Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Rumors reached Philip about a child wandering in the fog.

He was one of the few who actually put in the effort to communicate with the others. Part of that was out of an urge to keep them all on the same page, in case something like the blight serum ever came back around; part was out of an urge to know what the hell was going on, and sometimes to be the only one who knew what was going on. And part of it was just because he couldn’t stay in his own pocket of the realm all the time, where the ghosts of his past crawled after him and clung to his heels like second shadows.

So when Kazan said he’d seen something picking through the crumbling temple gardens he called home and, on chasing it, discovered it wasn’t a survivor but instead someone young and bloody and fast and noisy, Philip nearly felt a flicker of curiosity.

“Did you kill them?” he asked.

“No,” was the response, short and sharp and clearly unhappy about the fact. “It fought back and then ran. Disgraceful and cowardly.”

“A child generally would be afraid of someone like you.”

“It should have stood fast and died a worthwhile death.” The twisted, angry mask turned to look at him. The real expression was hidden, but somehow, Philip got the feeling it would look a lot like the mask anyway. “Even children can have a strong will.”

He didn’t argue that fact, knowing that pointing out even adults were unlikely to stand still and let themselves die, much less children, would only get him gutted or decapitated. Kazan held a fragile respect for him, since he himself had stood fast and let the man almost cut him in half during his initial ‘trespass’ on the temple, and at the moment he wasn’t willing to risk shattering it.

After that, he heard from Amanda that someone had been eating the dead pigs in her meat plant. She’d only seen a shadow, but she’d heard screaming - high-pitched wailing that cut itself short as soon as the source reached the freezer.

“Rotting pigs?” he asked, feeling himself almost get nauseous for the first time since arriving in the fog.

“Those ones aren’t as bad. But, yes.” She pointed to one of the T.V. screens nearby, where the whole meat plant was under constant surveillance. It was paused on a frame, showing a strange, almost hunched figure in the freezer, their hands buried in one of the pigs. The image was grainy black-and-white, the details vague, but the height of the figure was clearly too short to be fully grown. “Can’t see much here, but I know what I heard.”

“Screaming.”

“It sounded more like a baby crying.” She leaned away from the array of screens. “A demon baby, anyway.”

Herman said he saw a girl circling the Institute without going inside. Evan said he followed some kind of wailing and found a busted bear trap, so badly bent out of shape it had to have been done with a weapon, not anyone’s bare hands. At the farm Max hadn’t seen anything, but the man known possibly too accurately as Leatherface claimed someone had been stealing from the constantly-bubbling pot he’d set up in the destroyed farmhouse’s kitchen.

The pieces added up in strange ways. A baby’s unholy crying, a short figure, stealing food instead of possessions, being afraid of a strange place - they said a child. The strength to dismantle a trap, and to rip apart a frozen pig, said a killer. But why would a child that young be taken into the fog? Even Legion were at least on the cusp of adulthood.

It was Adiris, eventually, who gave him the answers he was looking for. Rumors didn’t filter down to her - she wasn’t interested in talking to many people aside from him and Anna, who shared a realm with her - but she’d actually seen what was new in the perpetual gray cold of the fog.

“She is not a child,” she said, and that as a response to have you seen a child around here lately? threw him off.

“You know who it is.”

“I know of her.” Sweet smoke drifted up to the high ceiling above them. “I saw her while I was praying. She stood at the mouth of the temple. Looked to my altar, and then looked to me. And then … she ran.”

Adiris lifted her incense burner and murmured against her clasped hands. Philip waited until she was finished to speak.

“Others heard a baby crying.”

“I would have said screaming.”

“So … she is a child?”

“No. A child is with her.”

That made him stare at her, more intently than his usual look.

“The Entity brought a woman with a child into this place?”

In that instant he remembered that Adiris saw their dangerous benefactor as a god in line with the one she’d once served, and that any criticism was met with instant violence, but she only looked up into the ceiling above and let the incense drift past her.

“Seek her out and you will understand.”

“You know where she is?”

“With Anna,” was the response.

It wasn’t a long walk from the temple to the heavy forest. It wasn’t on him to doubt the actions of the Entity, or question its plans, or fight against it in any significant way, but a part of him refused to believe even something as thoughtless and monstrous as a creature so powerful it may as well have been a god would drag a woman with a newborn child into the realm, whether to kill or be killed. It made him uneasy.

In some ways, the answer he got was a relief; in others, it gave him a whole new reason to be uneasy.

She was crouched by the little hut where Anna had, back in the world, smoked meat. That was still what happened here, but the animals never really cooked properly, and when they were taken down they just reappeared later. He approached, fully visible, and she turned sharply to look at him, the basket on her back swinging hard.

She was scowling, glaring, hunched down like she was trying to hide. One hand clutched a weapon. The other was clutching at her chest.

Except, he realized, it wasn’t her chest. It was a child.

A long look revealed that it was a child in her chest.

It looked like a baby, too small and malformed to be anything else, but it was looking at him with an expression a baby couldn’t possibly have had: almost a glower, mouth set in a snarl. That was what eventually started to howl and wail, even as the girl clutched it more tightly to her body.

Carefully, he backed off. The sound died down, replaced by a growling that sounded half-human. He stared for a long while until Anna appeared from out of the fog.

She gave him a look before turning to the child - to the children - and saying something he couldn’t quite hear. The girl slowly stood up and, after giving him a long look, crept into the smoking hut. Only once she was inside did Anna make her way over to Philip, who wasn’t entirely sure how to start his questions.

“They’re twins,” she said, sparing him the effort, and he turned to look at the doorway of the shack again.

“I can’t imagine they were born separately.”

“Stranger things have happened.” Anna shrugged one shoulder and turned to watch the doorway with him. “I found them stealing food. Fought them until I realized they were starving. Even in a place like this.”

“Old habits linger. They won’t be, in time.”

“Maybe.”

“So the Entity has brought children into this place?”

Anna considered the question, which was unusual. Just inside the doorway he could see the shadow of the child - the children, hacking pieces off the dead animals.

“She said she was older. Nearly twenty. So is he.”

“They don’t look it.”

“Starvation and fear stunt growth.” She drummed her fingers on the handle of her axe. “Though he may never have grown at all.”

“What have they told you?”

“They were orphans. Fleeing those who would kill them for being what they are. She said he led her here, into the fog.”

And now … he watched their shadows move in the smoke and flames, but they stayed resolutely inside the shack, unwilling to come out while he was there.

“Have they killed yet?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Uncertainty and a strange sense of intrigue left him wanting to ask more questions, but Anna only knew so much, and they weren’t going to talk to him just yet, so against his better judgment he went to see someone that might know more.

Herman wasn’t a traditional doctor by any means, but he’d studied human bodies time and again and knew at least something about the way they could grow.

“Two embryos generally don’t fuse in the womb,” he said while stitching up a rip in his jacket. “The current theory is that a single zygote that might form twins fails to fully split during development. This results in what’s known as Siamese, or conjoined, twins at birth.”

Philip watched him work in silence, knowing there was more to come.

“Traditionally, they’re joined at a point in the body - the skull, the spine, the pelvis … occasionally you get two heads on one body. You said there was one full body and another smaller one growing out of the first one’s chest?”

“Yes.”

“That sounds more like parasitism to me.” He glanced at Philip, whose expression was as unchanged as ever. “Parasitic twins. The smaller one almost certainly depends on the larger one to survive. Conjoined twins are rare enough as they are, but that level of parasitism is even more unusual.”

He paused and examined his work. The rip was nearly sewn up, and the blood splatter around it looked more like the result of a stab than a slash as far as Philip could tell. Probably another fight with Evan.

“I don’t suppose you could convince Anna to let me examine them?”

“Convince her yourself.”

Anna had taken on an almost motherly role to the two. Like she did with Legion, but moreso, because unlike most of them they hadn’t come with a place to call home. They lingered in her forest, learning slowly that the indoors wasn’t necessarily a danger. Of course, if Herman got anywhere near them, that lesson was likely to slam to a halt.

And, like she did with Legion, she took to any unwarranted threats to them as a direct assault, and returned them twice over.

“I suppose I could always say it’s in their best interests. A young woman can’t want her brother always around, after all.”

“I’m sure she’ll understand,” Philip said, just dryly enough to be heard.

Of course, he thought as he headed back into the endless gray of the fog, Herman would be surprised to find out that the conjoined aspect was no longer mostly a problem. Anna claimed they could separate - that the smaller boy could pull himself free from his sister’s chest and run on his own. And grab. And hang on. And scream.

Back in the forest he found that was the case - the girl was sitting on the ground, watching as her brother raced back and forth through the trees. He didn’t sound like any child Philip had ever heard - more like an animal. Snarling and growling, his screeches as he lunged through the air like something out of a nightmare. He didn’t say words, and maybe he couldn’t, but he could make demands all the same - and threats, in a certain way.

He stayed far enough away that neither of them would think he was a threat, but didn’t hide himself. There wasn’t much of a reason to do it outside a trial, and he didn’t want Anna to think he was trespassing deliberately - or trying to hide something.

She found him not too long after his arrival and watched the two with him in silence for some time.

“Herman wants to examine them,” he said eventually. She snarled.

“He can try.”

“I thought you’d feel that way.” The boy raced toward a huge tree and hurled himself off the ground at it, slamming into the trunk and scrabbling to hold on as he slid down.

“If he wishes to dissect something, he can find stray meat.” They watched the pair for a few seconds longer before she kept going. “Do you still see our dead?”

“Yes,” he said, almost automatically; that was a gift he knew he’d never be able to shed, no matter how much he wanted to.

“Do you see much following them?”

Philip looked at the girl sitting on the forest floor.

The Entity had gifted him the unsettling ability to see the spirits of the murdered in this place - those that he and his fellow killers had stolen the life from, the results of the actions that condemned them to this place. Maybe it was because he’d always been watching and listening for something out there to explain the worst parts of the world to him. Maybe it was because he knew this was a punishment, not a gift. And maybe it was because he’d always been more sensitive to the second world, even back before.

It gave him guilt, and grief, and knowledge, and with that knowledge came leverage. To know what the others had done, whose blood had helped pave the path to lead them to the Entity’s grasp, gave him a sort of power nobody else had.

He could see ghosts behind the girl when he focused. Strangers lingering not far from her, covered in bloody slashes, some decapitated, some just slaughtered. They looked sullen and afraid. Some looked burned. Others had their heads caved in.

And on her chest, in the place where her brother normally hung out of but now was an empty gouge, was a silvery ghost of the same child that was running around, stuck in place, hands clinging to her shredded clothes, looking between her face and the copy of itself hurtling between the trees.

Philip stared at it for a long while before he spoke.

“Some,” he said. “Too many for someone her age. Fewer than you might expect.”

“Nothing interesting?”

The ghost of her brother turned to look at him. The eyes were - different.

“No.” The depthless white of his eyes stared back until the ghost boy turned away again. “Not really.”