fern would miss her when she was gone before shaking her head, both to clear her mind of bad thoughts and answer her friend’s question. “Actually, I need to use the bathroom.”
Before any of her friends could say anything, she quickly fled to the hall and left the cheerful scene behind her.
It wasn’t like Meg was making up some kind of excuse; in fact, she had started to feel weirdly sick in the stomach midway through the part. Hopefully, it would clear up soon. Seemed like a bad omen to be tithed in anything less than a healthy state. She turned right and headed down the hall until she stood in front of the bathroom door.
Her stomach was in knots. Despite this, she found herself unable to move. It was like cement blocks were tied to her feet.
In the emptiness of the hallway, everything seemed more…ominous, but she couldn’t bring herself to move and rejoin the party.
After a short while of standing there in limbo, the party door opened. She glanced over and realized that it was just her caretaker, Lu. Meg’s shoulders relaxed, losing a tension she didn’t even realize she had gained.
Lu looked down the hall, searching for Meg until she finally seemed to notice her and hurried over. “Hey, you’ve been out here for a while. Are you okay?”
Meg licked her lips and responded mildly, “I’m fine. Just needed to use the bathroom.” Never mind that she was still facing towards the door. The older woman didn’t leave.
“Is there something you want?” She asked when Lu stared at her for a long time.
“…How are you feeling about tomorrow?” Her caretaker responded with her own question.
She fell back on familiar words as an answer. “It’s an honor to be a part of something much greater than myself. I feel very lucky.” It was a sentiment she’d expressed before, words she knew like the back of her hand.
For years now, she knew; tomorrow, she would leave and the doctors would separate her off into parts for others to make use of. She was ready, yet her chest tightened as she spoke.
“Meg…” Lu waited. Expecting what, she didn’t know. She stared at Meg.
“It’s true,” she insisted, glancing down before faltering at the sight of Lu’s hands.
They were slightly discolored—not a perfect match—but a perfectly good set of hands. Meg never really thought too hard about it before, but now, she could only wonder who would receive her hands. “Do you ever wonder about the unwind you got your hands from when you use them?”
The question had escaped her, unbidden, but she couldn’t help it. Would whoever received her parts ever wonder about her? Think of her?
It was a surprisingly selfish thought for her to have, but she felt safe sharing it with Lu.
Her caretaker made a strangled noise, hands flexing before forcibly relaxing and gently taking Meg’s hands in her own. “Hey. Look at me.”
Meg looked up, shocked by the sheer intensity of her gaze. Lu looked somewhat sick before she forced a smile on. “Sometimes, I wonder, but I don’t have to wonder when it comes to you. I could never forget an amazing kid like you. You might not be…here here, but…” She trailed off, smile fading away before she abruptly ripped her hands away.
The girl looked at her in alarm. She couldn’t tell what Lu was thinking, what she had done wrong.
Turning around, Lu walked a little bit away with her hands on her hips. The woman sighed heavily, shaking her head. “Fuck, I can’t do this.” She sounded exhausted.
“Lu?” Meg asked hesitantly. Said woman turned back to look at her. The girl was reminded of the sick feeling she had when Lu stared at her like she saw something disturbing. Then she spoke.
“Meg, be honest with me. You don’t want to be unwound, do you?”
In the lull that followed, the entire scene felt dreamy under the dim lights and the distant thumping of the music from the other room. It was only the heavy thud of her own heartbeat and the blood roaring in her ears that grounded her.
They never talked about it. It was just something they all accepted as part of her role as a tithe. Tithing, not unwinding. But…
“No.” Meg finally admitted, feeling sick. Guiltily, she was relieved that Nero wasn’t around to hear her admission. Lu, however, looked at her not with disappointment but with relief.
Before she could even ask, she was grabbed by the shoulders. “Meg, listen to me. In 20 minutes, we’re cutting the cake. You need to be gone by then.”
“What are you-”
Lu tilted her head so that their eyes met. There was a determined set in her eyes. “Meg, I’m not gonna let you be unwound, especially if you don’t want it. I’m getting you out of here.”
And so, Meg found herself wandering the streets, looking for the store where Lu said the owner would help her escape. Nothing more. She didn’t want to think of anything more. Just one foot in front of the other.
New York was a great place to disappear. Very few people would take a glance at her white clothes, showing her status as a tithe, and smile. Tourists. She brushed past them easily enough. There was a lingering paranoia that she would be caught, but she forced it down.
Lu said she had 20 minutes, definitely less now that she finally hit the streets, but Meg just had to be far enough away from the scene by the time they cut the cake and realized that she wasn’t with any of them.
Then, she found it.
“Hello,” the man at the counter greeted as the door’s bell jingled, signaling her entrance. “Take a look around. Feel free to ask for help if you need any.” His eyes lingered on her white clothes, but he maintained his customer service grin and said nothing more.
For a moment, Meg hesitated before steeling herself. She couldn’t afford to waste any time here. “Are you Chiron?”
“I am, did someone recommend this place to you?” Chiron’s expression stayed pleasant and open, but his eyes sharpened with expectation.
“Lu did.”
Chiron hummed and nodded in reply. “Come on then. For a tithe like yourself, I reserve only the best.” He seemed to glide as he moved from behind the counter until Meg quickly realized that the man was in a wheelchair.
The girl halted in her footsteps, eyes wide in shock. “You’re…”
Chiron chuckled, amused. “It always surprises people when they first see me. They ask why I chose the ‘lesser’ surgery.” He jerked his head, directing her to follow him, before wheeling himself through a room labeled EMPLOYEES ONLY. Meg followed after him.
“Well, why did you?” She asked after closing the door behind them, shuffling to the side so Chiron could lock it. The girl couldn’t possibly begin to understand why the man would rather live out his days unable to walk when he could easily get his spine replaced and be good as new.
“I refuse to let those doctors operate on me and use an unwind to do so,” he explained, harsh words mellowed by his patient tone, “I won’t support that.”
She frowned. “But your legs.”
The man shook his head. “Nothing for me could be ever worth that. I’ll stick to my wheels.” He patted the wheel rim with a satisfied smile. Meg looked at him strangely. They fell silent and continued down the hall until they stood at another door. Chiron looked back up at her. “This leads to the basement where the other unwinds are.”
She realized then with a jolt that she basically was an unwind, a federal criminal no less. The idea would’ve been laughable just a few days ago.
Chiron grabbed the door handle and began twisting it before he suddenly hesitated.
“Be careful,” he warned, “you kids have the same goal, but the others may not see that.” His eyes darted down to her white clothes before looking back up at her with a grim expression.
A chill ran down her spine. Unlike tithes who were celebrated for their greater sacrifice, unwinds were simply the unwanted leftovers of society. They were the failures, the degenerates. It wasn’t that they were too good to stay in a whole state; rather, they weren’t good enough to deserve a whole state.
And she was walking down there to face them. Chiron looked sympathetic and twisted the handle all the way down, pulling the basement door open. “Try to find someone and stick with them until you make it through. This isn’t the end.”
The stairway down looked ominous. But what choice did she have?
With a deep breath, she marched herself down the steps and ignored how loud the door sounded as it closed behind her.
Chiron was right. The others definitely didn’t like her after taking one look at her clothes.
“Well, well. Looks like we got a tithe to grace us with her presence.” A boy with elvish features spoke wryly, pretending to look busy with a piece of wire. He gave her a sarcastic smile before continuing to fiddle with the wire.
Another boy, packed with muscle, snickered. “How does someone like you end up with people like us?”
“We should give her the welcome tour,” Elf Boy offered.
“Hey, let’s not start shit when we’re all trapped together in the same basement.” A boy with curly brown hair interrupted. Curly was writing something in his notebook, not even bothering to look up as he spoke in defense of Meg.
“Sticking up for your girlfriend, Lester?” Muscles jeered and crossed his arms.
Lester made a face. “She’s a tithe. She’s like 12.”
“I turned 13 today,” Meg interrupted, bringing the attention back onto her. She fought to not react, refusing to stand down.
“…Right. Well, I wouldn’t date a middle schooler either way, but you know, I’ll respect your tastes, Sherman.”
Sherman stomped over and grabbed the drawstrings of Lester’s hoodie. “Do you wanna fight?”
Lester closed his notebook and faced Sherman with his hands raised in surrender.
“My bad, my bad…”
Elf Boy huffed in amusement. “At this rate, maybe we don’t have to worry about the unwinding being the one to end us after all.”
Eventually, Sherman backed off of Lester, heading to a different corner of the room to grumble.
Lester looked at Meg and waved her over. For a lack of better options, she went over and sat down next to him.
“Why did you stick up for me?” Meg asked immediately.
The boy shrugged. “Tithe or not, you’re still in this crap basement with us, aren’t you? We’re all looking for the same thing.”
She had the feeling that there was more to Lester’s reasoning besides that, but she didn’t exactly want to fight with the one guy who stuck up for her.
He opened his notebook again. “Settle in. There’s not much else to do.”
Indeed, despite that exciting first day, the rest of the week almost seemed to crawl by. At the very least, it gave Meg time to know the others in the basement.
Turned out, Elf Boy’s name was actually Connor, and though she still stuck by Lester the most, she found that he and Sherman weren’t…the worst actually.
They all had a story. Connor apparently had an older brother who he used to pull a ton of pranks with until he left for college. When he left, his parents sprung the order on him to be unwound.
“I guess they couldn’t wait after they heard how much quieter the house got without Travis.” He laughed but not like he found it funny.
Sherman had the classic unwind story. A violent, troubled kid who got into fights constantly until he landed himself in juvie. That story grew less stereotypical, however, when Meg learned that the fight in question was between him and his mom’s abusive boyfriend.
Tellingly, Sherman didn’t name the person who called the Juvie police on him to get him unwound.
“Yeah, I don’t bluff, so none of you mess with me,” he warned.
Hearing both of the boys’ stories shifted Meg’s view a bit. These unwinds weren’t evil criminals or degenerates; they were nothing like the horror stories Nero used to tell her, people who were cruel for cruelty’s sake. Their parents betrayed them. They didn’t have to say it to show how that felt. It almost reminded her of…
She asked Lester what his story was since he didn’t exactly offer it up like the others did. Curiously, the others perked up as well. Guess they were all hearing this for the first time.
Lester closed his notebook and tapped his cheek with his pen absentmindedly. “Not even going to share yours first?”
“You already know it. Tithe does a good deed and gets chopped up. End of story.” Meg shut down. None of the other boys argued; Connor and Sherman exchanged looks, but they weren’t the reactions she was looking for.
Lester shrugged. “It’s a boring story really. I just didn’t cut it.”
Meg was confused until Connor cut in. “Ward kid?”
But Lester shook his head no. “Name’s Lester Papadopoulos. Never been Lester Ward.” He opened his notebook again and started scribbling. “But yeah. My parents thought I was mediocre is all. Took too much space.”
And that was that.
Over the next couple months, they moved from safe house to safe house. You weren’t guaranteed to see the same people each time you moved around, but Meg and Lester somehow managed to stick together every single time.
Naturally, the two grew closer together, if only because the familiarity of already knowing each other made things easier. Lester even gave up his hoodie to Meg so she cover up her white clothes and hide her tithe status at future safe houses. She’d never admit it, but she took comfort in wearing his hoodie and pretending that her past life did not exist.
At this point, she had been around him long enough to notice things about him that he never had to actually say.
For one, he was always drawing something in that notebook of his. Meg didn’t know what it was; she’d have to stand over his shoulder to know, but she knew that he was always doodling in it.
He also had this strange tendency before he sat down. Each time, he would pause and sweep one of his hands across the back of his neck, fingers just barely brushing across his curls, before flicking it forward as if he was trying to pull his hair in front of him. Only then would he sit down.
And, Lester had a habit of humming sometimes. Now, it wasn’t that he was dead silent or anything, but he didn’t strike her as the type to hum loudly. In a truck where the only other sound was the driving. And every teen there was fit to explode over anything and everything. Whenever he caught himself humming, he stopped, always looking extremely abashed.
Overall, he had some quirks, but she wasn’t going to hold that against the guy.
One day, when they were dumped at their newest safe house with another set of strangers, Lester seemed particularly agitated.
Pulling up to the empty table, he did his routine of swiping his neck before sitting down and slapped his notebook down onto the table. He looked angry. Unusual, he wasn’t really the expressive type, not outside of dry words.
Meg raised a brow at him. When he caught her expression, he let out an irritable grunt and flipped the notebook open with just as much attitude. Whatever he was drawing only seemed to set him off more as he started to scratch the page wildly. She glanced down and watched with confusion as he scribbled over the entire page in dark blue ink until the giant knot consumed the entire page.
“What happened?” Meg finally asked. She was about to turn away when Lester just let out another aggravated sigh but then he began to slowly flip through the previous pages of the notebook.
They were all packed to the brim with the exact same sketch over and over: a head with long dark hair in what seemed like a braid. All in varying stages of progress, never fully completed. Some of the heads were scribbled out entirely, ink heavy in those parts as if Lester was trying to gouge them out.
“What are you trying to draw?” Meg asked. Lester paused at one of many spreads full of the same failed sketches, staring down with open frustration. He flipped back to the first available blank and pressed his pen down on the page, letting the ink pool where the tip was pressed onto the page.
“I’m not an artist.” Lester said, gripping the pen tightly. “Never wanted to be one. Still don’t.”
“Then why are you drawing?”
“Because he-! …” The boy put a lid on his anger and resentfully began to create another one of his sketches. She knew by then that Lester wasn’t going to open up anymore and left it at that. If she had to know, she would.
That time seemed to arrive with their last stop before they actually escaped. The location was different; unlike the small safe houses that only had 4-6 kids in an area at once, the warehouse they were delivered to housed around 40 of them. It was the largest group of unwinds Meg had seen yet, but things otherwise weren’t much different from her life in the last couple months.
During the frenzy of mealtime, Lester sought her out and tugged her away to the bathroom (or the poor excuse they called a bathroom). She waited for what he had to say.
“I’m not an unwind.”
Meg stared blankly at him. Lester’s expression didn’t change to his usual amused smirk when he was teasing. He was deadly serious.
A wave of fury washed over Meg. She clenched her fists. “…Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I trust you.” His face still didn’t waver.
She relaxed her hands, mind still buzzing with adrenaline. “Why are you here with the rest of us then if you’re safe?”
Lester trusted her to not tell the others about not being an unwind, but that didn’t mean she understood why.
“You remember those sketches I showed you?” He asked.
“Yeah?”
“Those weren’t mine.” Meg looked at him, confused, so he elaborated. Weirdly.
“When I was a kid, I was in an accident.” Lester looked off to the side as he told his true story. “It was brutal. Brained myself real hard and got a bunch of stitches. But most importantly, I had to get a part of my brain replaced.”
He ran his hand through a part of his hair, presumably where the surgery was. “Now, my parents spent a small fortune to make sure I got something quality: an intact part of the brain. Normally, they just take bits from a bunch of other unwinds, but because of my parents, I only got the one.” Lester tapped his head.
“After that surgery, things changed for me. I started thinking thoughts that weren’t mine. Picked up habits I never had. I keep missing things I don’t care about. And I realized, it’s the unwind.” He looked at Meg miserably. “The unwind is trying to live my life, do what he would’ve done if he was still around. Like a ghost.”
“How do you know the unwind was a guy?” Meg couldn’t help but ask.
“Sometimes when I look in the mirror, I could see him. It was a bit confusing at first since his hair was so long, but I figured it out.” A pause. “I’m not an artist, but I’m pretty sure he was. He’s trying to tell me something, but again, I’m no artist.” Lester laughed bitterly.
“That still doesn’t explain how you ended up here,” Meg pointed out.
“Right. I’ve had this unwind haunting me for the past 6 years. I told my parents that I had enough, that I needed to find answers and maybe I could finally put this unwind to rest.”
Despite the weary exhaustion he carried for the whole conversation, Lester still managed to look unaffected by it. Instead, he looked determined. “All of his thoughts and habits have been getting stronger these days. I think I’m on the right track.”
Meg thought about her last conversation with Lu from so far long ago. “The unwind probably would appreciate what you’re doing. Wondering about him.”
Lester shook his head, troubled. “It’s just…curious. I’m pretty sure this guy was a super-genius on top of all the art stuff he seemed to do. Makes a guy wonder what he had to do to get unwound.”
They finally made it. The Waystation. A fully self-sufficient society of (mostly) unwinds.
It took a trip on a cargo plane as the cargo to make it; when Meg woke up, it was to the sound of the crate creaking as the top was pried off.
A blonde girl in a baseball cap stared down at them. “You guys all good?” After some quiet agreements, the girl helped them climb out of the crate and directed them to join the others on the grounds outside the plane.
“Alright, you’ll all be waiting here as we get the rest of your group out of the cargo. Hold any questions. We need to sort everything out first before you start asking about whatever. Okay?” A brown-haired boy corralled all the newcomers together, occasionally glancing up at the plane.
Meg turned her attention to the plane too and saw the blonde girl from earlier and a blond boy going around and opening up the crates one by one to grab the groups. Her heart leapt when she saw the boy pulling Lester out of one of the crates.
After getting them all out of the crate, he pointed at Meg and the others waiting outside and told them something before moving on to another crate.
Lester’s eyes passed over the crowd until he met Meg’s own. He headed over to her.
“You made it.” She nodded.
Once more, they were Meg and Lester as they waited quietly in the sea of excited ex-unwinds.
Eventually, there was a booming yell from the brunet boy in front. “EVERYONE, SHUT UP. ARTEMIS IS HERE.”
Next to her, Lester stiffened when he said the name ‘Artemis’. She found it a bit strange but brushed it off as the group hushed up.
At the front, a redheaded woman stood in silvery hiking gear with a stern expression. She was joined by the brown-haired boy and the other two blonds, plus another woman decked out in silver gear.
“Congratulations, you made it to the Waystation. I’m Artemis. Welcome to your new lives for the next few years. I expect you-”
Meg’s attention snapped away as Lester suddenly began shoving his way forward. She followed him. “Lester! What are you-”
She froze as her friend finally pushed his way to the front, in front of Artemis and her crew.
The brunet kid raised an eyebrow. “Can we help you?”
Lester didn’t even seem to notice him though, only having eyes for Artemis.
“Artemis?” His voice cracked. She’d never heard him sound like that before. The group began to murmur as Lester continued to speak. “Artemis, you have to stop Dad. You have to make him break the order, please-”
Artemis’s confident aloofness shattered as the teen kept pleading, skin turning white as she stared at Lester with devastation.
“Apollo?”