User:Maybeline Fox

Mara

Seven years ago, Mara's mother died in childbirth. Her father, whom she hardly knew, tried to take care of her, but decided that raising a child was too much of a hassle and gave her up for adoption just after she turned three. Mara has always has a somewhat photographic memory, and she remembers, even four years since the last time she saw her father, what he looked like, but never what he did for a living. All she knows is that he was far too busy to take care of a kid on his own. Now, she's blowing out the candles on her birthday cake, her father still absent from her life, and in his place, her friends from the orphanage. Lily, her best friend, claps as the last flame is extinguished, and Mara only half-smiles. She's never really shown any true emotion for anything. The last time she remembers laughing is when her father helped her blow out her candles on her third birthday. That seems like so long ago now. After the party is over, all the presents opened and the cake eaten, Mara sits up on the roof of the orphanage, staring into the woods behind the building while waiting for Lily, who said she was bringing a secret present that she didn't want anyone else to know about. Mara closes her eyes as the warm breeze blows across her skin and through her hair. Texas has the best weather sometimes, and it always seems to match Mara's mood. She opens her eyes as she feels something watching her from the woods, and she looks ahead of her to try to find it. Nothing there. She turns her head as she hears footsteps sliding down the roof, and she feels the strange presence disappear. Lily sits down next to her with a box in her hands and a huge grin plastered to her face. Mara smiles, just to make the other girl feel like she actually cares about a stupid present. Lily hands her the box. "I think you'll like it," she states, obviously rather proud of herself. Mara sighs and slowly pulls the black ribbon off of the dark blue box. "Where'd ya get the box?" she asks as she begins to pry the lid off. Lily shrugs. "an older kid." Mara nods. Of course. She pulls the lid completely off and stares at what's inside. Lily grins at her reaction, used to the fact that her friend never shows any emotion, even for the best of things. Mara reaches into the box and pulls out the silver keychain inside. It's shaped like a scythe. A very shiny, silver scythe, that could fit in the palm of her seven-year-old hand. She smiles a little at this as she sees a black thread chain in the box that looks like a rope. It's a choker. She loves chokers. Always has, always will. They just seem to fit her personality. She shakes her head. "Where'd you...?" Lily's grin grows brighter. "The same girl I got the box from. She gave me money and took me shopping at some weird jewelry store that had that kind of stuff in it. As soon as I saw it I had to get it for ya!" She giggles, pleased with Mara's reaction to her gift. Mara giggles a bit too. She had always had a strange interest in scythes since she was four. Strange for a seven-year-old, at least, and she knew it. Lily's face brightens even more. "Mara!" Mara looks up. "What?" "You laughed!" Mara blinks. She had laughed. She looks back down at the charm in her hand. Oh well. This is cool. A week later, Mara is waving goodbye to Lily through a car window as her new father drives her to her new home. The man had walked in two days earlier and immediately saw Mara and could not stop thinking about her emotionless face his entire visit, finally deciding after she told him her story that he would adopt her. Really, the only thing Mara is looking forward to is any scythes that might be waiting for her at this man's home. He's a wheat farmer, and she knows that farmers of tall crops use scythes. But her new father is looking forward to helping this girl find her smile, being the kind-hearted man he is. One shudders to know how wrong he truly is. Eight years later, Mara is fifteen, and well-trained in the use of scythes and various types of knives. Not too long after she had arrived at her new home, she had started speaking almost nonstop about different aspects and uses of a scythe, and had even broken into the toolshed a few times to get at the couple scythes the farmer had in there. Now, the farmer has a blacksmith friend who makes most of his tools for him, so for Mara's first Christmas with him, a few months after her arrival, he had a scythe made for her, one that could easily be wielded by a seven-year-old. He showed her the basics of how to safely use a scythe and some methods on swinging it. Then, after she got that down, he left her to her own devices, occasionally helping her when he saw her doing something wrong. She would go into the woods just behind the fields and practice her aim on trees, and after the scythe became blunt the first time, her new father-Dad, now-showed her how to sharpen a scythe-blade. He got her a new scythe every Christmas for every time she would grow out of the one she was using, and eventually she became an expert in scythe-wielding. When she was ten, her dad got her a dagger and a knife almost the size of a large kitchen knife. She carried the knife everywhere, even to school. Her teachers never noticed. By the time she was fifteen, nobody could match her agility and fighting skill, hand-to-hand, scythe, or knife. She never saw Lily again, but she wore the scythe charm on the black rope choker every day without fail and never forgot her friend. And she never really made any new ones, either. Now, at fifteen, she sits on her bed, sharpenig her new scythe. She'd gotten so good with the weapon that the new one her dad had recently had made for her is a foot taller than her with a blade that stretches to almost the length of her torso, plus her head. The blade is as wide as her as well. Mara, now a teenager, has a very thin waist with muscles showing on her belly from how often she practices. Her arms are more muscular than most girls, as well as her legs. Her blonde hair spills over her shoulders and down to her lower back, just around her waist, her long bangs brushed over her left eye, sitting slightly above it. Her piercing green eyes still show no emotion, unless she is wielding the scythe. That is the only time she feels anything, and it's usually anger at whatever is going on in her life at that time, or she feels freedom from the ability to use a weapon such as this the way she can. Mara sighs as she sharpens the blade. Right now, she's focusing on the scythe instead of homework, as usual. Her dad opens the door and smiles when he sees her. "Fixin' up the scythe again?" he asks cheerfully. "Yep," she answers without looking up. "Done with your homework?" "Nope." He sighs. "I'm gonna have to take that thing away from ya if this continues." Suddenly, there's a sound of a blade slicing through air and the sharpening stone is dropped to the floor as Mara is no longer on the bed, and is instead standing in front of her dad with the scythe-blade up against his neck. He never even had the chance to blink. He takes a step back, slowly raising his hands. "I-I was just kidding, Mara..." Mara blinks, then shakes her head, pulling the weapon away and leaning it against the wall by the closet near the bedroom door. "Sorry, I..." she starts. She looks to her desk. "I'm gonna do my homework now." She walks over to the desk and sits down, pulling her geometry homework from her binder and starting on it. Her dad sighs and slowly places his hand on the doorknob, glancing at the scythe leaning by the closet, then back to his daughter. He closes the door quietly, silently wondering if that will (and hoping that it won't) happen again. Mara finishes her work after a few minutes and gets up, grabbing her scythe and the stone off the floor, sitting back down on her bed, and continuing like nothing happened. Only, something did happen, and she knew it. The next day, the farmer walks around the field to find his daughter. It's a Friday afternoon and she's not in the house, which means she must be practicing. He finds her at the tree she's been practicing on for about a week, skillfully swinging the weapon around and slicing at the inside of a circle she's carved into the bark, chipping it away without even barely scraping the outside of the circle. Her dad watches her until there is no bark left in that area of the tree, then says "Dinner's ready." "Kay," she says without looking at him. She takes her knife out and carves a bigger circle around the previous one, then continues to swing at the tree, never touching inside the first circle, and only inside the second one. He watches her for a bit longer, then sighs and walks back inside. The only time he had ever seen her smile was when she got her first scythe that first Christmas, and every time after that, including when he got her the knife and dagger. He would occasionally see her smile when using the weapon, but he had never seen her even blink about most things other teenage girls like. But what does he know about girls these days? Isolated on the farm except for going to the store and maybe a beer or two with the guys, Mara is his only reference to the world of teenagers. Mara continues to slice the bark off the tree, expertly moving the blade through the air, hitting the tree every time, and only in the areas of the circle still covered in bark. She sighs as she chips off the last bit. What had yesterday been about? The thought has plagued her mind since the moment she'd realized she was not even a millimeter away from killing her dad. She couldn't focus on school work the entire day. What worries her isn't that she had almost killed the only father she'd ever had, but the fact that she'd liked the idea, and she'd definitely liked the feeling. A few minutes later, Mara walks into the house and sits down, her scythe leaning on the back of her chair. "Mara," her father scolds as he sets a plate of chicken in front of her. "no weapons near your food, remember?" She looks at him. "But that is how you get meat, right? Gotta kill it first." she picks up a leg. He sighs. "Sure. But after it's dead, no weapons are needed." She keeps eating. He sighs again, then walks around the back of her chair, taking her scythe and leaning it against the back door. Mara huffs, but keeps eating as her dad sits down on the other side of the table. They don't utter one word to each other. Later, Mara is in her room, sharpening her scythe again. She had given it quite the beating with that tree. Just as she finishes up with the stone and is pulling it away from the blade, she hears a loud static sound-in her head. Startled, she drops the stone, cutting her palm on the blade of the scythe in the process. The static fades, but she feels something...familiar...and she realizes with a start that it felt like that strange presence in the woods from when she was seven, back at the orphanage. She feels a stinging pain in her right palm and looks down at it, seeing a huge gash across the middle, dripping blood. It hurts, but Mara has always been able to tolerate severe pain as if it wasn't even there. She stares at the dripping blood, then looks up at the window. She gets up off her bed and walks towards it, holding her hand palm-up and leaning the scythe against the wall by the window, looking out at the woods. This time, along with the feeling, she sees something. She shakes her head, her hand coming up and resting against her temple. At the moment, she doesn't care about the blood getting in her hair. Mara reaches up with her left hand, gripping the scythe charm around her neck and stares out into the woods. She knows she just saw a man. A very tall man. And even though it's impossible, her photographic mind knows she hadn't seen a face. After a while of standing at the window staring out at the trees, Mara decides there was never anything there and her mind must have been playing tricks on her. She walks to her closet and pulls out her practice clothes: a dark blue skin-tight crop top with one inch straps along with skin-tight black pants and black lace-up boots that go up to her knees. She wears the scythe charm around her neck, as always, and her hair down. She loves this outfit. It's very comfortable and easy to move in. And the crop-top shows off her muscular belly. She walks into the bathroom across the hall and washes the blood out of the spot in her hair, then heads back into her room, sitting on the bed and grabbing her boots. As soon as the boots are on, Mara starts to lose focus. Her mind starts wandering and her thoughts aren't very clear. She has a faint sense that she is confused about the feeling, but with unclear thoughts swimming through her mind, she isn't sure what she's feeling. In a bit of a daze, Mara picks her scythe up off the wall by the window and slowly walks down stairs. As she hears voices, she stops at the bottom, peeking around the corner into the living room. Her dad is sitting on the couch, a man in a suit sitting in the armchair across from him. The man has papers and is speaking about some kind of payment her dad is late on. "Sir, if this is not in by the end of three months, I'm afraid I'm going to have to force you and your daughter from the property." 'Then it has to be by the end of three months.' The thought ran unclearly through Mara's head, but she knows it was there, though she has no idea where it came from or what it means. Her dad shakes his head. "What do you expect me to do? We're going through a drought. I can't grow very much right now. There's not enough income to pay this off in the next year, let alone three months." He sounds surprisingly calm. The man in the suit shakes his head. "I'm sorry sir. This is the bank's decision. I can't help you. This is paid in three months or you're out." He sounds robotic, like he does this every day. This kind of thing can't happen every day, can it? The man stands up, brushing off his suit. He nods to the farmer. "Good day to you, Mr. Ryan." He walks to the front door and opens it, nodding to the man on the couch once more before closing the door behind him. Mara looks back at her dad. He's staring at the paper in his hand, his hand over his mouth with a sad and angry look in his eyes. Mara steps forward and leans against the wall. He doesn't see or hear her. Mara stares at him, trying to figure out what the thoughts in her head are telling her to do. They seem violent, and all of them are focused on the man on the couch. She closes her eyes and breaths deeply, trying to focus on something else. After a bit, it works. The thoughts fade. She looks back at her dad. After a moment she sighs. "I'm gonna have to get a job, aren't I?" His attention snaps away from the paper and to her. "Mara!" He stands up, turning to face her. "What are you doing? How many times have I told you not to eavesdrop while I'm working!?" "You're not working. You're surviving. There's a difference," Mara says as she stands straight and walks towards the man. He sighs and rubs his neck. "No, you don't need to get a job, Mara." Mara sighs. "You mean I can't get a job, since I'm only fifteen." He sighs, but doesn't say anything. The silence seems to last forever, and Mara's thoughts begin to wander again. She starts thinking things she doesn't want to about her dad. He finally snaps her out of her trance. "You're dressed for practice. Go practice. I'll deal with this." She looks up at him, the thoughts in her head still pointing towards him. She swings her scythe around on her hand, then walks out the back door towards the trees. As she hacks at the same tree, the thoughts return. Her head buzzes and she can't think clearly. Suddenly her mind is clear, so clear she can't even try to figure out what was going on before. Or what's going on now. She feels that same dark presence deeper in the woods, and she looks in the direction she feels it. She blinks but doesn't look away. There's a man standing there. Or at least, that's what he has to be, right? That same man she had seen earlier. He has to be a man. A very...tall...thin...man... Like before, as she had thought, he has no face, just a blank white void of nothing. The strangest thing? He's wearing a suit. He stands there, hands at his sides, staring at (or at least facing) Mara. She tries to look away, but can't. And the more she stares at the thing, the dizzier she gets. A static sound grows louder in her head, and her vision is becoming fuzzy. She tries to back away, but when she puts her foot back, she loses her balance and falls to the ground, her scythe landing over her stomach. And that's the last thing she can remember. Mara wakes up hours later in her bed, feeling she had been out for a while, but not rested at all. She also feels as if she's not completely in control. The only reason she knows she was asleep is the fact that she'd had a dream. Well it was more of a nightmare, but at the moment, nothing seems to scare her. In the dream, she had woken up in her bed, all the lights out, and no noise anywhere. She had crawled out of bed, feeling the urge to see if someone was in the house, and grabbed her scythe, which was leaning on the wall beside the headboard of her bed. She had slowly opened her bedroom door, looking into the dark hallway. Determining that no one was there, she crept out of the room and down the long hallway, which was much longer than she knew it to be, but she knew she was dreaming, so she didn't wonder too much. She didn't see anything, or hear anything, and she was about to turn around and go back to her room, but just as she did, a small sound caught her attention. She swung her head around in the direction of the sound, but there was nothing there. Then she heard it again, behind her. A laugh. A child's laugh. She spun around. Nothing. She growled in annoyance, figuring that since this was a dream, she should just ignore this and head back to bed. Just as the thought entered her mind, she heard another laugh. Then another. And another. They were all around her. Children, or at least the sound of them, surrounding her, and she couldn't see any of them. She tightened the grip on the weapon in her hand. Then, the slight sound of static. She turned and saw the faceless man from earlier. She turned to back up, but her feet semed glued to the spot. She raised her weapon, but the man raised his hand slightly, pointing his long white fingers at the scythe, and her hands were forced down. She had nothing left to do but stare at him, which she did. After a few momets, she lost any feeling of fear, and stared up at the thing as if he were something she saw everyday. As soon as that happened, she felt herself losing conciousness somehow, and that's when she had woken up in her bed. She looks over and sees her scythe leaning beside the headboard, like it should be. She sits up, feeling lightheaded, and, as if in a trance, she turns her body so she can stand beside the bed. As soon as she does this, she feels like falling over. She turns to her bedside-table and pulls her sharpening stone from the top drawer. She grabs the scythe and sets it on her lap. Her dad had told her not to sharpen the top of the blade, only the bottom. But she can't do what the thoughts in her head are telling her to do unless she breaks that rule. She doesn't want to do this, but she knows she has to, or she will be of no use to him. At least, that's what her jumbled and confused mind is saying. She runs the stone across the top of the blade, grinding down the flat side until it's as sharp as the bottom. Obviously, it had been sharpened before, probably a little bit every day. Otherwise she wouldn't have been able to sharpen it all the way down as quickly as she just had. Somehow, she hadn't noticed before that she had been sharpening it on the top every day. Mara studies the blade. It looks a bit weird, but that's only because she's not used to it yet. She'll get used to it. She has to. She looks down to the floor beside her bed and sees her boots. Still in her idle, trance-like state, she sets the stone and scythe on her bed and pulls the boots on, tightening the laces before she glides over to her desk. Mara picks up her belt from the wooden surface and fastens it around the waist of her pants. She checks to make sure her knife and her dagger are there, and then makes sure the pocket for the sharpening stone is there. She walks back to her bed, picking up the stone and pushing it into the pocket. It isn't a very big stone, which makes it easier for her to move with it there. She pulls out her special gloves from the top drawer of her bed-side table. She loves these. They're leather over the hands, being a dark enough blue they almost look black, with a slightly lighter blue painted snake-skin starting at the top of the wrist and ending halfway up her forearm. They're comfortable and they somhow make it easier to grip the scythe. She doesn't wear them when she practices only out of fear of wearing them out. Mara picks up her scythe off the bed and looks at her bedroom door. She doesn't want to do this. Do it. Why would she do this? Do it. What would make her even want to do this? Do it! She would never- DO. IT. NOW! She loses all thought except for the violent ones that have been plaguing her. As if on auto-pilot, her feet walk her to the door, and she sees her gloved hand turn the knob and pull it open No. I won't. She stops for a second, but then whatever had control of her before takes over again, and she sneaks out of her room and down the stairs to find her dad sitting on the couch. He's talking to someone on the phone. She waits. If she does anything now, whoever's on the other end of the line will know something's wrong. After a few moments, he ends the call and puts the phone down. The phone's on the homescreen. The call's over. There's nobody listening. She looks at the back of her dad's head. She doesn't want to do this. She isn't going to. No, what are you talking about? You have to do this. There's no choice. Why wait when you have the perfect chance now? Before she can do anything, she attempts to save herself and hopefully the man in front of her by croaking out a weak "Hey." Her dad turns around and sees her. He looks her up and down: the gloves, the belt, everything in the belt. The weapon in her hand. He looks back up at her and cracks a joking smile. "Ya going somewhere? You should rest for a while. Found ya passed out outside. You've been working yourself too hard." He has no idea. She blinks. She should tell him. She opens her mouth to speak. I will not do this. That's the last clear thought she has. She closes her mouth and her eyes turn dark as she stares at the man in front of her. The man who had raised her. He cocks his head. The man she thought of as her father. "You alright sweetie?" Her dad. She grits her teeth, The only person she cares about. She raises her weapon. The man she's about to kill. His eyes widen as he sees what she's about to do. Mara slams the end of the weapon into his stomach, knocking the wind out of him and throwing him to the ground. She jumps over the couch as he turns over, his back to her, trying to stand up. She changes the position of the scythe in her hand and slices the newly sharpened edge of the blade across his back. He screams in pain and falls back down. She turns the blade so the curved edge is is facing her and has it on his neck before she can stop herself. She stands there like that, fighting the urge to slice his throat. His back is still to her, and she's glad she can't see his face. He's breathing hard. "Mara.." he starts, wheezing a little. She tightens her grip, and he flinches. "Mara, please, put it down..." All sane thought leaves her as she hears his plea. For some reason, it feels great to have him at her power, begging her to stop. She grins and pulls the weapon away. Her dad sighs and falls again, groaning as his back slowly bleeds out. Mara chuckles, pulling her knife from her belt. The wounded man on the floor, hearing her little laugh, turns his head as much as he can to look at her. Mara flips the knife around her fingers, grinning sickly down at the bleeding thing in front of her. "Mara..." he croaks out. She laughs and kneels down so that her legs are on either side of him. "What? Do you want me to stop this? Is that what you want, Dad?" she asks with a sarcastic emphasis on the word "dad". He nods slightly, almost too weak to move from blood-loss. Mara laughs, a little more insanely. She grabs his arm and slowly runs the knife along the inside of it, from the shoulder down to the hand and over the palm. He screams in pain, and she grins. She drops his arm and slices the blade slightly over the back of his neck. He whimpers, too weak to scream now. Mara wipes the blade of the knife on the back of the man's torn shirt, then puts it back in her belt, picking her scythe up again. She can still feel him breathing. That's good. Would hate to have him leaving before the end, right? She leans down to his ear. "You still want me to stop?" Understanding that begging would only make it worse, her dad shakes his head as much as he can. Mara sighs, slightly grinning. She knows he's just trying to save himself. "You know that won't work, right?" she chuckles out. "Sadly, you're almost gone anyway. Might as well help ya, huh?" She chuckles again as she stands up. The dead man on the floor tries to push himself up, but is far too weak. Mara laughs at his sad, pathetic effort, and watches him for a bit longer before saying "Bye Dad. Ya know, I really did love you." In the blink of an eye, the blade of the scythe swings through the air, and Mara stands with the weapon extended beside her, watching as the man's head falls to the ground and his body goes limp. Mara slowly lifts her head and turns it to look out the window. Something is telling her to go to the woods. She swings the scythe-blade in a fan motion to clear most of the blood off of it, then casually walks out the back door, through the almost dead wheatfield, and into the trees. She stops at her normal practice tree for a moment, not looking at it, then keeps walking a few more feet before she finally turns around to look back at the house. She can't see it well through the field, but she can see enough. As she stares, she feels something on her shoulder. She doesn't look. She knows who it is. She can see the long white fingers across her shoulder. She lifts her head and turns, never laying eyes on the old farmhouse again. Slenderman does not belong to me Slenderman original creator Eric Knudsen: https://www.google.com/search?biw=1366&bih=667&q=eric+knudsen&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgVuLWz9U3MDQoLKwqiQcACeDN2w8AAAA