Face-Slapping16 min read
You Think This Is My Fault?
ButterPicks16 views
I remember the first time someone called me “the ruin” like it was a curtain being drawn across the sun. They pointed at my green robes, at the way my hair fell like ink, at the strange quiet that followed me when I walked. They did not know my name then. They only shouted a word that fit the fear in their throats.
“My name,” I told a god once, “is Lainey Romano.”
He blinked as if surprised. “That is a pretty name,” he said, and I thought for a moment he might be different from the others. Grant Moreira had the light around him like a halo people made offerings to. He wore the world like it was trimmed with gold. He did not see me as a woman who had fought to keep herself from dying; he saw me as a curiosity. He called me “sister” because our blood was tangled in a story the heavens liked to tell themselves.
“Call me Lainey,” I said. “Not sister. Not ‘child of shame.’”
His smile softened. “Lainey.”
That was before the rumor—before a nameless, aimless slaughter boiled into a sentence that killed houses and gardens and the thing inside me that wanted to be forgiven.
They called me the Fallen One because I could take the rot in a man’s heart and make it useful. I could pluck the hidden greed and stitch it to my will. When other gods trembled at desire, I learned to weave the same hunger into craft. Nico Box—my shadow, my green-skulled intelligence, the part of me that hummed like a machine when strategy came—woke when the world dripped its own villainy. Creed Alvarado, the white beast who breathes like weather and follows my steps, waited because loyalty does not die like a candle flame.
The theater where it began was full of arrogance. Victoria Vazquez, high on her pedestal, moved her hand as if she were setting the stars in their sockets. Her soldiers were numerous and young, bright-eyed in the belief that light covers all sins. An older god took an arrow from his sleeve and declared me an affront. “She is green,” they said. “Let us drag her to the altar and burn the color from her.”
“You would?”
“Yes,” they said together, like a choir. “We must preserve the world’s purity.”
I stepped into their fog like a blade steps into paper. “You want the truth?”
“Answer for your violence,” Victoria barked, and the crowd roared for spectacle.
I laughed. “Which one? You mean the war-night you sent my soldiers to starve? The time your priests declared my child ‘unclean’ so that he would die slow? You took without the cost and expect no counterbalance.”
They charged. Men and women with halos and anger rushed me like tide-smudged waves. I sang pieces of their minds open and watched the gold chains they wore loosen into snake-things that coiled them tight. Nico breathed a mist that mirrored my laughter and made illusions of their baser selves. Creed and I moved as we always had—smooth, precise, merciless.
After, when the dust tasted of iron, they called me cruel. They did not ask whose hands had pulled their triggers first.
“Why save anyone?” I said, sitting on a stone and watching a former high priest try to find his collar. “You made them hungry. Then you fed them lies.”
“You would take our place,” he said. “You are not of the light.”
“I am tired of being your opposite,” I answered. “I grew up in the darkness because the light would not look at me. So I learned to be useful here.”
He sputtered. “You are a monster.”
“That’s kinder than what I have called you,” I said, and I watched him bristle.
That is how the name stuck. It is how the first of my public feuds began and where the light’s patience fractured. Grant—gentle as he was—did not strike. He sat on his dais with hands like open bowls, and said, “Lainey, do not make them your enemy.”
“You are their savior,” I told him. “You can point but you do not lift them.”
Our fight ended with a blade and a dream. I stepped into what they called a Fall Dream—a maze where your worst wishes wrapped you like vines. In Victoria’s dream I was a crown. In Grant’s I was a shadow he could not control. I wanted to tear it all down. I wanted my mother, Francesca Almeida, to have never been frightened by the gods. I wanted my brother, Angel Nicolas—the one with fox-eyes like lightning—to not be the golden example they loved and then left.
“Why did you do it?” Angel asked later, when the war dust had settled enough for words. He had not understood the way desire makes a person honest about what they want. “Why kill?”
“Because she would not stop,” I said. “Because they marched into my home and called my people vermin.” I clenched my hand. “Because a god’s mercy is often a lie in a feast.”
He did not touch my face. He said, “Then we are done.”
We were. Grant Moreira—light-crowned and stern—did what light does when it cannot understand shadow: he reshaped me. He split my sources, a kindness and a cruelty folded into parts. He put pieces of me into the world, hoping they would scatter like seeds and never bloom in a single hand again.
I woke later in a place made of moss and small animal sounds, but my soul still carried the green fog. I had a new body—a little grey fox at first, and the world laughed at me for my smallness.
“Next time,” Nico muttered, poking his smoke in and out like a child trying a candle. “Pick a better bird to land on.”
I hated being small. I hated being tender. I refused to be only memory while the gods traded my pain like a currency. So I traveled worlds, taking shape and work as the currents allowed. In one world I learned to sew quiet garments for people who could not be quiet themselves. In another, I learned to read a ledger. And in a small village that smelled of wood smoke and boiling tea, I learned to be a fox who could also speak.
Charlie Gutierrez found me once I tangled with a trap. He had the kind of hands that smelled like birch and rope and bargain: rough, honest, used to closing a deal with the split of a rope. He carried me on his back without a thought and a heart I would later keep like a charm.
“You’re a pest,” he said at first, laying me on his table to bandage my leg. “But a pretty pest.”
“You’re rude,” I answered, because the fox inside me was kittenish about being forced into gratitude. “Fix my leg and I won’t bite you.”
“You could bite me,” he said. He smiled with his mouth like a man who had known worry and set it down on a bench. “But then I’d take you to the edge of the lake and lecture you on drowning.”
We traded promises like small coins. He gave me meat and a place out of the rain. I gave him my voice wrapped in insolence and a stubborn idea of home. He said, “Stay. I’ll feed you, I’ll teach you to hunt properly. No one will tell you you’re a demon in my house.”
I smiled then, because the day did not belong to the gods or the pedestals but to the human honest things: soup, mending, the way a belt was tied around a waist. He did not ask me about where I had been, only where I would like to sleep.
“You should not speak your name so easy,” said Nico one night, curled in a pocket of moonlight. “Names like ours are heavy.”
“I have nothing lighter to carry,” I said. “And besides, I like the way he says it.”
“Charlie?” Nico’s voice was a thread. “Why do you like him?”
“Because he is simple,” I answered. “He is not a god. He does not pretend to be anything that will not bleed.”
That was the beginning of the small and wide life I tried to build for myself. I took to the town like a shadow with manners—helping where help was needed and occasionally making a man’s imagination less certain of the hands he loved. Charlie and I sat under plum trees, drinking thin tea, and we watched seasons misplace themselves.
Then the book arrived.
No, not a book. A world. A task that smelled like paper and fire. The small, sheep-sullen gray creature who liked to call himself NoGood—unhelpful, honest, and alarmingly loud—found the doorway. He came with a task and a map of other people’s lives. “You must shepherd them,” he said. “It’s only rules—they’re boring.”
“Aren’t all rules?” I asked.
“They’re not interesting until someone breaks them,” he said, then yawned.
The task dropped me into a story within a story where a girl named Jayda Francois stitched dreams into cloth while a man named Quinn Garza grew rich and hollow and missed things that mattered. Charlie and I fit into that story as a fox and a hunter on the hill who smelled of rope. It seemed quaint at first, until the author’s pet darkness slithered into the margins.
Forbes Buckley came like perfume. He was a man who could smile and close a factory down in a week. He did not seem like a monster until you saw the way other people disappeared from his life and the emptiness he left behind. He was slick in a suit and smelled like a safe. He believed, fiercely, that if you could make enough money no grief would find you.
“Why are you here?” Quinn asked me once, standing with a photo he would later hang in a thousand offices.
“To make sure he doesn’t kill the story,” I said.
Quinn blinked like a man who had learned to see numbers before faces. “You could make him rich,” he offered, as if wealth were the same as a heart.
“I could,” I said. “But I’m not a banker.”
If the world had been softer, if the author had been kinder, Jayda would have been allowed to live in peace with the little stitches she kept to herself. Instead, the world in the book—blunt, small, full of care and small cruelties—folded like paper under Forbes’s weight. He wanted to tidy her life with contracts and promises; he hated that she did not need him, that she held other people's hands because she liked how the palms in them fit.
I watched. I let them make their small mistakes. I nursed Quinn’s clumsy attempts at being brave. I helped Jayda not because of the mission but because there is a tenderness that stubbornly accepts what it can.
Then came the night of fireworks, and the sky being full of people looking up—like us all, watching the same burn.
Forbes Buckley did something small and final, and Jayda’s light clipped. He thought he could bury blame under legal sheets. He thought grief was a ledger. He did not understand what people call devotion.
It was in the breaking that I found myself tired enough to be fierce. I used the delicate art of truth that had always been mine. I pulled his lies from his throat and unrolled them in front of hundreds of eyes. He was standing on a hotel balcony, cheeks pale with surprise, while a dozen cameras—those small rectangular obsidian things people cradle in their hands—whirred, recording his pride dissolving as if someone had poured rain into his lap.
“Shut up,” Forbes hissed when they showed one clip: a private message he had thought was safe. “That’s private.”
“It’s yours,” I said softly over the mic someone had shoved in my face, and I let the world watch him like the play that he had scripted for himself.
Then he did the thing every villain does when pride meets accountability: he tried to rewrite it.
“No, this is false—this screen is doctored!” he said. The faces watching leaned forward. Their phones lifted like rows of soldiers. Hands recorded. The camera filmed his hands tremble. He moved from smugness to a twitch; he said, “You can’t prove that’s mine. You can’t—”
“I can,” I said, because the truth leaves stains that do not wash. “You said it. You wrote it. You promised it.”
He looked at me, and for a moment his bravado hit the floor like a tray of glass. A man who had controlled thousands of decisions found himself controlled by the space between a word and its echo. He barked denial, and the crowd watched denial sink into confusion. “No—this is a trick,” he lied.
“Stop,” a woman in the crowd said. “He told me—”
“They all did,” I whispered. “Do you hear yourselves?”
Most of the watchers did not pity him. They were on the side of the little and the true. The feeds spread. People who had suspected something sharp opened their mouths, and what they had been holding—evidence, memories, private footnotes—rushed out like a river. Forbes’ expression bled from haughty to hollow. He disliked being seen.
“Turn it off,” he begged then—an animal surprised by the flood. He fell to his knees, the suit not fitted for a suppliant. “Please—my life—my work—my children—do you understand? I will give you money. I will—”
“Money is how you bought silence,” a camera said flatly from somewhere in the crowd. Someone laughed, small and ugly.
A hundred people reached for their phones at once. A hundred-odd devices buzzed with the same intent: they recorded his falling, his begging, the way his eyes roved for a friendly face and found none.
Forbes went through the stages the corrupt go through when barter fails them: smugness, shock, denial, splintered fury, and finally the public collapse. His hands spread like leaves in a dying breeze. He clutched at a reporter’s sleeve. “It’s a mistake. Forgive me. Please, I’ll fix—” He tried to bargain with the most vulgar thing he had: money again.
“Fix what?” a woman shouted. “How do you fix a broken life with a check?”
Another man pulled out a voice recorder and pressed it to his lips. “Tell me what you did,” he said into the air, and every confession became a stone thrown.
The crowd did not clap when he fell. They gasped. Some cried. Several filmed. Someone laughed, and then the laugh turned to bitterness, to the sound of power being recognized as a human instrument, finally no longer godlike.
Forbes begged until his voice thinned; then, when humiliation had done what law had not yet been asked to do, he sat with the cameras trained on his knees and the public opinion seared into him like a brand. He was stripped not of his assets only but of the pretense that he had been flawless. He had been found wanting in the plainest, most human way: in courtrooms of gossip and shared memory.
“You will be judged,” I told him quietly, and the cameras closed like eyes. “But the first judgment is the one you see now.”
That scene—his fall—would be a lesson for a while. It played again and again on glowing rectangles, in newsrooms and late-night bars. People discussed it like a new weather pattern. Forbes’s reaction had been textbook, and the crowd’s reaction was a mirror of the small and unobserved justice that comes when the many decide to stop carrying a man’s lies to keep him warm.
Yet even that justice felt insufficient when I later watched Quinn Garza’s face as he learned he could not buy back the woman he loved. Quinn’s grief was a separate thing. He mourned with a powerless weight. He had money and no remedy for the missing.
“This is not your fault,” I told Jayda holding her hands close. “But it is also true that the world is brittle. For now, rest.”
She nodded, small and beat with tears. “You saved us,” she said.
“No,” I said. “We were all doing what we could. I just took the ugliness out of the room and set it on the table.”
There came a different darkness later that would break a life I had loved: a village, fear, and the cruelty of superstition. It began when the man known for giving out charitably hectors of praise—an old village clerk who smelled of cloves and sour bread—saw me with ears and tails and decided I was a threat to the way things had been counted in his ledger.
“You have a demon in your home,” the clerk told the crowd. “She is the one who takes luck. We must put fire to her.”
“Fire!” someone cried. “We’ll cleanse the village.”
They came to Charlie’s house at night, rolling torches like a procession of accusations. I stepped out to meet them because I had never been one to hide while accusations rose like locust.
“We have never done you harm,” I said. “Why do you come armed?”
“You are a witch!” the village leader—Forbes’s cousin in small, ignorant clothes—shouted. His priest stood behind him with a handkerchief of talismans and a greasy smile. “We have proof of your malice.”
“You have cruelty, not proof,” I answered. “You have fear propped up on a stick like a scarecrow.”
One of the younger men—panic bright in his blood—threw a knife. It lodged in the wooden frame of Charlie’s door.
“You want us to leave,” I said. “Then leave.”
But they would not. They wanted a spectacle. They wanted a villain to point at and say they were clean. So they moved in.
Their first stage of arrogance was a chorus of shouts and the scratching of matches. They thought the fire would find me small. They never imagined a god would be the one to teach physics to a human crowd.
I tried to stop them. I should have left. I could not.
When the first torch kissed Charlie’s stoop and scorched the wood, I felt what I had become: a thing mostly contained but full of old, old hunger. Their fear did not touch me. Their greed did. It caked. It tasted of burnt corn and the old man’s brand of self-righteousness.
“Leave him!” I shouted. “You don’t want this.”
But they did not leave. And so I did what the world had taught me to do in smaller rooms: I took their worst feelings, and I sent them back.
What followed was the public punishment I have never been able to forget. They came to burn a monster and found themselves on a stage. A roar rose like rolling water until it became a solid thing. At first, there were the mocking cries—wine-sour, the kind that says, ‘We do this for our safety.’ Then the shouting turned to something like the clatter of dishes as a household breaks.
“Stop!” someone cried, and for the first time uncertainty lit the faces at the edge. Fingers wrenched at torches. The man who had led them—the village leader—stood framed in smoke, his chest heaving. He raised a hand and tried to look tall.
“You should have left,” I said. My voice was quiet enough that the people thought it might be a trick. “This is your choice.”
He stepped forward, trying to parry shame with command. “You are a witch. You have charmed my son—”
“My son is a man,” I interrupted. “He eats, he sleeps, he hunts. You blame the wrong thing.”
When the inevitable began—the unraveling of human arrogance—eyes widened like coins flipped. The leader’s smug grin dissolved into confusion as the torchlight caught the first of a hundred small feathers in his hair—but they were not feathers. They were the illusions of his bravado pulling away like paper masks.
“Turn them off!” he begged when his fist lost its sinew. He moved from smug to trembling in less than a breath.
A young man who had volunteered to be the first to strike found his legs failing. His knees buckled like a bargain. “No,” he choked. “This is wrong. We can—this is a mistake.”
They tried to step back, but the world is a place where once a thing is set in motion reproaches how you set it in motion. The mob had fed itself on certainties and found no answers when mirrored. Their hands, which had pointed like daggers, now reached for each other and for something stable in a shaking world.
Someone recorded, because they always record. Little boxes in palms blinked red. Clips spread like spilled oil across networks—small windows of a village trying to immolate a fox and finding the fire turned back upon them. Neighbors from beyond, who had watched the torches from a safe distance, leaned in and watched with the same hunger people watch a play.
I watched the leader change—at first his face was brass, then iron, then the raw, pink skin of someone who must beg. He sank to his knees. “Please,” he said, and I heard everything a man says when he thinks his past choices are negotiable as beads.
“Please help us,” he added, and for a moment his voice was a child’s; the crowd circled like a school of fish.
A woman who had raised her voice now hid her hands inside her apron. “We’re sorry,” she cried at last. “Please forgive us.”
The leader tried every stage: denial—“She did this to us”; anger—“We will have her trial!”; pleading—“We had to do something, forgive me, Lainey, I’m—” His eyes were glassy. He threw himself at my feet and spat words between shame and theatre: “I can arrange for a blessing, I will give you—my land—my valuables—my first child—”
“No,” I said because the truth is not a market. “You had chance after chance. You chose spectacle.”
At that, some people laughed, but it was the small sour laugh of someone watching a man remove his trousers and claim he was naked by custom. They took out their phones and filmed anyway—human reflexes leaning toward evidence. Someone clapped, an awkward protestation. Others cried into hands that trembled.
Witnesses shrank: the leader’s smugness changed to shock; shock changed to denial; denial to broken pleas; pleas turned to public collapse. They watched and recorded, and recorded and watched; the world recorded a man’s fall, and a human mind tried to soften the memory with details.
I could have burned them to little ash and called it mercy. Instead, I took their shame and made sure they held it like a memory they could not offload onto a parchment. They would remember the moment their certainty was taken away. A man who had intended to lead a bonfire; he became a kneeling figure in the center of a circle, hands spread, eyes wet and red, pleading for incredulous forgiveness among the very people he had once judged.
“Please,” he begged again, the word too small for the cavity it attempted to fill. People recorded his tears, his small, venal bargains. “Please. I didn’t know.”
“I did not come for punishment,” I told the crowd, because speaking first makes you the one who shapes what follows. “I came to stop them from doing something stupid to a man who never harmed you.”
The crowd looked at me like a flock of birds that had been shown a shadow of themselves. A few turned away, stomachs twisting. Some clapped, half to signal approval, half to make sound where nothing fit.
They did not all die. Their world was not erased as I have erased others’ illusions. But the leader’s power unraveled; his name lost its easy place in village lore. No one trusted him as they had. Children walked more slowly past Charlie’s door. Merchants treated him like a man whose account had been settled. In the end, the punishment was not flames; it was exposure. It was the cruel, slow erosion of prestige in a small place where prestige once bought people like food.
And for my part, when the crowd finally dispersed, when the torchlight ebbed into smoke that smelled of regret instead of warmth, I picked Charlie up and held him. He had been cut by a flying kind of blame; he had bled the color of a life lived honest and raw. He smiled at me in a small, tired way.
“You are not a monster,” he said. “You are just a woman who hates injustice.”
“I am Lainey Romano,” I said, and he laughed, a little shocked at the full name, at the dignity of it. “And I am tired.”
He kissed the top of my head like a benediction and promised, in the softest way a man can, to make me food in the morning. I kept that promise for as long as I could.
Later, they wrote songs about the night. Some people painted it as a miracle. Some called it a warning. Quinn Garza, who had quietly learned a lesson about the limits of the ledger, visited Jayda’s grave years later and left a necklace that looked like a ledger’s page folded into a heart.
As for me, I moved on in small ways. I kept my tails hidden when I could and showed them when I needed to be seen. I never stopped hearing Nico’s dry observations.
“You are dramatic,” he said once, as we walked away from another scene, his voice like paper rustling.
“I loved,” I replied.
“That will be your downfall,” he said.
“Then watch me hold it like a trophy,” I said.
When the last person left that village and the snow moved on, Charlie and I returned to the little house and stitched the world back together—the slow, patient work that does not end with one night and one confession. I kept the jade bracelet Otto Perez had given as a trinket from a life that smelled of old money and older grief; I slid it on and watched it shine against my skin.
There are places I have been that will always name me “ruin.” Good. Let them have the word. I have kept people. I have mended things. I have loved like a person who knows loss is possible and still chooses to try.
“Will you ever be forgiven?” Angel asked once, years later when we met at the edge of a world that smelled of salt and old orchards.
“I forgiven?” I echoed. “What for? For learning to protect what matters?”
“You hurt people,” he said quietly.
“I did,” I agreed. “And I have carried the weight of it. But I did not start the first hurt. They did. I am not asking for absolution. I am asking for honesty.”
Angel bowed his head. “Then you have mine.”
When I die—if I die in a way that is not ending but only changing—I will like to be remembered for the plum trees we planted and the soup bowls we filled and for the fox that once learned to love a hunter and a man who knew nothing of gods and everything of kindness.
And if anyone ever asks me again, I will say the same thing:
“I saved what could be saved. That is the only thing that ever sat comfortably in my hands.”
This story ends with a small thing: a fox-tail braid tied around a jade bracelet that used to be a token for a dead man. I wind the braid and the jade around my wrist and call it mine, because the world once gave me ruin and I turned it into a home.
The End
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