girls of effulgence | bts

thirty-one

The boys arrived within minutes because of how fast Greed was speeding through the woods. Gluttony was in his wake, scrambling and stumbling over everything living and nonliving while desperately trying not to drop his precious gift cards.

"Slow down!" Gluttony yelled, and then promptly tripped on a rock that was shipwrecked in the soil. While Gluttony yelled for help, Greed was already at the door, and then inside by the time that Gluttony had picked himself up and found his Silver Starling card that he thought he had lost for a moment.

Greed entered the dining room, where Wrath was eating alone. The llamas were gone. "Wrath," Greed breathed, "we've got something important to tell you."

Wrath looked up from his soup he was slurping, wiping his mouth simultaneously. He looked like a deer caught in headlights, and if he had ears on top of his head, they certainly would have been flopped down. "What is it?" He asked, and a few dribbles of red soup dribbled down his chin.

Greed opened his mouth to speak, to unload everything, when Gluttony finally caught up with him and opened the doors, the gift cards not in his hands, most likely in his pockets. Wrath only raised his eyebrows, looking back and forth between the two of them.

It must have been an odd scene indeed, both of them were covered in leaves from running through the trees to get back so quickly, and their hair had no choice but to look like thousands of tiny burrs from the ferocious wind. Nothing like anyone normal would have looked like on a windy day, where normal people would stay inside. Gluttony blew a leaf out of his face and shook stray hairs out of his eyes. "Have you told?" He asked Greed, looking at him curiously.

"I was about to." Taking a deep breath, Greed dumped everything that had happened, Gluttony jumping in as well. They explained every little thing, from the mailbox to the interesting paper bird, and the letter. The letter, of course, was in detail, and Greed had shown it to Wrath to confirm that the two of them were not as crazy as they looked. When they were done, they looked at Wrath like pleading puppies.

"Thoughts?" Gluttony asked with innocence, walking over to the dinner table and swiping Wrath's bread rolls right off the table and inserting them into his mouth. Wrath didn't notice, he was reading through the letter with intensity, his eyes rocking back and forth and rereading the curly handwriting that the other two had grown so accustomed to.

After a few minutes of exchanging glances in the silence, Wrath looked up. His expression looked like as if he was figuring out a calculus problem inside his head. He looked back and forth and Greed and Gluttony, and then the paper, his eyebrows knitting together and drawing closer to his eyes. "So, you got this from our mailbox?" He asked, ridding the silence.

Greed nodded. "And we're not sure how long it was in there, but it was there. When we got there. And then a small portion of the letter flew itself..." He shuddered and scrunched his face in confusion. The sentence itself sounded outrageous, papers couldn't fly, and papers couldn't turn into birds, but sins getting help was also outrageous and it had happened, so perhaps it was possible that the bird was not just a figment of his imagination.

"The paper flew itself away from us and said we need to be at the meeting place in two days time," Gluttony concluded for Greed. Wrath rubbed his nose and nodded. "I certainly got that." Wrath took a long, exhausted sigh, and looked at the paper, not reading it, with boredom. "What I don't get, is why someone would even help us," he whispered. "We are awful things. No one sane would ever think of doing this. But they did."

"But there's that part of the balancing," Greed reminded the two of them. "Maybe this H person is a little sane. Yes, we've done horrible things, but this person may be the bandage to fix the wounds that we inflicted." He smiled, feeling a bit of hope creep up and tingle throughout his body.

Perhaps there was a way, after all, a way to mend and sow the treatment. If they'd only just listen to him...

"We've got two days time," Greed said confidently. "That's plenty of time to tell the others about this letter, and time to get ready."

"Ready?" Wrath asked, puzzled. "You say this like we're actually going to go to this person and her friends."

"Aren't we?" Greed felt a swell in his chest and he suddenly felt like he was standing two feet taller. "Because I think we should. After all these years of trouble and torcher knocking at our door, we finally get help. Hope. And now there's a chance we can fix everything. Are we seriously going to pretend we're not home?"

Something must have clicked inside of Wrath. The sin stood up fast, hitting the table with his leg. "You're right," he said briskly, ignoring the stinging pain in his knee and folding up the letter, shoving it into his pocket. "He's right?" Gluttony echoed, gaping at Wrath. "He's insane Wrath!" Gluttony shouted, throwing his arms up. "What if this is some kind of trick? A scam? What if this is really-"

"Gluttony?"

Gluttony sighed and glared at Wrath, who was looking at him. "What?"

"For once in your life, could you stop being pessimistic and start to have some hope?" Wrath rubbed his eyes and squinted at him, his mouth turned down.

"Yes, this is all crazy, and frankly, even I'm a bit shaken and a little creeped out. But if this is all we got, we might as well use it. Because we won't have another chance again unless you'd like to have a llama army with Pride." He turned to Greed and nodded at him, ready and conclusive.

"C'mon Greed. We're telling the others." With the swish of his hand, Wrath threw an apple that was in his pocket at Greed, who caught it. "You're gonna need all the energy you can get."

The two left a shocked and hungry Gluttony in the middle of the dining hall with his thoughts, taking the last piece of food with them.