Chapter Text
The forest surrounded, and devoured.
That was the point. You wandered in, looking for something - a tool, a respite, a way out - and you didn’t leave, or at least not until you were dead. You could wander for hours and either you’d be mutilated or you’d end up back at the campfire, which was the last place you wanted to be.
Even he still ended up consumed by it from time to time, and he was one of the experts at navigating the place. It never stayed the same while never changing. Every tree was one he’d seen before and would never see again. Every path he found he’d trekked a hundred or a thousand times, and never led to the same place twice.
It was a nightmare, endless, relentless, the repetition its own piece of hell. But Jake was well used to nightmares by now. It barely bothered him.
He let the forest devour him now. The campfire was a distant speck of light somewhere behind him, rapidly vanishing into the darkening trees. He’d see it in front of him in no time, he figured, or maybe someone would step out of the shadows and cut him in half. It wouldn’t be the first time.
The forest was its own nightmare, and so was everything else.
They didn’t think, much, about how long they’d been trapped here. It didn’t feel like time could move, so it was easy to ignore, but as new survivors trickled in, the idea that there was a world still moving outside this one got to be too pressing to just bypass. He knew what year it had been when the calm cold of his forest consumed him. Yun-Jin also knew that it had been five years after him when she was dragged into hell by her own creation.
They managed to balance the thought by knowing about the others - that Laurie remembered 1977 as brightly as yesterday, that Quentin was dead certain it was 2010, that the killers were from times so wild and varied it didn’t seem possible - but that only satisfied for a while. Was time frozen, even if they were dragged from different points in history? Or was he a missing person, a police report filed away, while Yun-Jin was trying to figure out where her unease was coming from as the bodies piled up?
Did anyone remember them?
The forest surrounded, and waited. He watched the darkness ahead of him, unseeing, as dark thoughts pooled in his head.
He was tired. He was tired of running, of hiding, of surviving. Of anger and fear. Of pretending he didn’t care. Of dying. The little respites weren’t enough anymore. They came and went, but the trials never ended. Over and over again. Trying to save people. Sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing. Sometimes being left to die by panicking teammates, and sometimes by dead ones.
Oh, yes. The dying. It never ended. Death is not an escape. They’d seen it written in faded documents, scrawled on walls like graffiti, choked from throats both dying and vicious. He could die, and then he’d come back. He’d died so many times …
The deaths lingered in the back of his head all the time, and as he walked through the forest, they crawled in again. Hook sacrifices. Knives to the gut or the back. A spear embedded in his spine finding its way out through his mouth. Chainsaws splitting him in half. The pain was still there, phantom sensations and ancient memories, mixing and intermingling and getting confused after so many of them had piled onto each other over the time he’d been here.
So many deaths. So many ways to die.
Jake slowed, then stopped.
Something surged up in the back of his mind. He felt his gut twist, acid and bile starting to churn in his stomach, and something sparked down his nerves to his fingertips.
He couldn’t remember all the times he’d died, now, but he could remember how he’d died … at least, he could remember a lot of them. Cut throats and broken limbs and other things that would have made him sick in the world before. But there were … other deaths, weren’t there? Ones that were worse than what he could remember. Ones so violent and awful he couldn’t remember them, because it would break him.
It wasn’t just his decision, he knew - some of them were locked away by the Entity trying to keep its toys intact for another trial. But most of them were locked away behind doors in his head because the human brain could only handle so much trauma without shattering. And he’d put up with a lot.
A lot.
Not just deaths.
Darkness closed in around him, and inside him.
Somewhere in his mind, the doors that had been chained shut strained against their bindings.
His chest felt tight. He tried to breathe. Tried to look around, find the light of the campfire, but it was gone now. Not behind him or ahead of him. Just trees. Just darkness. Just shadows all around him. Looming, crawling, creeping in, ready to drag him down.
Was he lost? In the forest he knew how to navigate? It was like the first time he ran away from home, he realized. When he tried to make a living on his own back in high school. When it snowed, unexpectedly late in spring, and he was caught out in it, trying to find his way back to shelter as a blizzard whirled around him. It was a place he’d known and he had no idea where he was or where he was going. He’d almost died.
Of course he didn’t know this forest. But he knew the way it worked, he thought, and that the campfire was always visible, always a call to safety, always a warning not to stray too far - and it was gone, and he wasn’t in the fog yet, and even the moonlight above was gone, and -
And the memories of all those deaths were right there, right at the front of his mind, and -
The doors burst open, and the sealed-away memories poured out.
Dying. So much of it. So many deaths. So many, so awful - and they dragged up memories he’d tried hard to forget, too, not just his death but other’s deaths. Him bleeding out while Meg or Claudette or Dwight or someone else was torn to pieces in front of him. And then the knife turned toward him -
Ji-Woon with his knives, closing in, gouging, gutting, laughing. The Doctor finding a new place to ram a diode so electricity arced through something else. An axe in the Huntress’s hands splitting him open, starting at the pelvis, ripping up through the stomach and chest cavity and snapping off his ribs one at a time. Trapper smashing his face into a trap, and then dragging it out -
Jake hit the ground on his knees and retched, but nothing came out. It wasn’t as if they ever ate.
Still the awful images poured down around him, drowned him. Ones he hadn’t even realized were locked away thrust out of the throng and he hit them like a jagged rock in whitewater rapids. His skin coming off - one piece at a time, exposing flesh and nerves and veins -
And not just deaths, not just dying. Things as bad and worse. Hands dragging at him, at his clothes, nails digging into flesh, holding him down, holding him still. Pain outside and in. Teeth and tongues and heavy breathing, harsh words -
Meg was screaming, crying, begging, forced down over a crate, and he was lying on the ground dying from a gut wound, useless, hearing every word and sound and couldn’t do a thing about it, because if he tried to stand more guts would fall out, and all he could do was shut his eyes and try to block it all out but he couldn’t, it wouldn’t stop, he couldn’t stop this.
Something came up. He couldn’t tell what, in the darkness, but it was darker than the dirt under him. It didn’t taste like anything. He could barely see it, and then he choked, and more came up.
He could remember being split open. Ghost Face in a rage. The Clown finally getting what he thought he was due. A hand around his spine, dragging, pulling until something gave. Feeling his guts slither out of his stomach, or his back. His heart in twisted, gnarled hands.
Darkness all around him, the holes in his body pooling blood, claws cradling him, pulling him down, down into deeper darkness where something watched him as it gnawed on the pit of what was left of his soul.
Something burned along his blood, his nerves, like he was on fire, burning from the inside out. He tried to call for help and choked, tried to crawl to safety and there was nothing to find. Just more memories smashing into his mind’s eye. Just more of the horror of this place, of the things he’d forgotten because otherwise even death wouldn’t save him.
Blight, pouring out of every orifice, his eyes burned out as it found another way to escape him. Screaming close at hand because of what someone else could see had happened.
There is no escape.
Jake collapsed.
The danger of being too far from the campfire was ever-present, but it hadn’t been as bad recently. Obviously someone could still creep in and attack, but there were enough people nearby now that a scream would draw at least one person who was qualified to deliver an extremely effective beatdown on any killer ballsy enough to come this close.
Still, a death could happen quicker than rescue could arrive. They were always on alert.
Alert as she was, Mikaela still didn’t expect someone to grab her by the arm and drag her into the trees while she was out collecting flowers to dry into offerings for the campfire.
It was sudden enough that she yelped, and then, realizing what was happening, she screamed, sharp and high. Whoever was dragging her - and she couldn’t see who, in the darkness - didn’t even pause.
“Let go! Let go of me!” She clawed at the hand around her arm, and realized it was invisible. The place where invisible fingers had a fierce grip was clear, but the fingers themselves weren’t. “I said let go!”
“Your friend is dying,” came the response, short and sharp.
“What? My - who?” Mikaela tried to dig her feet in and slow them down, but it was impossible. “Who’s dying? Why are you taking me there?”
“Do you want him dead?”
“No, but who’s - I don’t even know if you’re telling the truth!”
It was the Wraith, she realized, because only he was invisible, but that wasn’t much of a comfort. He wasn’t the worst by a long shot, but he’d caved her skull in with his club before - and that was before he found out she was the one who’d brought in blessings.
He didn’t respond. He just dragged her further into the darkness, until fog started swirling between the trees, but it never wrapped around them completely.
“Please - at least tell me who it is - ”
Still nothing. But then he dragged her forward and hurled her to the ground, right next to -
She stared for a second before recognition set in.
“Jake?”
He was curled up, hands at his face, something that looked like blood splattered on the ground underneath him. She grabbed his shoulder and shook him to no response.
“Jake - hey, Jake, what’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
“He’s dying,” Wraith reiterated, his voice too close by for comfort. “Heal him.”
“Heal him? How? I don’t have anything to help! Not a medkit or even some flowers to - ”
“He’s not injured. His mind is collapsing. This place is consuming him.” There was a grim finality to those words, and then disdain crept in after. “You’re the witch, aren’t you? Use your magic.”
Uneasy and uncertain, Mikaela turned Jake over. His hands fell away and he saw something black on his mouth. Blood again, she thought, but she couldn’t smell any blood. His eyes were open but rolled so far back she couldn’t see the irises. When she touched his skin, it was freezing cold.
Fear started to settle in. She didn’t know what to do. She could do little things, bless totems, let the magic of this place take hold and spread the power, but on her own - what good was she?
“I don’t know if I can help,” she said.
“Then he will never come back to your campfire,” said the Wraith.
She looked down at Jake’s unseeing face.
Of course the stories had come around of survivors long since gone. They found names written on toolboxes or medkits, notes, recordings … people they’d never met, and never would again. They all hoped, secretly, that those long-gone people had managed to get out, but most of them knew that wasn’t the case. Vittorio had been a help learning that, not necessarily for the better.
If he was dying … they didn’t die here, but he was dying. Somewhere in his head, he was breaking apart and fading away. And she was the only one here to help.
“I don’t know what to do,” she whispered.
There was no reply - not from the freezing, twitching body in her hands, and not from the invisible figure behind her. She couldn’t do anything, but she had to try. If she let him disappear without even putting in an effort, she’d never forgive herself.
And neither would anybody else.
Mikaela pulled Jake’s upper body onto her lap with some effort and put one hand over his eyes, then the other over his heart. She shut her own eyes and focused. This place was full of magic, good and bad; she’d used it to bless totems and could still use it to make curse nets, idols, little things to keep them safe and warn them of danger. Back in the world she’d blessed little things to help people, and she’d made the coffee beans at the shop healthy and wholesome and ready to cure the little aches and pains after just one cup.
It hadn’t been a lot. But what else could that do, here and now?
There was magic all around her. She focused. If she opened herself up to this place, however bad of an idea that might be, she could draw it in. From there, she could channel it into Jake, and if she did it just right, she could cleanse it of whatever dark things lurked it in by nature. Send purer energy into him to block out whatever was trying to destroy him.
Slowly, she could feel coils of grim energy pooling inside her, flowing through her veins. She imagined it like water in a filter. All the impurities, the gritty bits that would make things worse, she tried to keep out, or at least in herself, and the rest she passed on into him. Through her fingertips into his skin, or his clothes, where it would seep down and fix whatever was happening … she hoped.
She laid her hand flat on his forehead and tried to open a channel into him. That might make things easier, or at least quicker, and if he was dying, then time was of the essence. She felt a mind normally closed off start to open up -
Blood death pain a knife a blade a weapon digging in digging deep prying open blood pouring guts twisted screaming howling help me help me stop no you can’t the world closing in closing down the darkness always the darkness the light at the bottom of the end of the world as it comes it claims it wants it feeds
Mikaela yelped and pulled her hands away like she’d been burned.
“What was that? What was that?”
“This place,” said the Wraith, and the grimness had gone from his voice. “It consumes you all, eventually.”
Afterimages flashed in her mind. She shook her head, tried to dislodge them, but they’d been so gruesome, so awful that they stuck. But Jake didn’t look any better, and she was still the only one here who could do anything.
A little hesitantly, she set her hands back on him, then glanced over toward where she thought the Wraith was.
“Why are you helping him?” she asked.
There was silence, and a little shift in the darkness.
“None of you should die a death this terrible,” he said eventually.
It was an alarming response, and one that made her feel slightly ill. But it was an answer. She looked back down at Jake, took in and breathed out a cleansing breath, and then shut her eyes again.
His mind opened more easily this time, or at least she felt like it did. Instead of pushing pure energy in, she let the darkness out. It streamed through her like water out a pinhole leak in a pipe. Fast, sharp, easy to let flow out from her into the air but with enough still sticking to be a problem - to hurt.
She didn’t see images, but she felt the pain and desperation and despair. All his time here, all the deaths and agonies, clawing up through him, threatening to overwhelm him. She tried as hard as she could to let it find a way out of him so it couldn’t come back and replace it with something else - something better, or kinder, or at least not as bad.
It was hard to tell if she was succeeding. It was even harder to tell if he was still alive. The awful darkness ripped at her soul, making tears well up and blind her, but it wasn’t her darkness, so she had to withstand it - had to let it go -
She thought she could see something with her eyes shut - some grim thing, glowing in the distance. Mikaela forced her eyes open and blinked back the tears and only saw the forest. Even the barely-visible silhouette of the Wraith had gone. Well, this place was magical and metaphysical; maybe what she’d seen still existed, just not here. Or at least not right here and now, immediately here.
She hoped.
Just as she thought she couldn’t stand it anymore, the flow of inner awfulness ceased. The power she was pulling down out of nowhere dwindled, or maybe it was her strength that gave out; she sagged and tried to catch her breath. She felt exhausted and weak, and it wasn’t clear if Jake was still there in any way but physically. It was even hard to tell if he was looking any better, given how dark it was.
But when she put the back of one hand to his forehead, the chill had gone. He wasn’t as stiff anymore, either. She had to take what she could get, she supposed, and just be grateful he hadn’t disintegrated on her lap.
The silence of the forest worried her, but there was nothing she could do about it now. Instead Mikaela tried to straighten them both up as much as she could. She wiped away her tears on the edge of her jacket and used her other hand to brush some of the dirt and leaf detritus off Jake’s face and hair. He must have collapsed face-down; it was all over him, and some was stuck thanks to that probably-maybe-not blood. She wiped it off the best she could.
When she went to try and get some off his chin, her fingers brushed the scarf he always wore, nudging it down just enough for a gleam of light to break through.
Curious, she tugged it down a little further, and saw something like a scar on his neck. It glowed orange - not a bright, unrelenting neon, but intense nonetheless, and very visible in the darkness all around them. It disappeared further down under his scarf, into his jacket. She started to unwrap the scarf to see it more closely but stopped before it came away.
Not because she knew he’d hate her doing it, or because she’d had a second thought, but because of the heavy footsteps she heard approaching behind her.
Mikaela let go of the scarf and didn’t turn around. She could recognize the weight of the steps, and the harsh breathing she could hear escaping through the mask.
There were no words for a while. She didn’t know what to do, except that if he was here to kill the two of them, she’d at least try to protect Jake as best she could - which would probably just mean she’d get her blood all over him when that cleaver split her open. But, well … maybe he’d wake up in time.
“He’s not dead,” she said, eventually, if only to break the silence and let the attack begin. “And if you’re here to kill him, you’ll have to kill me first!”
Instead of a snarl or an attack that she fully expected, Mikaela heard a snort. It was a laugh, she realized.
“Wouldn’t be hard.” The heavy footsteps got closer and suddenly he was right there, at her side, looming over both of them. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the heavy boots, the cracked and bloody waders, and, notably, not the rusting, blood-soaked cleaver she’d been reluctantly prepared to deal with. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous, or that she wasn’t about to end up a corpse.
She looked up at the Trapper, whose bone mask looked down at her like something out of a nightmare she wished she’d never had. Darkness flickered around him - false visions, memories that weren’t hers - and then disappeared.
“This is your fault,” she said, with less accusation in her voice than she wanted because of how he was looming over her.
“That so.”
“Well … partly.” Her fingers closed around the scarf, as if she thought she could protect his throat, or maybe just the burns of light from being seen. “All of you. You’re killing us like this.”
“He tell you that?”
“He hasn’t said a word.”
“Not him.”
“Oh. He - suggested it.”
There was a dismissive release of breath. Trapper looked back into the darkness. Mikaela wondered if she’d be able to pick Jake up and run, but the answer was no. She could barely support someone when they were conscious; dragging him would get them both killed.
So would staying here, probably. She knew that just because the man looming over them both had let her live once - and that was a memory that had burned itself into her brain, so shocking and terrifying she couldn’t forget it - it didn’t mean he was going to do it a second time.
“Could at least have the grace not to spell it out for you.”
“He didn’t really - ”
Trapper moved, stepping around in front of her. Mikaela went stiff and waited for the next subtle shift that said she was dead where she knelt, and didn’t get any less nervous as, slowly given his size, Trapper crouched down in front of her.
It was the closest she’d ever been to him without being over his shoulder while he dragged her to a hook. She stared at the mask which, even in the darkness, was so clearly bone, and bloody bone at that. It was ragged, worn, cracked in places, showing the grain of bone in another - did bone have a grain, she wondered? - but it was solid, and she could see the effort it had taken to carve out the eyeholes. No wonder the mouth was so jagged, she thought numbly. It must have been almost impossible to gouge that much out.
He must have carved the back of a skull. Or else he wouldn’t have had to make room for the eyes. It was a strange, detached thought, aided by a rush of inner darkness that wasn’t hers.
She glanced at his skin - burned, broken, scattered with patches of light that looked like what she’d seen on Jake - and at the metal jutting out of his skin, the huge almost-hook jammed through his shoulder, as if he’d been the one up on a scaffold once, when things were very different. She had to wonder why it was there. It clearly never gave him an advantage - she’d seen Nea grab it and yank before, and that didn’t end well for anybody. What was the point?
He wasn’t looking at her, at least. Instead his focus was on Jake. It was strangely intent. He reached out and tugged the scarf down despite her attempts to keep it in place; when he saw the marks she’d seen, he let out a breath. Disappointment? Relief? She wasn’t sure.
Then he moved to pick Jake up, right off her lap.
Automatically she locked down on him, arms across his chest, hands clenched in his jacket. She knew they hated each other, and knew what happened when the hooks came down because of him.
Trapper met her eyes. She stared back, frightened and defiant and certain she was about to die but unwilling to just let him take Jake somewhere else. Somewhere in the shadowy black pits of the mask’s eyeholes, she thought she saw a gleam of light - his actual eyes, as hidden as his face.
“I’m not gonna kill him,” he said.
“Like I believe that?”
“No point.” He shifted his arms under Jake and lifted. “Hasn’t done anything to piss me off lately.”
When he stood, she tried to hold on, but his grip was firmer than hers. She ended up hanging for a second before dropping back to the ground. There really was nothing she could do to stop him, and she didn’t believe Jake was going to make it back to the campfire without dying, but at the same time, the lack of weapon made her stay where she was.
“Then why are you taking him anyway?”
“There’s worse things out here than me.”
Mikaela looked around and saw nothing but darkness - or at least, darkness haunted by things beyond comprehension, by nightmares, by powers she couldn’t grasp. Between that knowledge, the rattling shadows that had escaped from Jake still inside her, and her own highly active imagination, the dark forest somehow seemed differently dark than it had been a moment ago.
But another question still stuck.
“Why bother at all? Why not just let those things kill us both?”
He paused, Jake limp in his arms; if she hadn’t known the danger Trapper posed, she might have thought it was like someone being rescued, or carried out of a burning building.
“Don’t think either of you deserves that, now,” he said.
She said nothing, shocked into silence. He turned and headed into the trees without another word.
Mikaela watched him go until his silhouette started to fade; then, certain she could feel eyes on the back of her neck, she jumped to her feet and followed, hoping something that at least resembled safety would be in that direction for her, too.