Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The fight started the same way a lot of them did: Evan in a bad mood, and Philip with one comment that went too far.

The wrecking yard was, fortunately, wrecked, so it wasn’t as if they were destroying anything worthwhile. The two of them left a trail of bent metal and broken glass, torn ground and blood that gleamed in the sickly moonlight coming down from above.

It was mostly Evan doing the bleeding, but Philip had his fair share of wounds. Deeper, more dangerous, but nonetheless fewer, and that was its own kind of insult.

Evan grabbed half a car and hurled it at Philip, who ducked out of the way easily only to have to lunge back to avoid the oncoming cleaver blow. It missed him by inches, slammed into the front of a broken-down school bus and sent metal fragments flying.

“You don’t,” Evan snarled, wrenching his cleaver free, “say anything about my mother. Ever.”

“If I’d known it was such a sensitive subject, I might not have.” But the tone of voice said otherwise, even if it was a tone Evan was hearing echoed exclusively in the confines of his own head.

“It’s not sensitive.” Metal fragments littered the path in front of him, glinting until moonshadows cast them back into darkness. “It’s personal. Shit you couldn’t know. Don’t pretend you do.”

“Really.” And that was sardonic, not just to Evan’s ears. “I think I can make a guess.”

“You want this in your neck?” He lifted the cleaver, all its scars and nicks proving that it had been through a lot more than just flesh.

“You haven’t gotten it there yet.” Philip’s head tilted, but the rest of him stayed at the ready, the skull at the end of his club looking no better for the fresh spray of Evan’s blood on it. “Is your father as offensive a subject to talk about?”

“Yes.” Evan took a heavy step forward. Ready to lunge. Ready to kill. “You say a bad word about him, you’ll fit into this.” The cleaver smashed into a stack of crushed cars, where the only way to make something fit would be to liquefy it. “I loved my father.”

“Then why did you kill him?”

It was like a bullet to the chest; six words, shot with no more venom than usual, stopping him in his tracks. All the rage froze. Philip didn’t move, and as the haze above passed over the moon the dimmed light hid his blank expression in new shadows.

Evan stared, and tried to find a response.

“I didn’t kill my - ”

“I can see him standing behind you.”

Something cold bloomed in the heart of the rage, like frost on a lake. Small, fragile for now, but spreading slowly through every inch of him.

Philip’s expression was as flat as ever, no hint of emotion in his eyes and no fraction of a second of a pull at his mouth to say whether he might have been amused or disgusted. He could see their ghosts - the bloodied and mutilated shades that had helped to drag each one of them into the Entity’s grasp - but unless they told him their stories, he couldn’t know who they were or what they meant. Only -

“You look like him,” he said, dry and cool. “More than you liked, I suspect.”

A prickling sensation crawled up the back of Evan’s neck. Not hot, not cold. Just there, moving up onto his scalp and spreading out.

“He’s a very thin man. Not much blood. Not like the others.” Philip’s head tilted the other way, and despite the easy target he made Evan couldn’t move. “He’s watching you. Looking at you with … hate. Fury. Anger like I see in you. Fear, so great it can’t be overcome by the anger. And … ”

There was a long, long moment of hesitation. The whole world felt like it was creaking around him.

“ … pride.”

Evan whipped around so fast he left a mark in the dirt underfoot.

There was nothing there. Nothing but the endless sea of broken cars and crushed metal, flaming barrels and distant neon lights, the fog drifting up wherever it could, hiding the distant wall in a greenish haze.

He stared into it for longer than he should have, feeling the rage inside him drain away like melting ice and then surge back up like molten lava, swallowing everything that might have been weak and burning it up again, turning it to ash to settle and grow back again later.

With a sound like some rabid wild animal he hurled an entire hollowed car out of his way and stormed off, sending the mist swirling as he went. Fire was raging in his brain; he needed to cool down. Needed to get space. Needed to do anything but think. Or worse - remember.

Philip watched him go in a cold, almost pitying silence.

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.”

Chapter Text

The Fog was … bigger than he expected it to be.

For something that seemed so oppressive and claustrophobic it went on forever, leading him down strange paths that led to even stranger places. He could hear things as he wandered through it, the cold damp prickling on his bare chest, listening to every sound in case it seemed worth following - and feeling things, too, in a way only torture had ever resonated in him before. Strange things, and strange smells and tastes that were only there for a second, more fleeting than raindrops, than bloodspray.

Sometimes the endless gray parted and he was somewhere new. A cold, rainy forest, hemmed in by endless heavy trees. A farm with corn sprawling in every direction, the rust-colored horizon broken up by broken-down buildings. A snowy treeline that broke into a snowy clearing, the one huge building looming overhead. It was all so new, so interesting, but he didn’t stop to look too closely; he was still unfamiliar with the whole place, and didn’t want to make the wrong first impression on anybody he ran into.

Because they were out there. He could almost sense them. Strange silhouettes in the distance, not watching him but maybe following him anyway. Stealth had never in his life been a skill he needed to hone; it wasn’t necessary when a friendly smile or enough money could get people to turn their backs to whatever he was doing.

So he didn’t linger, and kept moving. He figured that eventually he’d be found, or get stuck somewhere for a while, because he’d stalked from his magnum opus into darkness and coiling fog and ever since then hadn’t been able to find somewhere familiar.

In the end, he got stuck.

The fog cleared and didn’t come back, leaving him in the snowy cold outside a looming building. It almost looked like a hospital, but one that had been so ravaged by time and chaos it was on the verge of falling apart. Then again, what place didn’t look like that around here? So far only one or two spots had looked even remotely held together, and they’d felt like some of the most unfriendly.

Tugging his coat a little tighter around him to fend off the cold, Ji-Woon made his way into the building.

He could smell blood right away. Old blood, obviously. And electricity in the air, the bright tang of it almost as sharp as metal. Which was strange, because the whole place was as dark as the others, every overhead light blown out and the whole place only lit by moonlight coming through sealed-shut or broken windows. Something worked around here. Where was it?

There were hospital beds shoved against walls, gurneys left to rot, shower stalls molding and moldering but kept from really stinking thanks to the cold. There were no doors, only doorways. No windows, only empty holes in the walls. He hadn’t seen this place before, but his limited experience told him he would see it again; he tried to remember the layout, then gave up. There was more than enough space to throw a knife around here.

The smell and sound of electricity got stronger the closer he got to the center of the place. There was light, too, coming from somewhere. Above and below all at once. Some piercing white, some hellish orange. He followed it, and heard … noise.

That was all he could call it. Noise. Not just sound, but chaos, and it lured him to the center of the building like a moth headed for a blast furnace. Ji-Woon stepped into a circular room, ringed by open doorways and bizarre machines. His shoes rang on the metal grate that served as flooring; the light coming from somewhere underneath cast his shadow strangely on the walls. But he was too busy staring upward to notice.

A mechanical mess of televisions hung overhead. Pointed in every direction, making sure anyone standing anywhere could see what was playing on them, and what was playing was absolutely bizarre. Flashing lights and images. A smile, or maybe a grimace. Staring eyes, or flayed ones? They flashed too fast, all in black and white and gray, layered by static, dragged by like they were on a film reel instead of a video. He thought he saw dead people, or at least dying ones.

It was the source of the noise. Grinding, guttural sounds. Metallic. Rumbling. Voices filtered and distorted so the words were unintelligible but still carried a terrible, dread-inducing meaning. Screams snapped and stuttered between and through the distortion. The screens shifted and rotated with a tortured scream of metal as gears and bars ground against each other. He watched unseeing and listened, hearing a pulse underneath it that he wasn’t certain anyone else had ever heard or ever would. A beat. A rhythm. Something he could use, something to bind to the bottom layer of a track, something to spark a new light in the head of every listener and drive them into a frenzy …

It didn't quite seem complete, though.

He was very much aware of someone approaching behind him, but he didn’t move from his spot, still too enthralled by the sight and sound above him to care much. The footsteps were light, even on the grate, and the breathing was a quick hiss. There was pressure at his back, the kind that would have sent a lesser man running.

When it stopped, he turned.

Years of training had taught him never to flinch or recoil or change his expression even when dealing with the most unusual, ugliest, or downright strangest of sights, so he didn’t actually step back when he saw the man behind him, but it was a near thing.

Ji-Woon looked into a flayed face pulled into a rictus grin and permanent stare by metal bands and wires and smiled a bright, brilliant smile.

“This is incredible,” he said, pointing up toward the mess of televisions overhead. “Is it yours? I’d love to see how you put it together.”

The man in front of him gave him a long stare - could he do anything else with a face like that, Ji-Woon wondered? - and then he laughed, a strange little chuckle that sounded like it was coming from two voices at once.

“The mechanical setup or the video tracks?” he asked, in the same split voice, leaning in to loom with an unnatural height. Ji-Woon didn’t so much as tilt his head back.

“The video tracks. The audio in particular. It’s so distorted - I can only guess at how you did that.” His smile quirked up a notch, showing a flash of teeth. “It needs more screams, though.”

The man smiled wider, if that was even possible. His constantly staring eyes bored down into Ji-Woon’s own.

“I agree entirely,” he said. Electricity sparked off the metal on his head, drawing Ji-Woon’s attention briefly. “Any thoughts on how to add that?”

A threat was a threat even when it wasn’t obvious, and Ji-Woon cocked his head at it, toward the way he’d come in. His smile never flickered.

“Find a lost little stray and see just how loud they can get?” he asked, mostly rhetorically. He flexed his fingers, the tension running up to his wrist.

“I think,” said the strange man, taking a step closer, “that I’ve already found that.”

He took one more step and stopped abruptly. Ji-Woon had casually raised a hand. Two blades, thin and glowing, were pressed up against his stomach, the edges razor-sharp and slick as ice and already starting to cut through the thick layer of his coat.

The sounds coming down from above filled the silence between them. Electricity arced off the man’s body and into the floor. That kind of thing would run through his knives and electrocute him, he knew, but the moment of surprise was all he needed to take control here.

“Not really,” he said, as casually as if he was dismissing someone’s concerns over a questionable fashion choice he’d made. “But I’m sure if we work together we can find someone that can really add to that track.”

There was a long pause, and then a very slight shift on the rictus face - almost like surprise, or maybe delight.

“Oh, you’re new, aren’t you?” The man eased himself back, away from the accusing point of the knives, which Ji-Woon didn’t lower. “You look just like one of the subjects. I couldn’t help but assume.”

“What, even with all the blood?”

“They’re usually drenched in it.” There was another odd split-voice laugh. “Even when I get my hands on them. It’s nice to meet you. Why don’t you step into my office?”

The man’s name was Herman Carter. Doctor Herman Carter, Ph.D., psychiatry and neuroscience. One of the directors at Lery’s Memorial Institute, an agent of the American government, and a researcher in the field of torture and interrogation methodology, once paid very handsomely to learn how to get information out of sealed heads and now just interested in getting those heads open.

His office was just off the center treatment theater. In contrast to the rest of the place, it was bright and warmly-lit, carpeted, and reasonably clean. The doctor sat himself in a leather chair on one side of a not-exactly-pristine desk and failed to offer Ji-Woon anywhere to sit, so he helped himself to the desk itself, perching on one corner with ease. Surprisingly, there were no immediate repercussions.

“So you’re a professional torturer?” he asked, looking around at the high bookshelves and strange art hanging on the walls.

“In essence,” said the doctor, opening a desk drawer and pulling out a well-worn but mostly cared-for textbook. “The short-sighted goal of the Institute was just to get information. War can blind all but the most softhearted eyes, so they never questioned my methodology as long as I gave them what they wanted. It allowed me to do whatever I needed to reach my own personal goals.”

“Which were … ?” Ji-Woon glanced back at Herman, but he was busy paging through the book. It was mostly text, with the occasional diagram. Most of them looked like they’d been drawn on, or over, or in some cases blacked out completely, heavy pen marks scribbled over neat printing.

“The full and total control of the mind.” He laid the book open, flat on the table, the pages falling open easily. He must have opened it to that place a thousand times. One side was words; the other was a diagram of the human brain.

There was writing scrawled all over the page without the diagram.

“And did you end up getting that?”

“Not at all. But given everything else I learned, that was hardly a loss.” He hissed out a strange sort of breath, and after a second Ji-Woon realized he was laughing again, this time without his voice. “I know the limits of human pain.”

“Me too.”

Herman glanced at him, or at least turned his head in Ji-Woon’s direction. There was no way for that expression to really change, but he knew when people were doubting him.

“Is that so?”

“Well … maybe not the limits.” He smiled at the memories. “I got carried away most of the time. I wanted to hear them scream, really, and why hold back just to drag it out a little more?”

“For the sheer pleasure of it?”

“Not at all. I make use of it. Made use of it. In my music.”

“A musician, hm?” He could hear the derision in Herman’s voice, and diplomatically chose to ignore it. “I can’t say I don’t see the connection between the two, but it seems a little wasteful. You could be using your work for research.”

“I did. Research into what made the best sounds. A blade splitting a tendon, for instance, makes a person go right through a full scale. Low A to high. And that’s if you just go straight from one side to the other. Start sawing at it, and they go all over the place.”

“And how exactly did you use that in your music?”

“Sampling a clip in a track is normal. Even screaming is pretty usual.” That wasn’t exactly true, but he knew he’d had copycats - and entire copy corporations, in some cases - at the peak of his popularity. “Maybe not exactly the way I did it, though. Either interspersed in the song, or as part of the opening to set the tone, autotuned behind the lyrics, or if I felt like being a little daring, hiding it unaltered under the song so you can only hear it if you know what you’re looking for.”

The look he was getting was indecipherable, but the brief silence told him there was still judgment in the air. He let his smile widen a little.

“There’s no sweeter sound than people in agony, and I wanted to make sure my music was the best.”

“People heard it?”

“Worldwide.”

“And nobody ever caught on?”

“If they did, nobody else was listening.”

Ji-Woon’s almost-smirk met Herman’s pulled grin.

“Fascinating. I think we might almost be kindred spirits.”

“Only almost?”

“I was still doing something worthwhile with my end product.” Ji-Woon’s smile faltered a little, his eyes narrowing, but Herman didn’t seem to notice. “Even after I stopped sending reports. All my research is stored in this room, and in my head, and it still has a use here.”

“Really? Can I have a look?”

“I might let you someday.” There was another laugh. “Only what’s in this room, of course. You won’t be getting into my head.”

“I might,” he said, almost sweetly, and got yet another laugh for it.

“You’re welcome to try.” Herman ran a hand almost lovingly over the diagram of the brain in front of him. “All the work I did here is a testament to my intellect and abilities. I remember the work I did in every room. All the most successful procedures, and the ones with the most explosive results.”

“This was where you did all your work?”

“Of course. That’s why it came here with me. I could hardly be deprived of it.” He looked at Ji-Woon, whose expression had settled somewhat. “I assume you have somewhere of your own.”

It wasn’t phrased like a question, but Ji-Woon heard the delicate inquiry.

“If there is, I haven’t found it,” he said with a shrug. “One moment I was finishing my work, and the next … nothing but darkness.”

“Really.” He watched out of the corner of his eye as Herman pulled out another book, this one a notebook battered and ragged, filled with scrawled, frantic handwriting he wasn’t sure he could have read if he’d looked at it right-side up, much less upside-down as it was. “No home territory … no property of your own. Unfortunate for you. Though you’re hardly the only one.”

“I would have liked my recording studio. Or even a soundstage, a real stage … anything. Think it might still be out there?”

“I doubt it. Have you had any trials yet?”

“A few.”

“Then if you didn’t end up there afterward, you don’t have it.” There was no real way to discern a change in expression, but he heard the fake sympathy as it came out. “Too bad for you.”

He kept up his smile, the same as he always had, and set his hands flat on the desk behind him and tilted his head back. Closing his eyes, he slowed his breathing and listened, hearing the crackle of electricity, Herman’s breathing, the distant creaking of broken windows and clanking of the metal nightmare in the treatment theater - and the faint, distant screaming seeping out of the walls.

For everyone else, it was probably a nightmare come to life: a place so scarred and haunted by what had happened that even the inanimate pieces of it couldn’t keep all the horrors locked away.

Ji-Woon opened his eyes and turned his smile to Herman, all perfectly friendly again, the new yellow of his eyes glowing like molten metal.

“Mind if I stay here for a while?” he asked.

Chapter Text

He hadn’t met the Wraith until now, and face to face, the man was a lot more unsettling than he’d been led to believe.

He wasn’t scary, exactly. Just … unsettling. His face was flat and blank, almost expressionless; his eyes were the same, pale white edged with black instead of the other way around. When he looked at Ji-Woon, it was like he was looking right through him, to the burning, seething inside of him where all his bloodlust raged.

Or maybe past him, to the empty fetid air behind him.

“Call me Philip,” he said, and Ji-Woon smiled the same dazzling smile he always did for introductions.

“Nice to meet you.” He swung his bat over his shoulder, the bladed edge out as always. “The others said you know the most about this place. To head to you if I have questions.”

“So I’ve heard.”

The stare was starting to annoy him a little; the man didn’t blink, didn’t look away, didn’t even turn his head to see what was around them. But this was his territory, his … place. He probably knew the whole thing inside and out, where every broken car and collapsing building was. All the little secrets that came with having a place to call home. For a given definition of the word.

Of course, Ji-Woon didn’t show even a fraction of that annoyance; there was no point in getting off on the wrong foot with new coworkers. He might have had to share the glory with them, but since nobody really died here, there was only so much he could do about that.

“What others told you to come to me?” said Philip, pulling his attention back to the present.

“Well … mostly just Ghost Face,” he replied, and Philip’s head tilted. “But Dr. Carter agreed that you probably knew the most, and I can’t say too many of the others around here wanted to talk.”

“Really.”

Was that a hint of something wry in his voice? Or was he just expecting to hear it? Ji-Woon’s smile tempered down into something more casual.

“The big guy in the forest ignored me. I couldn’t really understand the guys at the farm. That woman with the axe just let the freaky demon kid chase me out, and I don’t really thing something that’s all teeth can talk, so I left the thing in the laboratory alone.” He sighed, shrugged a shoulder and hooked his thumb in the pocket of his pants. “The only person here who’s been even remotely helpful is the doctor, and listening to him talk for too long really grates on my ears.”

“Most of the others are territorial, or busy preparing for our work. They don’t see much of a reason to speak to anyone new.” Philip’s head tilted a little further. “Particularly not someone who puts them in mind of a survivor.”

“Nothing I can do about that,” Ji-woon said dryly. “This is how I showed up. Besides, they should know just by looking at me that I’m not one of the plebs.”

There was a long moment of silence while he knew he was being looked over. He couldn’t argue that he did, in most ways, look like a survivor: average height, normal build, clothes that stood out … but the blood should have been a little hint, and the same went for his eyes, yellow and glowing like molten metal.

And, of course, the attitude, but arrogance was a pretty common sight around here, even among the pitiful survivors. They had to have something to keep themselves from going insane, so pretending they had a leg up anywhere was the best they could do.

“What called the Entity to you?” was the next question on the table, and after a second of thought Ji-Woon smiled again. This time it was a little thinner, and a little less pleasant.

“In general? It was probably looking for a higher class of monster,” he said lightly, and waited for a reaction, which he didn’t get. He shrugged and continued. “Or maybe just my attitude. My … what’s the word … predisposition to hurting and killing.”

“Both?”

“Well, yeah. People dying is just what happens. It’s everything that comes before that that’s the real fun.” His smile turned into a grin, but there was still no reaction or real response. Maybe that was just what he’d have to get used to around here - people as bad as he was, not being impressed or even made afraid by his last life’s actions. “I liked hearing them scream. Used it for my work.”

“You were a torturer.”

“I prefer to think of myself as an exceptionally dedicated artist.” Though the one-word description wasn’t exactly wrong. “Their voices gave a whole new life to my music. One nobody could match. It’s what helped get me to stardom.”

“What did you do?”

“To them? Cut them, mostly. Beat them. Broke bones, opened them up, pulled at the nerve endings, cut tendons, fucked around with their organs - ”

“Burned them?”

For a second, Ji-Woon froze. Then he was all smiles again, a little curious and a little annoyed.

“Sometimes, but I liked the more personal touch, you know?”

Philip’s face didn’t so much as twitch.

He hadn’t burned many people, really. After his revelation, his awakening, it had seemed … well, insulting, really. Sacrilegious in a way. Taking what had opened his eyes to his true path and trying to replicate it just to see if he could pull it off hadn’t sat right with him. He did try once or twice, early on, but those screams never quite lived up to the ones that had ripped away the dull veneer of the world around him.

Why ask that specifically? It put Ji-Woon on edge, made his fingers curl tighter around the handle of his bat. But as he looked closer he thought he could see something like scars on the other man’s face - maybe burns, maybe something else. Maybe that sort of thing was closer to his mind than normal, but something unpleasant was starting to crawl up along Ji-Woon’s spine.

“Cutting someone open has a whole different appeal than a burn. I’m sure you understand.” He glanced down at the skull of a club, just barely lit up by the odd moon overhead. “There’s only so much voice a person can have while they’re burning to death. Eventually the smoke and the fire gets in and chokes them. It doesn’t last long enough for me. But if you know how to compensate for blood loss, you can keep someone screaming for ages.”

How often did he get to talk about his work? Rarely enough. Around here he’d had the chance to do it more freely than ever before, and while Dr. Carter was more than willing to listen and offer advice and the occasional compliment, nobody else had really seemed to listen or care. The words spilled out of him, finding an audience of one that just listened rather than asking questions or making horrified noises.

“It’s music. It’s all music. People just don’t know how to understand it, so I made it sound right for them.” He spun around, let the bat in his hand vanish into fog and spread out his arms to take in the whole of the wrecking yard behind him. “I took real, raw emotions, their humanity, everything that made them alive and used it to make something great. Something better than any of them could ever be. I made them immortal and they made me an icon.”

There was no response behind him, but at this point, he didn’t even notice. He was too distracted by his own memories. The dying, the screaming, the voices that led him to heights of fame nobody could have ever imagined, even him - and to this place.

“Nobody else understood. Even my biggest fans, but at least they were trying.” In his head blood poured out of twitching, cooling bodies, pooled on the floor. His last great performance, his showstopper that capped off a nearly perfect career. “All those executives couldn’t even start to grasp what I had, and they tried to stop me. So I showed them, up close and personal, exactly what they didn’t understand.”

All the agony. All the proof. His teeth ground together as he smiled, wide and dangerous, at the memory. If he focused he could still see their faces so twisted and wracked by the one thing they could never really get.

But then he remembered where he was, and who he was talking to, and that this was supposed to be a friendly conversation that got him a little information and not just him reiterating his finest hour. Ji-Woon dropped his arms and sighed, fixing his face back into a relatively normal expression, then turned to face Philip again.

“It was probably that last little show I did that - ”

He didn’t see the club moving until it connected with his jaw.

Pain exploded in his face, making him stagger and nearly spinning him back around again. Blood sprayed out of his mouth to the dirt and grass below as his teeth tore open the inside of his cheek. He swore he saw a tooth, white and red in the moonlight, vanish into the grass.

Something felt broken. Several somethings, actually. A hand came up and curled around his jaw and mouth in shock, because while he’d dealt with pain before nobody had ever, ever aimed for his face, and especially nowhere near his mouth. It had always been unthinkable.

He stared at Philip in something between complete bewilderment and insane rage, and saw nothing on that face that hadn’t been there before. But when he spoke, his voice was just different enough to send spikes through the pain radiating out from Ji-Woon’s jaw.

“It was probably that violence that drew its attention to you, yes.” There was a cold disdain there, every word like black ice, liable to make him slip and take another hit if he tried to reply. “The Entity can sense great violence. Anywhere that’s suffered from mass death is a doorway into this place. Kill someone there, and you invite it to take you.”

The words rattled around in his skull like thumbtacks, like pieces of broken machinery, like the teeth he could feel coming loose in his mouth if he prodded them with his tongue. He couldn’t move; the sheer shock and unfamiliar pain had him stuck in place, and so did the little trickle of worry that he’d get beaten to death if he so much as twitched.

“I don’t doubt you’ll make a worthwhile addition to this place. You’ll feed the Entity well. You’ll never think about anything but the pain you cause.”

Ji-Woon wanted to ask so what the fuck was the hit for then? But he didn’t try, absolutely certain that if he did his jaw would crack in half. It sure as hell felt like it was going to.

“Yes. You’re another one.” Philip lifted the club and looked over the skull. There was a little patch of fresh blood on it - not much, but enough to see glinting in the moonlight.

“Another what?” Ji-Woon managed to snarl out between his fingers, and was instantly skewered by a blank yet somehow accusing stare.

“Another monster.” And that should have been a compliment, except for the way it was said. “More degenerate filth. A venal torturer and murderer. Nothing but selfishness and bloodthirst.”

Slowly, Philip lowered the club, but Ji-Woon didn’t relax. The man had moved way too fast before, and in total silence; he wasn’t going to lower his guard for a second in case he had to dodge.

“I know what you are.” The white pupils met his. “I know what you’ve done. I can see your work without ever needing to hear it. You can tell yourself it was for some grand purpose, but in the end, you just liked hurting people.”

They watched each other in silence. Ji-Woon wanted to lash out, strike back, demand an apology for the damage and the insults, but there was blood trailing out between his fingers, his teeth feeling more and more loose with every passing second as the pain made him shudder. Nobody had told him to look out for this. Nobody had warned him that if he pissed off the guy with what was apparently the least kills in the entirety of the fog he’d end up in actual danger. Nobody had even suggested that there were morals out here, in a place where death and agony were supposed to be the watchwords of eternity.

“I despise people like you.” Philip flicked his club to get the blood off it, then turned his back to Ji-Woon. It was an opening he couldn’t take advantage of, and a very clear, very evident dismissal. A fuck you without words. “Take your questions to Ghost Face. He knows more than he should.”

There was another pause. Ji-Woon felt knives form between the fingers of his free hand, but he couldn’t quite get up the strength to throw them and risk jostling his broken jaw. Philip turned his head slightly, not enough that he could see the bastard’s expression but enough to know he was being addressed.

“If I ever see you here again, I’ll kill you.”

He watched in total silence as Philip stalked off into the mess of broken cars and busted metal until the fog hid him from sight. Only then, once he was finally able to break the feeling that he was still being watched, did he straighten up and head in the opposite direction. To the wall of fog he’d come out of in the first place.

On the way he spat out another tooth, and clutched his jaw hard all the way into the curling gray mists.

Chapter Text

“Tell me about your family.”

Evan glared over to where Philip was sitting on the hood of an empty car, staring at nothing. It was such a stupid, out-of-nowhere question that he almost ignored it outright, but it wasn’t like it was Ghost Face asking him that.

“Why?”

“I’m curious.”

“Gonna get you killed one day.”

“Since when has that ever mattered?”

He snorted and turned back to his work, which involved redoing the brickwork on one side of the coal tower. The ones around the windows were disintegrating; left on their own, they’d crumble, break away, and send the whole thing collapsing to the ground.

“You know. I’ve told you enough.”

“Barely anything.”

“You first.” It was a childish snipe, something he couldn’t hold back. It’d get ignored, he was sure. But -

“My father was a good man.” The answer was as level as anything else Philip had ever said. “Kind. Generous. Understanding. So was my mother. Their strength gave me the start of a life where I could have excelled.”

Evan said nothing, just fought the mortar out from between the crumbling bricks.

“But they weren’t strong enough to stop the tidal wave of creatures that tore our home apart.” He saw, out of the corner of his eye, the club shift so it was closer to eye level. “And I was … not even as strong as that.”

“Didn’t kill you.”

“It probably should have.” Philip’s silence was usually empty or thoughtful or watching, but here and now, it was almost tense. “I saw nightmares made real and I could not forgive.”

“Doubt anyone expected you to.”

“A good man would have.” The head of the club - the skull - hit an empty palm. “But I killed out of mercy, and there was never going to be forgiveness for that.”

“Mercy?” Evan turned, if briefly. “What the hell happened, exactly?”

“It was called a war. Men were paid to tear through the country and kill anyone who stood against the government. Maybe soldiers. Maybe mercenaries. They took money to torture and execute at their leisure, then burn everything that was left.”

Tension like an iron wire hung in the air, ready to snap. Evan, who had been familiar with the feeling since he was four years old, stayed silent.

“After I lost everything, I had a second chance. I could have been a better man then. But I … was not. So I killed out of kindness, and then I truly had nothing left.”

It wasn’t much of an answer, but again Evan kept his peace. In truth, he was only half interested. Philip had never said much about himself, except about the wrecking yard and the reason he was here. Everything before that had been a mist - or a fog.

“It made it very easy to take revenge. When people make it clear they have no worth on this world, very little stops you from taking them out of it.”

“Yeah?” It was a familiar concept, but Evan got the feeling they were on the same page in two very different books.

“Yes.” The skull turned in his palm. “I found some of the men responsible for forcing me to kill out of mercy, and I killed them out of hate.”

“Think I’m starting to see why you don’t like the ghost very much.”

“I’m sure you can,” was the dry response. “Those who bring hell to earth for money are worthless. Subhuman. Those who do it for sheer pleasure are even worse.”

Evan spread fresh mortar and slotted a few bricks into place. His kills were out of pleasure more than obligation around here, but if Philip felt the same way about him as he did about Ghost Face, he probably wouldn’t be saying it so freely - or at least not without a fight.

“How old were you?” he asked.

“Ten,” was the response.

Evan set a brick down, and paused. Ten. Well, he’d understood the world well enough at ten, hadn’t he? But he’d never killed anyone at that age. Hurt, yes. Not killed. He hadn’t crossed that threshold yet.

“Your turn.”

It was like they’d never broached the subject of the slaughter. And while Evan would have preferred to ignore it, he felt just enough of a tug of obligation to reply.

“You know what my father was like.” Fresh mortar, fresh bricks. Or at least as fresh as anything got in this place. “You can see him.”

“Yes. Worse than you, but apparently not enough to draw the Entity to him.”

“He was too damn old.” The window ledge creaked without enough support. Evan jammed new bricks into place and scraped the excess mortar free. “He called it with the way he ran the mine, but he wouldn’t have been useful here. Too sick and weak by the time I - took over.”

“Of course.” Was that conciliatory or condescending? He couldn’t tell, but wasn’t in the mood to fight over it. “And your mother?”

“The opposite. Far as I can remember, anyway.” The memories had faded even before the fog, but some had stuck, like bright glints of light off broken windows. “Except she was as wilful as he was. Probably why he killed her.”

“You know he did.” It wasn’t a question, but it was pointed.

“Couldn’t prove anything, but I could tell. Even then.”

“How old were you?”

“Eight.”

“So you could do nothing.”

“Except hold a grudge.”

“Is that part of the reason you killed him?”

“No.” The tension that had been in the air seeped into him. Acknowledging that he killed his father still grated on him and the loyalty that had been beaten into him. But he couldn’t ignore it. Not now, at least, when there was no more chance of any kind of consequences. “That wasn’t ‘til later. He just got too weak to be worth anything.”

“And so you cut him down.” There was less judgment to the words than he’d expected.

“Him and everyone else.”

In the silence that followed, he finished the window and jammed the wooden windowframe back into place. It wasn’t perfect, but it’d do for now.

“Did you have siblings?”

“No.” He dropped the trowel back in the mortar bucket and wiped his hands off on his waders. “Had an uncle at one point. Pretty sure my father killed him, too.”

“I really am surprised he wasn’t the one brought here.”

“I don’t think he would have listened very well.”

Philip was quiet again, this time more thoughtfully than judgmental. It was a pretty obvious distinction. Archie MacMillan would have been the worst thing the Entity could have created in the fog - but he never would have listened to orders. Never would have sacrificed, only killed. He would have been a waste of effort.

But his son …

“I see,” was all Philip said; Evan was certain his thoughts were running along the same lines, and he was smart enough to know when it was better to defuse a situation early than to get his head cut off for making a pointed comment. Not that Evan himself felt any less tense for realizing it. “I’ll be grateful for your company, then. Instead of his.”

“Don’t bullshit me,” Evan grumbled. “Don’t you have a junkyard to clean?”

“It’s not mine.” Philip pushed himself off the car. “Besides … it just falls apart again afterward.”

“Doesn’t mean you can’t put in the effort.”

He got a look that wasn’t any different from the usual looks but made his hackles raise anyway. It was amazing what a man with no real facial expressions could communicate.

“If you hated him enough to kill him, why did you obey your father in everything else?” he asked. Evan picked up the bucket.

“He was my father. You listen to your parents.”

“You had a will of your own. You have some of it here. You had enough to turn against him in the end.” Philip’s head tilted a little. “Even if that was mostly the Entity’s poison. You could have stood against him and been a better man for it.”

“Why the hell should I have?” It was almost a snarl. He reached out, grabbed his cleaver where he’d left it sitting near the decrepit wall. “Nobody else at that mine deserved me being better.”

“Not one?”

“They proved it. They - ” He stopped as the recollection hit him like a truck, making hate tear through him like a wildfire. No. That wasn’t something Philip needed to know. “Get out. Go ask Max why he hates his parents.”

Philip reached to his belt for the rusting bell he kept on him at all times.

“I already have,” he said, and rang the bell, and vanished into the darkness in a flicker of orange light and black fog.

Chapter Text

The first time Jake crept into Haddonfield to steal, Michael found him.

It was the early days. Back when things were still new, still fresh, still horrific in general. Back when they were still trying to figure things out and see if they could find a way out. Nea had been distant and argumentative. He’d only just started to get a handle on destroying traps and hooks quickly and efficiently and regularly and without getting his skull caved in for it.

None of them had expected Laurie. None of them had expected a horror movie icon. Neither of them should have been real, after all, but there they both were. Michael had made … an impression.

But Haddonfield itself was a little piece of a suburb, and in trials he’d seen the sheds and garages. Outside a trial, they had to hold things, and so he left the campfire where Nea and Meg had been getting into an argument again and went wandering.

He still hadn’t figured out the fog back then, but he got lucky. He didn’t have to wander far before he found the houses. Eerily silent, creepily identical, and empty. Or so he thought.

There’d been a shed, and as he expected, he could open the door outside a trial. Inside there were - things. Some of the Entity’s stupid jokes, and some unidentifiable things, and some very useful things. Metal pieces and toolboxes and tools.

He hadn’t seen anything on his way in, but he’d barely gotten a hand on one of the toolboxes when he heard footsteps in the grass outside the shed. In the total silence he was known for he pressed himself back against the wall next to the door, so that if someone peered inside they’d see nothing - and nothing out of place, either.

The footsteps stopped just outside the shed. Jake watched the shadow on the ground, cast by a moon that wasn’t in the sky. Faint, but obvious, and recognizable in a way that made ice crawl up his spine.

Then the shadow moved. Into the shed, so it crept up the walls and shelves. He held his breath and watched as a silhouette appeared just past the edge of the door. Dark blue, a little worn, blending into the darkness of the shed’s interior, except where it was whiter than bone at the mask and gleaming silver at the knife.

Jake watched his back and grit his teeth against a fear he didn’t trust.

There was no movement for what felt like forever, and then Michael turned.

The second time Jake went to Haddonfield, Michael found him. Again.

Getting killed in the trials hadn’t really prepared him for getting killed outside them; it wasn’t the first time it had happened, but it was the first time it had happened at Michael’s hand. They already knew he could kill at will in trials, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise to find it outside them.

But the memory of that knife sliding through his gut up into his ribcage was still echoing through him when he made his way quietly into the little suburb. He wasn’t interested in having it happen again.

The high bushes and topiaries kept him out of sight for a while. There were other sheds, so he opted to leave the first one alone, just in case Michael was keeping a closer eye on it. It didn’t seem like something he’d do, but Laurie insisted he could plan. That he was methodical. And the others, Dwight in particular, agreed.

So he went to another one, or at least headed in that direction. He’d kept his footsteps light and his breathing quiet and rounded a line of high bushes directly into Michael.

He was never sure if he was the only one surprised by it. Obviously it wasn’t going to show on someone like that. But Michael didn’t react immediately, giving Jake two seconds to stumble back and start to run, so maybe that terrifying presence hadn’t expected to see someone sneaking back onto his property so soon.

The two seconds was all he got, though. Jake ran for it and when he glanced back Michael was following him. Not running, just walking, but catching up all the same.

The fog was too far away. It always was, when he was in danger. He’d bolted through the Trapper’s forest more times than he could count and it was never there, never close enough, and then there was a trap waiting for him when he got there. This wasn’t that much different.

A hand closed on the back of his coat, and Jake was jerked around into the knife.

The third time Jake tried to get into Haddonfield, Michael found him, but didn’t kill him.

He’d been cautious this time, but less sneaky about it. No reason to go around in the darkness at the edges. He wanted to get a good look at the place when he wasn’t in danger of dying, to see what he could use the next time he went in there with real intentions.

He’d only seen Halloween once before, when he was a kid. His brother had put it on with some friends and Jake, never annoying enough to be thrown out of any gatherings, had sat in while they watched it.

It hadn’t scared him. Horror movies never really did. It did upset him, though. Watching it, watching people die so suddenly, watching Michael follow them with the intent to kill - he’d spent the next month sleeping with the light on, convinced that if he turned it off he’d roll over while half-asleep and see that mask watching him from a corner of the room.

He hadn’t thought about it until Michael arrived, and then all the memories of that short time came rolling back in. It was - frustrating. He didn’t have the time to anxious out here. There were enough problems to deal with.

The single street in Haddonfield was empty, except for the few cars that he knew would never work. Even the doors were sealed shut. The Entity didn’t know how they functioned, and couldn’t copy it, so they might as well have been rocks for all anyone could tell. He ignored them. Any value in the engine parts was lost by right of the fact that the hoods wouldn’t pop.

He’d been halfway down the street when he felt someone watching him. It was a skill gained living in the forest - the knowledge that he was being seen by something as dangerous as he was, or more. Those had been rare back in the real world. Wolves never came close enough to be a problem. There hadn’t been any mountain lions nearby. Mostly it was elk, who could be fatal when they wanted to, or bears, who usually wanted to raid his supplies but would have easily turned on him if he’d gotten too close, or the occasional fox - or people, infrequent as they were. Like the other animals in the forest, he’d learned how to go still so eyes passed right over him.

Here, that wasn’t an option. And here, the thing watching him was so far past dangerous it made a bear look like a kitten.

Michael was at the upper window of one of the houses. His house, in fact, with the realty sign out front. The only thing he could be looking at was Jake, standing in the middle of the street without bothering to hide himself. There was nowhere to hide, anyway. Especially not now.

They stared at each other for a good five seconds, Jake unsure of what to do, before Michael stepped away from the window. His disappearance was abrupt enough that Jake remembered what the hell was going to happen next, and he turned and bolted back up the street, back toward the forest and the fog and possible safety.

The one advantage they had over Michael was that, in general, he was slow. Not necessarily slower than them, but he never ran. He walked. He stalked. With this much distance between them, Jake knew he could outrun him easily.

He also knew that it was only the fog that saved him from being gutted eventually. Because Michael was a pursuit predator - the perfect pursuit predator, ancient human nature honed to a point as deadly as his knife. All he had to do was follow them until they couldn’t run any more.

And that, honestly, was a lot worse than even a chainsaw.

As time went by, and more and more places appeared in the fog, Jake found other, safer alternatives for tools than breaking into Haddonfield.

Not that the killers were any less dangerous, but they were at least easier to track. He could hear them coming before they were two feet away from him. And while none of them were interested in talking, they were at least capable of it. Their silence was - quiet. Not real silence. Not like Michael’s.

But even as he figured out how to navigate the fog, his treks didn’t always land him where he wanted to be. And so he ended up on that suburban street more often than he wanted to, trying to figure out the fastest way to safety before he got caught.

A few times, though, he managed to take something without being seen - or at least being interrupted. A few times in a row he got in, grabbed a toolbox, and got out. Maybe Michael was in a trial, or on the other side of the street, or just didn’t care. Whatever the reason, it gave Jake a reason to drop his guard.

Maybe that could have gone on if he’d kept to the sheds and garages, creeping away whenever he suspected Michael was close at hand. But on one trip he figured he’d see what was in the houses, because some of the ones in Springwood had given them books - even if they couldn’t read them - and blankets and little things to make the place more bearable.

He entered from the back of the house. It wasn’t the Myers house - he made dead certain of that. It was one of the other ones, the kitchen crawling with cockroaches that didn’t flee from his footsteps, the floor made of creaking boards, the stairs threatening to give him away with every second. He stayed quiet enough, going slow, and made his way to one of the upstairs rooms.

Preoccupied as he was, Jake didn’t hear the steps approaching outside, even though half the windows were wide open. He didn’t hear anything from downstairs until the stairs themselves creaked. One at a time, slow but steady.

The room he was in had two windows, but both were boarded up. His only chance was to bolt out and make for the room leading onto the porch, but the door was right next to the stairwell - right where someone would be when they got to the second floor.

His heart pounded. There was only one person who’d come to Haddonfield other than him. None of the other survivors were willing to try it after getting gutted once - and none of the killers cared enough to invade this particular property.

Plans and ideas raced through his skull, but in the end, Jake acted on instinct, and ran. It might have worked if he’d done it ten seconds earlier.

Michael caught him by the scarf as he went past the landing and dragged him back, almost strangling him on the spot. It wrapped up into a fist that pressed hard against the back of his neck, dragging him back into the boarded-up room he had no other escape from. He clawed at it, trying to get free, or at least stop choking. It didn’t work. It was wrapped so tight around his neck he couldn’t get his fingers under it.

He was dragged around so Michael could lift him into the air and look at him. Jake kicked and struggled, which only made him choke more, and tried to see any expression under the mask. But the shadows cast by the dull light and the mask itself made it impossible to even see eyes in the cut-out holes. He couldn’t sense any anger, any fury at his trespassing, like he could with the Trapper; it was like he was just an insect, being inspected before being pinned to a corkboard.

Spots flickered in his vision as his lungs started to burn.

Michael dropped him. Jake almost hit the floor, taking in a desperate breath, but then that freed hand caught him by the face and slammed him back into the wall. It was as bad as being choked, stunning him in an instant, and before he had time to even reach up and try to fight his way free he saw the knife gleam in what little he could see through Michael’s fingers.

There was no time to brace himself, but it didn’t matter. Michael aimed for the throat, not his gut.

Ice cold and white hot cut through him as fast as the knife did. It went through his throat, out the back of his neck and into the wall behind him, narrowly missing his spine. Instantly he was choking again, but there was no way of getting free this time.

He tried to grab the knife anyway. Tried to pull it out. But it was buried too deep.

As he choked and bled, Michael pulled his hand away and watched him. Jake tried one more time to see some flicker of emotion in what little he could see under the mask even while his vision flickered and faded, but there was nothing. Not a glint of hatred or a gleam of satisfaction. Just cold darkness and colder silence.

He started to fade out, the pain draining away as his brain shut down, and he wondered: had there ever been anything there at all?

And Michael watched him until the darkness closed in.

After that, Jake kept his distance from Haddonfield. It wasn’t worth it, he told the others. Not for what little he could get. Better to go to the mine, or the farm. They probably suspected something more, but he never bothered telling him. One more death was nothing in this place.

Even if sometimes, when the fog cleared for a trial and he found himself staring up at a pale-paneled house, he suddenly couldn’t breathe.

Chapter Text

He wasn’t out very long. It wasn’t because of the soreness; it was because sleep wasn’t really a thing in the fog, the body’s usual ability to run out of energy and shut down curtailed by the Entity’s demands. A quick rest or nap was about the best any of them could do.

But there was still soreness. Everywhere he felt a kind of ache that was and wasn’t familiar all at once, especially in the places where it was centralized. But it was … a good soreness. The kind of pain he didn’t mind letting settle in him. Aches in places he tried not to think about that didn’t remind him of getting gutted or stabbed or torn to pieces or eaten.

It all made him shift, rolling from his side onto his back and open his eyes. The room was still dark, so his eyes didn’t need to adjust. There was a weight on the bed next to him so he knew he hadn’t been left to his own devices. Under the circumstances, that kind of paranoia probably wasn’t warranted.

But Jake had done stupider things in worse situations.

Hazily he glanced over and saw a silhouette just barely illuminated by what little moonlight made it in through the boards over the room’s few windows. Trapper was sitting up against the headboard, fiddling with something in his hands; it took Jake a few seconds to realize the white edge of it was his mask.

That was new. He’d never taken it off before, or at least not where Jake might see him without it on. At the current angle there wasn’t much to see, but bits of the silhouette were more clear than they’d ever been before. A harsh brow. A badly-set broken nose. What might have been scars and might just have been his skin.

A patch here and there glowed the same dull orange glow as other places on his body - the Entity’s touch, burned into him. Identical to the spatter that went up Jake’s torso and across his back, though not quite as centralized.

“Why take it off?”

Trapper’s head turned toward him, then back to the mask.

“Gets a little irritating after a while.” A thumb rubbed at a scratched spot, like it was trying to wear away any splinters that might come off the bone. “‘Specially during something like this.”

Jake considered it, then set it aside. He doubted he’d ever really see the man’s face clearly, and had never been sure he wanted to; this was making him a little curious, which could easily turn into a big problem.

Probably unwisely, with mostly-contented exhaustion making him a lot less wary than he should have been, Jake decided to move onto a different, just slightly related, curiosity.

“Am I the only one who comes out here for this?”

“No.” Trapper turned the mask over in his hands. “Only one who comes out this often.”

It was an interesting comment, since he barely came out here at all - or so he told himself, every time he crept through the fog intending to find the mine and ironworks - and the intrigue shifted up a few notches.

“Who else?”

“You sure you wanna know?”

“Won’t kill me.”

That got a laugh, low and probably not that really amused. He could hear the implication in it: they might.

“The redhead.” Moonlight caught the hollowed inside of the mask, where bloodstains looked black against the white bone. “She’ll show up sometimes. Try to start a fight. Never wins.”

Meg didn’t strike Jake as someone who really started fights, but as thoughts drifted across his half-scrambled brain, it was probably something like the way he used to break traps outside of trials. A way of getting attention through pissing someone off.

“Didn’t think she’d do that.”

“She’s been here as long as you. Probably needs a break too.”

“Anyone else?” Jake asked, ignoring that comment as hard as he could.

“That new girl.”

He paused. There were several ‘new’ people around the campfire; more turned up every so often, usually in ones but sometimes twos. And a lot of them had been women lately, so that didn’t narrow it down at all. He really couldn’t see most of them coming out to deliberately antagonize a killer into something like this.

“Which one?”

“Black hair. Red shirt. With stripes.”

“Élodie?”

“Sure.”

“Why?”

“Said she was lookin’ for a library.” Trapper’s silhouette shrugged. “Not much left here, but it was somethin’.”

“You let her in in exchange?”

“She didn’t find anything she wanted and she still came back.” The mask shifted and glowed in the fragments of moonlight. “Same as you.”

“That was different.”

“If you say so.”

Irritation burned in him, but like embers instead of a flame. He was too settled for it to really catch, and honestly, if anyone else was coming out here just looking for a break from the pain and terror and endless fucking struggle for survival, then it didn’t matter how it started. There was no point slinging blame at anyone, even Trapper.

He’d be a hypocrite, anyway.

The weight on the bed beside him shifted. Trapper set his mask down on a nightstand and then, to Jake’s surprise, turned toward him - and over him. A hand caught his shoulder before he could do anything and in one heavy move he was effectively pinned, or at least boxed in.

There wasn’t enough light to see any features even now, but shadows moved in different ways. Under the mask there was a human enough face. Something the Entity hadn’t taken the time to twist like all the metal and the hooks.

“I thought we were done,” Jake managed as the other hand landed on his thigh, the permanent heat of something he didn’t understand making the touch warmer than it had any right to be.

“You weren’t out long.” A leg shifted, got between his, nudged his out of the way with a slow but unstoppable certainty.

“Yeah, and I’m still - ”

“You’ll be fine.”

Any further protests were cut off as Trapper closed in, grazed teeth up his shoulder to his neck and bit down just hard enough to hurt. It’d bruise. It had before. He’d never taken his mask off fully to do it in the past, just pushed it up, but this let him get in closer, less awkwardly, and the heat of it - of him - was that much more intense. It sparked along oversensitive nerves and made Jake bite back a sound, made him grab at scarred and burned arms, sent fire back into his blood and sent that blood moving south. Again.

This was a bad idea, he told himself distantly, but soreness and pain and even the bites would vanish when he crossed the threshold from the fog to the space within the light of the campfire. It was the biggest double-edged boon to the fog, and the knowledge - along with a permanent desperate hunger - made him tilt his head back and move his legs apart, pulling up one knee to meet a hand that caught it just at the joint, instead of closing himself off and slipping out from underneath.

Every bite left a stinging mark that faded into an almost addictive ache. On his neck, the place where his neck met his shoulder, a collarbone, just under the jaw. He’d put up with so many soul-scarring barely-manageable pains in the fog that something like this was like a relief. It didn’t stay sharp. And it wasn’t left with the intent to really hurt or kill him. It was more possessive than anything else, and even if that riled him it didn’t really piss him off.

Jake let himself be moved, let Trapper get his knees up, let him practically fold him in half as he pushed back inside, the pain of oversensitive skin and nerves cut down by what was left from the fact that they’d done this maybe twenty minutes before - at his best guess, since time didn’t exist here. At what had to be over seven feet of mostly muscle, Trapper was - as some people had wondered about around the campfire from time to time - proportional.

“Fuck.” It was barely a whisper as echoes of pain rattled through him, followed by a dull but building sensation of pleasure. For all the brutality he was inclined to Trapper went slower, which was its own kind of pain. Every movement, every damn inch, was clear as day in Jake’s rapidly deteriorating focus.

“‘S the plan,” was the almost amused reply against his jaw. Jake glared at the darkness, knowing that even if there’d been enough light to see by his irritation would have gone unseen.

“Not funny.”

The slowly-building speed eased pain away, replaced it with something a hell of a lot better, and Jake gave up on annoyance in favor of just giving in. He held onto whatever he could - one hand on a shoulder, the other briefly closing around the hook and then immediately moving to the arm it was punched through. Nails worn down through years spent struggling for survival against nature did their best to dig in, but the skin they met was rough, worn, scarred and burned beyond any further damage. It made it impossible to hurt, which was probably for the best.

He locked his knees against Trapper, letting the man move at least one hand. It landed on his hip, ran up along his ribs, a thumb dragging against them where they showed a little too much under the skin.

“How long were you starving?” came the question, out of nowhere and edged with a growl that for once didn’t come from anger.

“Wasn’t,” Jake managed between breaths. “Just - living on the edge.”

“Feels like more than an edge to me.”

What would you know? But he didn’t voice the words, because he knew Trapper had been a hunter and therefore probably knew the toll starvation could take. Not personally - like hell he’d ever starved himself - but from prey. Jake had only come close to that in his first year, but all the years after had been lean, even during the best parts of summer.

His lack of response got him silence in return, which was fine. There was something more important to focus on here than a conversation, and words were failing him anyway. Trapper was picking up the pace, driving into him harder with every thrust. It took all his focus to strangle every cry that wanted to break free into a groan or a whine.

And even that wasn’t going to last.

There were still teeth against his neck, moving back to his shoulder, grazing now instead of biting. The hand moved across his chest, down over the glowing marks to where he was almost rock hard. The sensation of a rough palm curling around him and stroking up just once was almost enough to pitch him over the edge. It would have, if he hadn’t come so recently already; as it was, the sound he made was embarrassing. At least it didn’t get a comment, or even a laugh. Trapper was distracted enough to ignore it if he even noticed it.

The ancient bed creaked with every move. The idea that it might break pinged off Jake’s overheated brain and then vanished. There was too much going on inside him and in his head to focus on something external. Flickers of pain on the edge of pleasure like a chain of tidal waves came from the overstimulation and did nothing to stop him from getting harder under that rough touch. In contrast to the thrusts, it was almost agonizingly slow.

He mumbled something, and heard a growl against his shoulder.

“What.”

The words echoed in his skull. Jake tried to bite them back, but the hand around him stopped, a little too tight especially given that nothing else stopped.

“Say it again.”

It was deep, it was dark, and it was like fire in his gut, up his spine, a demand that didn’t want him to die bleeding somewhere. Say it again. No, he thought to himself, don’t say it, you’re already losing control again -

“Please,” he mumbled, and got a hard direct thrust that almost blinded him.

“Again.”

“Don’t - stop. Don’t stop, please - please - ”

This time there wasn’t another demand, just a snarl like something feral, and the hand started moving on him again, rough and hard and as capitulating as Jake was doing with every word that broke out of him. Begging wasn’t something he did; in trials he’d stare down death, die without a word or even a scream, and outside them his silence was an offense to so many of the killers, including the one fucking him right now.

But this was different.

Ever since the first time, it had always been different.

He didn’t last much longer after that, pleading going from a mumbled chain of almost-words into something desperate and louder into what he wouldn’t call a scream by the time he came, but whether that was truth or his own ego wasn’t clear. Orgasm hit him like a truck, harder than the first fuck half an hour before even though he was already spent. Trapper wrung him out and didn’t stop until one final thrust bottomed him out inside Jake, and the tension, the feeling of the grip on his leg and hip, told him he was absolutely going to be limping back to the campfire, and that was only if he could stand.

The blood roaring in his ears stopped him from hearing if Trapper made any sound, but from past experiences it didn’t seem likely. He did feel a hard hot breath against his shoulder a few seconds after movement stopped. And, by inches, the grip on him relaxed.

Slowly Trapper pulled out, but didn’t drop back on the other side of the bed quite yet. Jake was still half-blinded by the lights flashing in his vision and just watched the darkness, knowing he probably looked pathetic, embarrassing, vulnerable as hell and unable to defend himself from an instant, violent death. He would have been more frustrated by it, or even ashamed, if this hadn’t been something that had happened before - and if anyone else had known about it.

A hand came up and grazed his throat, running across the red bites that might turn into bruises if he stuck around long enough. He hissed a little at the sparks of pain that flared up in the wake of that, but they didn’t last long.

After a few more seconds Trapper shifted and dropped back down onto his side of the bed with a sigh that sounded more human than almost any other sound he’d made before. Exhaustion, probably. It must take a lot of effort to nail someone to the bed like he just had, Jake thought distantly. Twice, even.

It took another minute or so before he could find enough strength to move, but when he did, the most he did was roll back onto his side. This time facing Trapper, instead of away from him, the chill of the room closing in against his back and driving him toward the man’s perpetual heat.

A hand didn’t push him back. There was no demand he get out and stagger back to the relative safety of the campfire. There was just silence: not exactly welcoming, but present, and the heat so close at hand kept him from wanting to drag himself into the cold of the fog.

He could stay for a while. Until the aches and soreness really started to bother him, or he got snatched away to a trial. It’d be fine, as long as he didn’t get a cleaver to the gut.

In the silence, Jake drifted off again.

Chapter Text

The name of the game in the fog was altruism. It was the expectation, the default: they only survived because they could work as a team, even when they were individuals. Self-sacrifice was a necessity sometimes. You took killing blows for others. You died so they could live, so that the next time it happened they’d return the favor. And sometimes, working together like a killer’s worst nightmare, they could play the game just well enough for everyone to escape, leaving their tormenters behind to rage and suffer.

It was a concept about as familiar to Yun-Jin as astrophysics. She was aware of it, knew that some people out there were experts in it, but it had no relevance to her life whatsoever and was therefore unimportant.

She had learned how to grasp the concept in the fog, over time. It had become a necessity to avoid isolating herself from her new companions completely. They could understand why she would hide and avoid them while they were being chased or attacked, or leave them if she was too far away to want to take a risk, or even just scramble out through the hatch while some of them were still struggling to survive, but they didn’t like or appreciate it. She’d been left to die a fair number of times herself, and that was never a pleasant experience.

So she’d managed to force herself into something that resembled altruism, and that got her some of the camaraderie she’d lost initially. But her first instinct was always to herself, and so she was very much used to being the last one left alive in a trial.

They’d warned her against that. She’d learned why.

But this time was different. It was pissing her off, for one.

The Entity’s decision to land new killers in their laps from time to time had only really caused her a few problems because of how recently she’d arrived - for a given definition of the word recently - but having to deal with them on top of getting hold of the whole nightmare in general wasn’t helping her situation at all. The last one had been ridiculous. This one should have been the same way, but he wasn’t. For however stupid he looked, he was effective, deadly, and - despite everything she told herself - frightening.

He never ran, only walked. His expression rarely changed. Even when they were dying the most she ever saw was a sort of mild interest, focused intensely but without any real hunger or anger or delight. And when he killed, he -

The chains hooked in her jacket, dragging her back even as she tried to run. Some made it through the faux fur and silk blouse to bury in her skin, making her wince as she ripped them free. She was the last one left alive again, which filled her with more dread than it had before but not enough to make her panic. She still had a way out. She still had a chance.

If she could find it before he found her.

It seemed less and less likely with every passing second. The chains came out of nowhere and at her from everywhere, catching any part of her unwise enough to be in their path. One hooked in her cheek and Yun-Jin yelped, jerked her head aside and tore the hook out of her face; the pain stung, fresh and hot and pointed, but it didn’t last long. They didn’t normally stick around. They weren’t meant to cripple, other than slowing her down.

She yanked another one out of her coat and took off through the fog and mist, ducking behind broken cars, hearing the pulse of someone else’s heart start to follow her. No. She wasn’t going to die here. Or worse. She glanced back.

Through the greenish haze she could see a figure following her, moving effortlessly through the grass and broken metal. Despite the darkness of his outfit he was very much clear. Maybe it was his aura, powerful and imposing; maybe it was just the fact that she knew he was following her. It didn’t matter. If she didn’t find the hatch first, she was a dead woman.

A chain shot out toward her side. She jerked back; it bounced off a stack of tires, hung in the air a second, and vanished. But as she rushed ahead again another one hit her in the back, and this one was a heavy one, huge and damning; it didn’t latch into her but it hurt and summoned other ones to snag her, slowing her down even more. The heartbeat got louder.

She ripped herself free despite the little agonies that ripped through her and forced herself to keep going. There was no call yet, no black fog. The whole place was so littered with metal she’d never be able to see the edge of the hatch on its own. And still the heartbeat got louder.

Chains whipped and snapped. Hooks caught her, ripped holes in her, ruined her jacket, her skirt, her boots. Blood trickled down from tiny wounds to soak her shirt. Pain crackled through her with every movement. And still the heartbeat pounded in her skull, with footsteps not far enough behind.

Another punch of power hit her in the back. Two chains caught one arm, and a single one the other; she tore the second arm free and wheeled around as she tried to free the first just in time for a massive glowing hooked chain to slam right into her, almost spinning her around again, calling even more chains out of nowhere to snag her with hooks.

There were too many now. Yun-Jin kicked and fought and snarled, pulled as hard as she could against the chains but they wouldn’t snap like they had before. They all but strung her up, arms pulled up and back, fresh ones hooked into her back to keep her from having any real leverage. Her feet were still touching the ground, but if they pulled any harder she’d lose her footing.

He approached, as patiently as ever. She had no choice but to watch.

The monster they called Pinhead said nothing at first. He kept his distance, a few feet or so, which she refused to be grateful for. Yun-Jin glared up at him and waited for something. A word. An insult. Even a change in expression, something smug or expectant. The same way all of them looked when they’d cornered their prey, unless they were wearing a mask.

The same way Ji-Woon looked at her when he had her at his mercy.

“What the hell are you waiting for?” she snapped when the silence finally got to be too much to bear.

“For you to catch your breath.”

“So you can make me scream?” The venom in her words was like acid. What had Ji-Woon said in that first awful trial, when she’d realized she hadn’t come to this place alone? You’ll need your voice, Yun-Jin. Make sure you don’t run yourself too hard.

“Perhaps.” The chains pulled a little, forcing her to stand straighter. One hand shifted and gestured; another chain slithered out of thin air and snagged at the rip in her cheek. She tried to pull her head away, but it caught the edge of the wound and pulled, opening it further down her face. She couldn’t stop a sharp sound from escaping her at that as the pain bloomed and spread like a gas fire. “You will need your focus to understand what I intend to give you.”

“Don’t touch me.” It was almost a growl.

To her surprise the chain at her face vanished, but the rest didn’t let her go. She saw more of them, curling behind him like snakes. Others clattered behind her. It would have been unfair, if she’d ever considered anything fair in her life.

She managed to meet his eyes for a few seconds. Completely black, too far into the whites. There was no emotion she could read there or anywhere else on his face, but some of it was probably forced out of place by all the pins that looked more like nails.

“Hurry up,” she growled as the little pains turned into more insistent ones. “Either kill me or torture me or sacrifice me, but get it over with. I don’t have time for this - game.”

“Patience.” Fresh hooks lodged in her legs, making her choke back the worst of a sound. “Pain is not something to be wasted. It is to be indulged in.”

“Pain?” Despite everything she laughed, breathless against the exhaustion and the growing pinpoints of agony. “Is that what this is about? You think you can be the best at causing pain around here?”

“I am,” he said, with almost no inflection to his voice. “The others are mere supplicants at my altar. Admirable in their intent, but still so far from perfection.”

“Please.” She glared at him, avoiding his eyes now. They were just too much to try and look into. Like Ji-Woon’s, but from the other direction. “This is nothing.”

Somehow the hooks managed to wedge themselves in deeper, all at once. It was such a sudden awful feeling it took her breath away, made her gasp without a sound. He just watched her, but somehow she got the feeling he wasn’t particularly happy with what he’d heard. Was that where all his emotion was? In the chains?

“This is only the beginning.” The hooked chains behind him rose just over his head like some kind of cowl. “Very soon you will understand the greatest intensity of pain you have ever known. Perhaps you will even come to appreciate it.”

Her voice was crawling back, but it was still too weak for her to respond. All she could think was: idiot. Moron. Causing me pain. If it hadn’t been for the rippling agony in her, she would have laughed again; as it was, she opted to save her breath, but not for a scream.

“In this realm, things are so … limited.” Pinhead looked around, like he was judging the ruin of the wrecking yard. “As a guest I dare not question that which controls this place, but I find its hospitality somewhat lacking.”

She might have agreed under other circumstances, even if they were on the same page in two completely different books. As it was, she didn’t want to encourage him.

Because when he killed -

“Very soon you will know just how great my understanding of pain is. You will not doubt me again.”

“Stupid,” she spat, breathless and so far over the edge of afraid she’d turned to sheer recklessness.

He didn’t respond, only watched her. The chains pulled; the hooks tugged her back, but her head was still dropped, still watching the bottom of his coat, or whatever the hell it was he was wearing.

“This is … just physical pain.” Every breath hurt from exertion. Every word made blood trickle out of the corner of her mouth. She fought through it. He didn’t deserve to know how much he was making her hurt. “You think … that’s all … there is?”

She tried to laugh, but it turned into a cough, and then a cry when a hook ripped free from her calf. Another was quick to find a fresh grip.

“Even if you do the worst … you’ll never be the worst. You’ll never … hurt me as bad … as before.”

The chains jerked, lifting her off the ground. She couldn’t fight back a yelp, and tried to kick out of instinct, but she was pulled taut in every direction. Pinhead leaned in, black eyes fixed on her face, his mouth a thin line of what was either anger or disapproval. It was hard to tell through the haze.

“I am the high priest of hell,” he said, every word terse. “I am the master of suffering. I have laid open the mind, body, and soul of thousands and brought them the sweetest agonies they have ever known. Every dimension and realm has thrilled and dreaded my presence. And yet you stand before me, wretched and helpless, and say that I cannot bring you greater suffering than you have already known?”

The pain was unbelievable. Even for what she’d put up with here already, it was bad. Bear traps and chainsaws and knives and swords and spears - they all hurt, but this was little pains building up into a big one. Maybe he was right about that.

But that wasn’t all there was to pain.

She remembered being slumped in a chair, barely able to move and only partly able to see but able to hear very very clearly. Screaming and sobbing, begging and howling, one after another individually and in tandem, a symphony concocted by a deranged mind performed only for two people to hear. All those familiar voices crying out for help, for family, for something, someone, anything, anyone.

And she could do nothing.

And it was all her fault.

They died because of you.

Yun-Jin finally met those terrible black eyes, and despite the pain, the hooks, and the straining tension threatening to tear her apart, she almost smiled.

“You can never do worse than him,” she whispered.

You can never do worse than what I did to myself.

She didn’t quite remember what happened next, except that the pain suddenly ramped up in one awful moment and then there was nothing. Then she was coming to lying in the dirt just past the light of the campfire, alone and completely unharmed with an echo of agony rattling through her.

It didn’t seem like he’d done his absolute worst. The stories she’d heard from those who had been taken by him always seemed worse. He didn’t kill, as far as they knew. Not outright. Not like the others. But death was always the end result, eventually. So he’d probably done something different to her, which was both worrying and a relief given that she couldn’t remember what it was.

She had no interest in letting him take her from this place into an even worse one.

Slowly, her whole body trying to come to grips with the fact that it was still in one piece, Yun-Jin picked herself up and headed toward the light, making sure she didn’t stumble as she went.

And at Lery’s, in the center of the treatment theater, Ji-Woon was flipping through one of Dr. Carter’s textbooks with disinterest when a shadow fell across him. He looked up into a pale, emotionless face that he’d seen around the place before, usually talking to Dr. Carter, sometimes giving him a considering look before moving on.

“Tell me about that woman of yours,” Pinhead said.

Chapter Text

Ji-Woon was used to having people watching him. It had been something like an addiction at first, one that needed more and more to fulfill it until he realized his real purpose in life. Then it had been an easier thirst to quench - to a degree. He still needed the attention, after all. Still needed those eyes on him all the time, or at least when he was out in public.

In private, just one pair was all he needed.

What that meant was that at this point, he knew in an instant when he was being watched. Whether it was in a trial or outside one, he could feel the pressure of someone’s gaze the second it landed on him. Sometimes it was the Entity - and that was its own gripping terror, an attention that didn’t adore or judge but expected, like the way the executives used to do except a million times more dangerous and terrifying - but sometimes it was the survivors, trying to make sure he wasn’t about to turn on them. And sometimes it was other killers, judging him for being less in their eyes, until he took the damn things out in one movement.

It was much more obvious in the fog than anywhere he’d been in before, just because of the total fucking lack of people watching him most of the time. Used to crowds of adoring fans as he was, it was a frustrating experience knowing he wasn’t being seen at almost every second. Especially because he looked his best these days, with the blood and edge of violence. Real violence. The emptiness ached, in a way.

He was in the hospital, lounging in one of the chairs in the treatment theater and idly trying to make heads or tails of one of Dr. Carter’s older psychiatric textbooks, when he felt someone watching him. It wasn’t a flickering glance: they were really watching. Fixed on him, as they should be.

He glanced around without moving. Not Dr. Carter - the man couldn’t move silently, and he hadn’t heard anyone approach. Not a survivor - they wouldn’t stare, or at least not for this long. Not the Entity - though that presence was there, a pressure like the ghost of every person he’d ever killed dragging at his shoulders, which suggested he was up for a trial soon. Who the hell was it?

A tiny movement at the edge of vision drew his gaze up just slightly. The observation room above the theater had a few places where the metal shutters were either missing or jammed open, and as he watched he saw something drift along the very edge of an open window.

Not much floated around here.

Ji-Woon thought for a second, and then he smiled.

“Man, I really hope nobody’s watching me,” he said, a little louder than necessary. “I finally got some time all to myself - it’d be a real shame if someone decided to try and invade my privacy.”

With the book still in hand, he shifted on the uncomfortable chair, stretching until he could hook one leg over the arm and splay himself out that much more visibly.

“I’ve never had to deal with anyone trying to take unsolicited photos of me while I was just trying to live my life.” Every word was light, almost sing-song in the piles of sarcasm he was loading them with. “It’d be so traumatic and invasive if someone had the balls to do that.”

He didn’t have to look up. He knew exactly what was happening as he flipped the book open again and pretended to start reading.

From his spot up on the balcony, Ghost Face lowered the camera and watched Ji-Woon, his irritated glare hidden beneath the flat white-and-black plastic of his mask.

Chapter Text

The trees around the lodge were bad for climbing. Birch, mostly, the bark with a decent grip higher up but too slick lower down for her to get much higher than a few feet. She’d tried, over and over again, to get up to the branches, but it was impossible.

There were better trees outside the snow. The place around the campfire had some good ones, but she knew the survivors were out there, too, and they’d probably attack her and if there was more than one of them there she’d be dead. The coal mine was in a good forest, but the last time she’d gone out there she’d gotten trapped and just barely managed to escape without getting cut to pieces. The swamp was too creepy. Most of the other places were the same way.

But the heavy forest was different. Still dangerous, but there were so many better trees out there, and they were easy to climb, the limbs lower and the bark better. She wasn’t much of a tree expert but she knew a good place to climb when she saw it. Higher up in trees had always been her safe place, where nobody could reach her and half the time couldn’t even see her. She could be alone up there. Think about her art and get inspiration from the world around her.

So Susie left Ormond and went to the cold, rainy forest. Though compared to what she was used to, it wasn’t really that cold.

It was such a huge forest that she had as many trees as she wanted to pick from. She wandered for a little while before finding one with a lot of low branches, just in her reach if she jumped. Susie got a solid grip on one of them close to the trunk of the tree and hauled herself up, hung over it, and waited to see if it broke. When it didn’t, she got to her feet.

It would be a good place to relax, she thought to herself as she made her way into the upper branches. With enough leaves around to block out most of the rain, high enough that the scary woman who lived nearby wouldn’t see her, and out of the way enough that nobody else was going to find her. She could just sit and think about things. About this place. This … half-dream, half-nightmare that Frank had gotten them all into.

That way she could keep the anger down. Instead of blowing up at him and getting into a screaming match, or having him get violent, or having everybody else turn on her, she could work things out. Yeah. That was a good thing. This was for the best.

She grabbed a thinner branch higher up with both hands, and pulled.

It snapped.

Susie flailed wildly, trying to grab the next closest branch, but she couldn’t grab it before she fell back and plunged into the branches below. She didn’t weigh much, but gravity was dragging her down, smashing her into everything it could manage, and they were breaking as she went, giving way as easily as the first one. Until she got far enough down.

Those branches were older and thicker. When she hit those, they didn’t give way: they just hurt. She yelped at every hit and tried to grab at least one to keep from hitting the ground, but the rain had made them too wet to hold onto in a hurry. She couldn’t get a grip.

Then there was nothing left to break her fall, and she hit the ground on her side. Hard.

For a while she didn’t move, or make a sound. She didn’t know how badly she was hurt, but every breath made her chest sting, and the arm she’d landed on was throbbing with a fresh pain she could recognize as a broken bone. Realistically, she knew none of this was really a problem; every wound they’d gotten out here had healed up no problem, and not after very long. Even the dead could come back to life if they waited a little while.

But that didn’t stop things from hurting, right now. And they hurt even more as she tried to stand up.

Susie managed to roll onto her front and push herself to her knees with her good arm. Now she was cold, and the rain was getting her more wet with every passing second, which made the cold even worse. Everything felt bruised where it didn’t feel broken. If she could just force herself up and make her way back to the fog, she could get to Ormond and recover there, and …

But what if the others saw her come back, hurt from her own bad luck? They’d laugh at her, or worse, take pity on her. They didn’t think she could do what she needed to do here. They never had before. If she went back now, limping and cradling a broken arm, they’d just assume she was still pathetic and useless. She couldn’t stand the idea.

Which meant she had to wait here, in the creepy forest, getting colder by the second, until her arm healed.

Just as she thought things could get worse, she heard someone approaching.

There was no time to run. She looked over and saw the huge woman that had chased Joey with an axe and split Frank’s head with a hatchet appear from behind a tree. She stopped and stared at Susie through a half-mask shaped like a rabbit’s head, which should have been ridiculous but on her was as terrifying as if it had been half a human skull. The eyeholes of the mask were just black pits; Susie couldn’t see even the gleam of her eyes underneath.

The woman was deadly with her hatchets. All she had to do was throw one. Kill the trespasser on her territory, the same way Legion did to the few survivors that had already tried to creep around the ski lodge looking for tools. There was no running, no protecting herself; Susie just watched her through the cracks in her own mask and waited to die, trying not make any sounds that absolutely weren’t crying.

It wasn’t like it would be permanent, she told herself. It would just - hurt, for a while. And then it’d be over. And she could lie about what had happened. The others would believe her.

None of that stopped the part of her that hadn’t fully come to grips with her new reality yet from screaming no no no no no i don’t want to die.

The woman … just watched her. Then looked up at the damaged tree, where most of the broken branches had either snapped off entirely or were hanging by bark skins to what was left of their base. Her mask followed the broken trail down to the slightly less damaged branches, and then to Susie, who instinctively put a hand over her broken arm to keep it from moving too much as the cold started to seep in and make her want to shiver. The axe was right there, right at the woman’s side, gripped in a single hand that could still no doubt cut someone in half, especially if that someone was two-thirds the height of its wielder.

And then, surprisingly and terrifyingly, the woman smiled. Not nastily, not like a rabid dog showing all its teeth before it attacked - it was almost a nice smile. A little awkward in an attempt to be friendly but genuine all the same.

“Poor little one.”

Her voice was deep, and rough, and there was an accent Susie couldn’t really place, but it wasn’t mean, either. Not exactly warm but not a threat, and for a second she thought maybe she wasn’t about to die. That thought flickered when the woman suddenly strode right up to her, but instead of burying the axe in her chest to end her suffering she crouched down and reached for the broken arm.

Susie flinched away out of instinct, but the woman’s hand took hold anyway, pressing down not anywhere near gently enough to not hurt. When she found the break Susie yelped again, then tried to bite down on another a second later. The woman tsked and let go just long enough to shift her grip on her axe, and then -

She picked Susie up bodily like she was a child again. It was so quick and effective she didn’t have time to protest. She ended up cradled against the woman’s body, shocked into silence and then suddenly humiliated. She didn’t need to be carried, she could walk, it wasn’t her leg that was broken -

“Stay still,” said the woman as Susie tried to squirm out of her grip. “I will help you.”

“Help me?” she squeaked, and cursed internally at herself. “I don’t need help! Just let me leave, I can - ”

“I will help you,” the woman repeated, and this time her voice brooked no argument.

She carried Susie through the damp forest toward the hulking cabin at the center. It was big and dark and loomed, and only Frank had ever gotten inside, and even then only for a minute or so. He’d talked about skulls and candles and animal skins, a whole chandelier made of antlers, but then she’d split his skull open with a hatchet and he didn’t have time to take a souvenir. Now, Susie was going to see the inside, whether she really wanted to or not.

Julie had done a little digging, and found out the woman was called the Huntress by the survivors. As she carried Susie through the heavy door to the inside of the cabin, it was pretty clear why that was the case.

Like Frank had said, the place was covered in candles and the remains of hunted animals. There was a chandelier made of antlers, and furs on the walls and floor, and skulls in places. Some were animal. Some were human. It didn’t do much to help the terror that had been steadily building since she first saw the woman, but she tried to remind herself that even if she died and this crazy woman made her skull into a trophy, she’d still come back good as new a little while later.

Probably.

With an unexpected gentleness for what she knew of the woman, Susie was set down on a pile of heavy, soft furs by a lit fireplace. They were a little worn down, but given her other option was hard wooden floor, they were comfortable enough. They also weren’t covered in bloodstains, which was a positive thing. Maybe she really did want to help. But what could she do for a broken arm?

Susie watched as the woman moved around the main room of the cabin. It felt bigger than it had in her few trials here. A huge log pile by the door was there to feed the fireplace. There were bags and things piled against the walls. There was a bed tucked away in a corner, heaped with blankets. And there were axes on the walls, hatchets on the table in the center of the room. They gleamed dangerously in the firelight.

But so far none had been turned on her.

When the woman came back, she knelt down on the furs next to Susie and took her arm again. Any resistance went ignored. Any protests got no response. She pulled off the hoodie, despite Susie trying to hold onto it with her good hand, and then got to work setting her arm in a makeshift splint that was just torn cloth and broken wood.

“It’s not that bad,” Susie tried to insist, but the woman only looked at her with a faint smile before going back to work. It really wasn’t that bad, but every move made it hurt more. At least when it was set, it couldn’t get much worse. And at least she still had her mask on.

When it was done the Huntress folded up the hoodie a little inexpertly and set it aside. Susie took this to mean she wasn’t going anywhere, which was worrying, but this clearly wasn’t going to be a fatal stay. At least in the short term. So maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

“Um … I didn’t mean to trespass,” she said, trying to sound calm and collected and hearing that fail as soon as the words reached the air. She didn’t want to apologize, but somehow this didn’t seem like the time to be aggressive. Using her knife would be difficult right now, especially given the close proximity of some of those axes. “I just wanted to climb some trees.”

“For?”

“To … think.” But that wasn’t exactly true - it was to not think. To let her brain shut down in the chill of the rainy forest, so she could start it back up the right way. Did the real reason matter, here and now? “I didn’t know the branches were weak.”

“Not weak. Dying.” That not-exactly-visible gaze was fixed on her. “Always dying, never dead."

Susie looked back at her, knowing her own expression of uncertainty wasn’t visible through the cracks in her mask. It didn’t make sense, and then in an instant it did. Ormond had been the same way. Julie always said it, back before this place. A dying town that wouldn’t die.

Was this whole nightmare of a place the same way?

The Huntress suddenly lifted a hand. Susie flinched back automatically, but it only found her hair and stroked it, rough fingers twining through the dyed strands. She waited for a sudden grab, a yank, something to hurt, but -

It never came. There was a little prickle of pain when the Huntress found a tangle, but the woman just teased it loose and kept stroking. Almost petting her.

It was a little humiliating, and kind of annoying, but at the same time the warmth of the fire was helping her get dry, and the pain in her arm was fading a little, and even though the whole place was decorated like an animal’s worst nightmare she didn’t feel like she was in danger. Probably as long as she didn’t run. The Huntress was a predator like them, but in a more close-to-an-animal sense. Anything that fled was prey.

Maybe that was why she brought her back now. Because Susie hadn’t run. There hadn’t been a point. So she got … mercy, or at least something that seemed like it.

After a little while, the woman stopped stroking her hair and got up to fetch a hairbrush. An actual one, if kind of primitive. She sat back down and started brushing Susie’s hair instead of just stroking it, which - didn’t make much sense. Maybe she just liked doing it. Her own hair was tightly pulled back, or maybe just too short to see; there was a veil over the back of her head, hiding any sign of hair or skin from sight.

And then she started humming, something Susie knew she did but hadn’t heard much herself. Something quiet and calm. Almost personal, just between them. No words, just music.

There were way, way worse ways to get caught around here. She knew that almost too well by now. She’d been trapped and hacked up and beaten and stabbed and one of them had even tried to eat her. Here, in this place, she wasn’t being attacked; she was … well, being taken care of. She couldn’t remember the last time that had happened, even before they’d ended up in the fog.

Maybe it would backfire later; maybe she’d end up being cooked over the fire. Or maybe she’d do something wrong, like walk too fast on her way out, and get a hatchet to the head for it. Somehow that didn’t really matter. Right here and now, she was, for lack of a better word, safe.

And so, listening to the humming, feeling the brush carefully work through her hair, feeling little pinpricks of pain in her scalp and arm and feeling the warmth of the fire fighting off the cold of the rain, Susie drifted off.

Chapter Text

Julie watched from a distance as a figure in black scrambled toward a generator.

She followed it, dropping down off the broken balcony around the ski lodge and heading for the corner where walls hid the thing from sight. As she went, she felt her heartbeat go quiet - knew, out of time and practice and instinct, that she was all but invisible now, at least from hearing, and that was more important than anyone might think - and that gave her a chance to stop at the edge of the walls and peer around them to see that figure a little closer.

Black clothes, black tattoos, a little black witch’s hat on curly red hair. Not dyed, not auburn. Real red, the kind some girls dreamed about having.

She gripped the edge of the wall and watched.

Mikaela was new, and hadn’t adapted well, but she was catching on, the same way they all did. She wasn’t a fighter, or a runner. She looked like, and apparently was, a witch, able to cast little magic spells on the curse-bound skulls that made life a hell of a lot more difficult for the killers than it had any right to be. She screamed when they cut her and tried to throw things and got angry when she missed and got in the way of other kills, voice high-pitched and panicked and grating like a nail on glass when she was afraid, which was most of the time.

Julie had never liked goths, or any of the wannabes and fakers that tried to wear black all the time. She hadn’t liked the wiccan girls, either, with their quirky little obsessions and fake tribal wear and ruminations on the natural world and whining about how they could cast spells and lay curses. And she really hated the hippie girls who raided their mother’s closets for twenty year old clothes and made flower crowns and tried to be so philosophical all the time, which just made them sound like idiots. They’d especially gotten to irritate her in the years after she met Frank, who was a real philosopher and understood the things they’d barely even read.

Mikaela was all of those things wrapped up into one neat little package, from her stupid hats to her black faux-leather long jacket to that tasseled wrap skirt she wore sometimes that tripped her up and got her caught on pallets. She was obnoxious. The very sight of her set Julie’s teeth on edge.

Frank had made it very clear what he thought of her. Of course he was as pissed off about the totems as anyone else, but he also thought she was hot. He liked the tattoos and the hair. He liked the exposed midriff and the way she screamed and ran as soon as she saw one of them coming after her. That wouldn’t last forever, but for now, it always made him laugh.

Jealousy wasn’t much of a thing in the fog. There wasn’t a point. They were stuck here, with each other, for the rest of forever; Julie wasn’t going to begrudge him occasionally wandering off, as long as he didn’t begrudge her the same. Nonetheless, she’d overheard him talking to Joey, listening in from the balcony above as he talked about the things he wanted to do to the redheaded piece of ass the next time he got in a trial with her and had a mori ready to burn.

It was mostly just bluster, but it had made her knuckles go white where she stood, anger and disgust boiling in her, and she told herself it was because she didn’t like the witch and didn’t want her boyfriend’s hands anywhere near the fake leather and stupid tattoos.

But Julie wasn’t quite as capable of self-delusion as other people. Not anymore.

Watching Mikaela work, she tried to focus on the idea of burying a knife in her back. Or slamming her face into the generator and breaking that pretty little nose, making her squeal and bleed all over the snow and dead grass. Or … or stabbing her in the knee and crippling her, making her try to scramble away on one good leg. Or …

Julie glared, and tightened her grip on the wall.

She had always known, without a doubt, that she liked boys. She’d dated them even before Frank, though he’d been the ultimate, the soulmate, the perfect man for her. Every movie she watched she pined after them: the bad boys, the gangsters, even the heroes, as long as they were brutal and violent enough for her tastes. She’d burned out a tape of Heathers rewatching it over and over again just for J.D., and not long after that Frank had come into her life.

But then she’d ended up here, thanks to Frank. And here in this place, she’d met girls who were completely unlike the ones back in Ormond. Ones who looked death in the eye without flinching, who tried to fight back, who could put their money where their mouth was and refused to ever back down. They weren’t all shallow little shits who expected her to live up to their standards.

And a lot of them weren’t that bad looking. She’d tried to tell herself she just liked their fashion, or at least the way they wore it.

So in this place, with no audience and no consequences, her thoughts had … wandered. When she was alone, stalking the fog, sometimes seeing those other girls out there trying to steal or scavenge. She’d just barely admitted it to Susie, who’d been less surprised than she was entirely comfortable with, and sometimes the two of them would find somewhere private and, well … experiment. But it had never gone all that far. Mostly because they knew each other a little too well.

Frank had always been into both men and women, something she’d figured out early on and something he refused to openly admit to even now. It was something he had to handle on his own, and something that Danny’s arrival all that time ago did not help with, but Julie had been certain of her own sexuality. Frank had been her perfect man. Danny, once he showed up, had been everything she thought she’d wanted in a dark, dangerous monster. She was into men, and only men.

Until she got here. Until the cold emptiness of the fog forced the parts of her she’d long since pushed away back into focus. Until she saw there were women in the world that weren’t shallow or cruel for the sake of it or bound by one specific stereotype and perfectly content with it.

And as she watched Mikaela shove a curl back behind her ear, the silver fastenings on her clothes glittering in the gray light, her tattoos sharp and dark on her skin, the line of her jaw sharp against the generator’s shadow, she didn’t know if she wanted to rip her face off or try to kiss her.

There were only a few seconds left before her heartbeat was going to come back, flooding the minds of everyone nearby.

Julie snapped open her knife and charged.

Mikaela heard the knife and turned around, shock turning to horror turning to anger, and she ducked out of the way of a stab just in time. The knife scored the generator, sending sparks into the air.

“Stay the hell away from my boyfriend,” Julie snarled, backing her way from the generator. For a second the anger turned into confusion, but she must have made the connection between the masks, and it came rushing back in a hurry.

“Stay away from him? Tell him to stay the hell away from me!” Mikaela’s hands were fumbling along the frozen wood of the wall where it met the stone half-wall base, probably trying to find a weapon she could use if Julie took her down. “If you’re his girlfriend, you should be able to keep him in line!”

“I’m not a possessive bitch.” Julie closed in, but there were ways out from here; all Mikaela had to do was pick one and run for it. “You keep out of his sight and he’ll lose interest. Maybe wear an actual shirt for once in your life.”

“Oh my god. That’s an incredibly shitty thing to say.” She was still furious, but appalled, too. “It’s my fault he can’t back off?”

It was shitty. Even Julie, high school graduate of 1996, had to admit it. But she was angry just looking at her, and it wasn’t all because of Frank.

“Just - stay the fuck away from him!”

She slashed out, but she was too far away to hit. Mikaela took off. Julie chased her, felt the frenzy kick in, and closed in just in time for her to turn and realize they were too close.

The knife dug across her forearm, splitting the tattoos, sending blood arcing into the air. It splashed across Julie’s mask and made Mikaela yelp and take off again, given fresh speed by the pain, and even as other heartbeats pulsed wildly in her head Julie fought their siren call back and went after the one in front of her.

Red hair, not quite like blood, didn’t hide well in Ormond. And Mikaela didn’t know how to keep from whining in pain. It was easy to find her once the frenzy wore off and the world came back into place, tucked into a corner, gripping her bloody arm tight in an effort to staunch the bleeding.

Julie wanted to loom over her. Wanted to see her snuffling and crying in pain, wanted to see her pathetic, stupid, as bad as all the other girls back home who would have screamed and collapsed in the face of her knife. She’d dreamed about it. Thought about all of them learning not to fuck with her, not anymore. And in that dark little corner it should have been easy. Mikaela should have been a sad sight, something truly pathetic.

But as Julie’s shadow fell over her she looked up, and she was glaring. There were tears of pain in her eyes, but no fear.

“Well?” she said, clearly trying to hold back a sob. “Aren’t you going to stab me again?”

Her makeup was running, and there was blood on her midriff and on her clothes, red glinting as much as the silver fastenings and sigils. There was hair in her face. Her glasses were ready to slip off her nose. Patches of her clothes were damp with snow and filthy with blood and dirt. And she was glaring, waiting for more pain, for an inevitable death, ready to face it.

The Entity’s not-really-a-voice in her head called for blood, for sacrifice. She hadn’t done enough yet. Hunger needed to be sated. Cut meat. Bleed meat. Sacrifice meat.

Julie felt her lungs go tight, making it hard to breathe. Her knuckles whitened around her knife. Her head spun, the sound in her ears like the rush of the frenzy.

She kicked out. Just once, hard. Mikaela jerked aside and narrowly avoided the sneaker that slammed into the wall next to her head, leaving an imprint of blood and mud on the wood.

She should have followed it up with some comment, or a threat. Another reminder to stay away from Frank, or to not fuck with her, or something. Anything. But the words wouldn’t come.

Julie turned and immediately broke into another frenzy to try and drown out the chaos in her own head. There were other people in the trial. Other people to kill. Other people who didn’t make her face prickle and her chest feel tight, who weren’t everything she hated and somehow at the same time something she wanted.

Chapter Text

The wrecking yard was a mess of broken cars and machinery, overlaid by the stink of gas and motor oil and rotting corpses. It was huge, with houses at either end and a gas station in the center, the whole place strangely laid out but not in a particularly nonsensical way. They knew where things were by now, and even Élodie had gotten a grip on it after a while.

It was a relatively safe place to raid, though not without its dangers. Its occupant often let them wander in without attacking, if he was there at all, but every so often someone died there, their head smashed in against a car without warning. It meant they had to be cautious, but at least they didn’t have to watch their feet.

Élodie would have preferred to be somewhere else. Looking for one of the libraries she knew existed in the fog, or somewhere abandoned that she could ransack before it collapsed into the Void. But she had a goal. Or, rather, they had a goal.

The newest arrival to the campfire was a woman without a nightmare on her heels. Nothing new had showed up, and no new hellscape had appeared to struggle on. They considered it a fair trade for gaining a fucking cenobite, of all things, to kill them without anyone else to help out, but Élodie knew the Entity didn’t play fair. It just hadn’t found something to go with this woman that met its standards for unrelenting slaughter.

But this woman had brought something new with her: actual, literal magic. Of course it existed, but Élodie had never run into it quite like this, and in all honesty, it kind of annoyed her. Mikaela was friendly and relatively optimistic and introduced herself as a barista and horror story enthusiast, and also as a witch, which matched her evident aesthetic. And when they doubted she was actually capable of casting spells, she was dragged to a trial with them and proved what she could do.

Of all the skills they’d learned here, this was probably one of the most useful ones, right after stabbing a killer in the back so hard and deep it stunned them for a good five seconds. Totems turned into something that benefitted them as a group, instead of individually or being nothing but a problem. And so Mikaela became part of the group around the campfire almost immediately, which was grating but probably warranted.

As a nearly-lifelong occultist, Élodie was a little irked by Mikaela’s presence. If it hadn’t been for her clear and actual abilities, she would have seriously disliked her, positive attitude or not. People who messed around with the occult for fun were obnoxious at best and a serious problem at worst, always drawing the attention of dangerous things and destroying the lives of everyone around them - which, apparently, wasn’t all that far from what had happened.

Still, she couldn’t help but hold a grudge. And then someone had asked her if she could read fortunes in tea leaves, which made Élodie grimace, particularly when the answer was yes - only for her to follow it up with the fact that she could apparently read fortunes in any kind of food, given some preparation and certain circumstances.

“Foodstuff divination in the West predates the arrival of tea,” she’d said, looking bright and enthusiastic. “It’s all a matter of focus and perspective.”

“So if we go find a bag of rotten coffee grounds, you could read the future in that?” Élodie had asked, unable to hold it back and ignoring the look Felix gave her when she said it.

“Sure! If there’s one out here, I’ll give it a shot.”

She hadn’t quite been expecting that answer. But if Mikaela was willing to prove it, Élodie was willing to give her a chance, and so the two of them were heading for the gas station, which was the most likely to have the food they needed. In particular, it had an ancient coffee machine that still worked, and would probably keep working even if they tore it apart. The Entity didn’t like change.

It was cold and dark, the place only barely lit up by the fluorescent sign overhead as they approached and a few bare bulbs in the store itself.

“Do you need something specific?” she asked, without looking away from the store itself. In trials, there was always the chance it was holding the staircase that led to the basement. Outside of them, she didn’t really want to know.

“Something wet works best.” The response was a little strained. Mikaela hadn’t gotten used to how bad places in the fog could smell yet, and the wrecking yard was second only to the meat plant in terms of sheer, overwhelming stink. “With … bits. More salsa than soup.”

“I don’t think we’re going to find either of those in there.”

Cautiously, they crept into the gas station and started picking through the shelves. They were mostly bare, just like in trials. The vending machines were partly stocked, the glass fronts broken, and any coolers that might have held frozen food had long since shut off and rotted out.

Élodie looked at a stuffed bear on one shelf, almost black from age and mold and rot, and wondered if it was something stolen along with this place or a cruel joke from the Entity. For a thing with an intellect too alien to fathom, it had a surprising grip on irony.

“Find anything yet?” Mikaela had moved behind the register and was digging around in the cabinets there.

“Nothing useful.” Élodie turned away from the bear and pulled out a drawer that almost broke in half when she laid hands on it. Inside were little bags of what looked like trail mix. “Unless you can read portents in rock-hard raisins.”

“I could give it a shot.”

She gave Mikaela’s general direction a withering glance. Witches … of course they were real, but they weren’t supposed to be like her. Magic was a dangerous thing, and using it as freely as she had, even at those low levels, wasn’t a good thing. Blessing coffee beans would end up backfiring eventually.

Not that it really mattered here.

They searched for another few minutes before Mikaela suddenly jumped up.

“Here! This’ll work!”

Élodie shoved a box back into a corner and came over to see what it was, then raised an eyebrow at Mikaela.

“Expired canned ravioli?”

“It might not be expired.”

“I haven’t seen that font on anything produced since the early 90’s.”

“Well, it should work either way.” Mikaela turned the can over in her hands, trying to find a way to open it. “We just need a knife to get it open.”

It took much less time to find a sharp piece of metal than it did to find the can, which didn’t surprise either of them in the least. They leaned back when it pierced the lid, expecting a smell as bad or worse than the wrecking yard itself and possibly a spray of decades-old copied meat and pasta, but instead they just got the faint smell of something like rotten tomatoes.

Once they had a big enough piece cut off, Mikaela turned the can upside down and thumped the side of it. The ravioli slowly slid out, landing with a splutch on the gas station floor, sauce splattering a little further than Élodie expected.

They both leaned in. Mikaela focused on the pile of ancient but apparently not rotten pasta.

“I’m surprised it wasn’t just one solid piece,” Élodie murmured.

“Probably enough moisture in there to keep it from getting dry,” Mikaela said without looking away. “And if it was sealed, there’s nowhere for the moisture to go even if it did escape.”

“Learn a lot about food production making coffee, I take it.”

“Oh, sure. We did sandwiches too.”

The joke having fallen flat, Élodie went quiet as Mikaela stared at the mess on the floor. What she could possibly see in it was a closed book to Élodie, who dealt with real things: signs and sigils, warnings carved into stone and wood. There were hundreds of them out there, and it was up to her and what she’d learned to decide which were worth paying attention to. It was different from this. Different from whatever the hell kind of witchcraft Mikaela had picked up in her life.

“I think … there’s a warning,” Mikaela said after a little while, frowning down at the pasta. “But this whole place is dangerous, so that’s not much help.”

“Not really,” Élodie agreed in a tone as dry as a desert.

“There’s a portent of death, right here.” She pointed at a spot that, as far as Élodie could tell, looked no different from anywhere else. “Which isn’t necessarily literal death, but given where we are … ”

“How about a portent of escape?”

“It doesn’t really work like that.”

Élodie couldn’t stop herself from raising a disdainful eyebrow, which Mikaela saw.

“Look - this place is nothing but bad energy. It’s influencing the way I can read things. And you said you wanted the future, and around here, death and danger are the future, no matter what we do.” Her face was slightly flushed, either through anger or embarrassment, and Élodie tried to back down, at least internally.

“Then how about some concrete answers? How about … who we’re going to have to face the next time we’re both in a trial together.”

“Okay. Let’s see.” Mikaela looked down at the mess, and Élodie followed suit, trying to see whatever Mikaela saw in case something gave itself away. “There’s … looks like a wave, here, but nobody’s really water based. It could be referential, not direct.”

“Someone endless? Or maybe it means drowning.” Élodie’s thoughts flew. “The Nurse suffocates people. Not the same, but close.”

“Possibly.” Mikaela turned her head. “Oh … maybe you’re right! Over here, this looks like a plus. Doesn’t it? That ravioli’s split right at the center. Like the red cross.”

“Looks more like an X to me.”

“It’s a matter of perspective.”

“Everything’s a matter of perspective. If we’re looking at it from this side, then shouldn’t it be - ”

They both realized it at the same time, and froze. Mikaela had a natural sixth sense. Élodie had one built through years of dealing with danger and monsters.

They weren’t alone in the room.

As one, they looked over at each other without moving. Nobody else had come into the gas station. Nobody had attacked them yet. And there was nobody they could see anywhere nearby, even out the windows, but the other presence was very, very close by.

There was the sound of breathing just on the edge of hearing.

Almost right on top of them.

They both took off at the same second. Mikaela bolted out the door, hand hitting the doorframe so hard the empty ravioli tin flew back into the gas station; Élodie vaulted an empty window frame and narrowly avoided colliding with the gas pumps outside. Neither one of them looked back as they ran.

In the not-quite-empty gas station, the air moved out of sync with the world around it, watching them go. Once they were out of sight, the almost-invisible figure turned back to the mess on the floor.

He left it there, after considering cleaning it up. It’d disappear eventually, or something would eat it, or - and this was the hope - some trespasser would step on it and slip and crack their skull on the floor, reminding them that this place wasn’t free game just because he wasn’t always around to stop them. Of course, that still left the question of what the hell the girls had been doing. He’d come in too late to hear the initial plan, and the details had just been confusing.

Survivors did some bizarre things to keep themselves from going insane.

Chapter Text

There were already enough hooks in any given trial; it seemed unfair to let him bring in more.

But he brought them anyway, and attached to chains, they spun out of nowhere, catching clothes and skin, forcing them to tear themselves free unless they wanted to be held in place while something just far enough from human to be terrifying closed in on them.

Yun-Jin had long since learned to just rip herself out of their grip rather than try to pull them out to prevent more pain, but that didn’t always stop her from getting caught anyway. This time, she’d torn her arm free from one of them so forcefully she’d stumbled, and then he came out from behind a tree and cut her down.

They weren’t doing very well in the trial, so she felt justified in taking her chances. At least this way she’d get something out of it.

“There’s - better people to go after than us,” she snarled as he lifted her off the ground with the chains.

“Are there.”

“We’re not a challenge - we’re not even a threat.” Yun-Jin kicked at him, fought, tried to dig her nails into the black leather of his outfit to no avail.

“I do not seek challenges or find anything threatening.”

“But you can’t do what you want, right?” His hand against her back where he was holding her in place was strangely light; it might have been a key to escape, except it clearly wasn’t working. It was like he didn’t want to touch her if he didn’t have to.

“You could never comprehend what I want,” he said, and she glared at the oncoming hook.

“You want pain.” The others had told her that, eventually, and it was more and more obvious with every passing trial. “There’s people here who think they’re better than you - ”

She hit the hook, making her shoulder explode in agony. When the lights cleared he was already starting to turn away, looking for the next person to drag toward sacrifice.

“They are better than you!” she snarled.

He stopped and looked at her, his expression as distant as ever.

“We have already had this conversation.”

“And you haven’t changed my mind.” Her fingers closed around the meathook where it had punched through her shoulder. “You’ll never change anybody else’s, either.”

“Arrogant.” He brought up a hand; a thin coil of chain slithered around her forearm, the hook threatening to latch into her palm and tear her hand away from its grip. “Those with sense have already acknowledged that I am superior in the realm of pain.”

“Does that include him?” she hissed. He had to know who she was talking about; Ji-Woon had never made a secret of the fact that they knew each other, mostly to try and keep her pain to himself.

“Some have yet to learn.”

“Teach him.” She tried to smile, thin and razorlike. “Unless you think he really is better.”

The chain tightened around her arm to the point of abrupt agony, the hook ripping a long bloody line across her hand. She yelped, and Pinhead leaned in.

“I do not do favors, woman.” There was a hiss in his tone. “Nor can I be goaded.”

“It’s not a favor.” In the distance, she could see the others running for generators, for her, and for the box that would drag him away. She had to hurry. “He’s more arrogant than anyone here. He knows he’s the best at causing pain, but he’s never been in any real pain himself.”

There was no response. Just those depthless black eyes, watching her coldly.

“Teach him he’s wrong,” she managed, “and - I’ll go with you. To the place you take people when you kill - when you don’t kill them.”

His brow raised, just slightly.

“You speak as if I need permission to do so now.”

“Outside a trial.”

It killed her to say it. She didn’t want to go. Even the thought made her cringe inside, want to scream and rip the whole world apart, but - it might be a fair trade. If he could make Ji-Woon suffer even a fraction of what he deserved, then it would be worth it. It had to be worth it.

For a long several seconds, Pinhead was silent, eyes fixed on hers. Then something like a smile pulled at the corner of his mouth. It wasn’t a pleasant one.

“You may regret that offer.”

“It - wouldn’t be the first time.”

In the distance, someone found the box and started to try and stop the incoming chain hunt. He leaned back, and suddenly blue and white light spread across him like spiderwebs, taking him away from her hook and all the way across the trial ground to hunt down someone else.

And as someone barreled toward her to pull her down, Yun-Jin thought about regret, and how there was nothing she could ever do that would surpass the biggest one in her life.

He couldn’t even die anymore, after all. She had to take her revenge where she could.

There was a sound on the edge of hearing that caught Ji-Woon’s attention.

It was a faint, distant, musical noise, something that shouldn’t have carried like it did but managed it anyway. Hollow and sad, and maybe even a little threatening. It was almost captivating the longer he listened to it.

It didn’t take long before he got up from his spot in the treatment theater and started to go looking for the source. Something new Dr. Carter was trying? Some surprise gift from the Entity? A survivor, maybe, thinking they had some privacy and trying to work out their frustration through creativity? He’d be willing to let them live if that was the case - as long as they were willing to take constructive criticism and advice, of course.

It was hard to pinpoint in the institute’s empty halls, but after a little searching it got louder. He tracked it down, ears attuned to every sound, and eventually there it was: a little box on the floor in a corner, twisting and shifting as he watched it.

He reached out. The slats and moving pieces of the box snapped themselves shut, and it went silent. Carefully, knowing even inanimate objects couldn’t be trusted around here, Ji-Woon picked it up by the corners; it stayed resolutely still and silent, but the memory of the little song was curling through his head, lacing with his own mental melodies.

In his hands it barely weighed anything, despite looking like it should have been a lot heavier. It was made of shiny black lacquered wood and pristine gold inlay, without a crack or line on it to show where the pieces of it had been moving before. He turned it over and over, trying to find a way to get it open again, wanting to hear that music.

But puzzles had never been something he liked. Or at least, literal ones. The puzzle of how to best get someone to scream had always been one he enjoyed. This was outside his interest and expertise.

“How the hell do you work?” he grumbled at it, trying to press what looked like buttons and getting nothing, nails scoring along the wood and finding no cracks to give way. “I saw you moving. Open up.”

It refused. Ji-Woon got bored of that in a hurry, and normally he would have given up in less than thirty seconds, but the song was still echoing in his skull. He wanted to hear it again. He wasn’t going to give up until he did.

“Okay.” He held the box in one hand and flicked out a knife with the other. “I’m going to ask one more time before I start breaking pieces off.” He was well aware that talking to a music box was the sign of a complete and total nutjob, but Dr. Carter was in a trial and nobody else came into the institute that often. “Open up.”

The gold inlay rippled. To his surprise, pieces of wood suddenly split and pulled back, opening the top of the box just enough that he could look inside, but all he saw was darkness, and more importantly, there was still no music.

“Are you fucking serious?” He shook the box and tilted it, trying to see what could possibly be going on in there.

At which point the chains shot out.

They had hooks on the ends, of course. And the hooks found a grip directly on his face, catching under his jaw and on his forehead, digging in hard and fast and deep. His knife clattered to the floor and vanished as he dragged at the box, which only made the hooks pull harder.

Every swear he’d ever known erupted as he tried to rip the damn things off him. They didn’t want to let go, but they came off one at a time as he tore them free from his skin and in some cases muscle. When he tore the last one off he hurled the whole thing as hard as he could down the hall, where it clattered, bounced, and rolled, stopping at the feet of someone dressed all in black.

With pain still rattling through him like an electric shock, Ji-Woon glared at Pinhead, a man he was barely familiar with. He visited Dr. Carter from time to time - the two of them had an even better sort of terrifying camaraderie than Ji-Woon had developed with the doctor - and it was Dr. Carter who’d absently mentioned he was a hell priest. Ghost Face was apparently somewhat more familiar with him, at least informationally, and called him Pinhead, which was easier and probably slightly more accurate, as far as Ji-Woon could tell.

They’d spoken a few times - once about Yun-Jin, and the rest about torture - but they didn’t have any kind of real relationship. Not even a negative one. They functioned in very different worlds here.

Pinhead glanced down at the box, and then back up at him. His expression was one of mild interest, but that wasn’t anything new, either; from what Ghost Face had told him, the man was a torturer at least as bad as Ji-Woon was, and he saw anyone and everyone as a potential target.

“I see you found my gift,” he said.

“That thing’s yours?” Ji-Woon said, voice strained to the edge of a snarl. His face hurt.

“Yes.” Pinhead leaned down and picked it up; the chains drew themselves back inside, and the slats shut again. “Or at least, in this realm, you may consider it so.”

“Yeah? Well, keep it under control.” Ji-Woon gestured to the bloody wounds on his head. “I barely even touched it and it attacked me. What the hell kind of gift is that?”

“One meant to see how you could handle it.” In those partly black-gloved hands, the box flickered with a web of blue-white light and vanished. “You really don’t know the joys of pain, do you.”

“Oh, believe me, I know those joys inside and out.” The lack of evident weapon made Ji-Woon relax slightly. “I just don’t need them done to myself.”

There was no response. Pinhead only watched him as he wiped some of the blood off his face and smoothed back his hair.

Something stung his hand as it reached the back of his head. He glanced up.

There was another chain there, ending with another hook, just barely caught in his skin. He tugged once, pulling it free.

And then there were more. Too many more.

Chains came out of nowhere, hooking every limb and dragging him back, then up, then stretching him out. They caught him in the back and chest, on the legs - everywhere, and it was such a sudden and abrupt agony he made a noise he’d never expected to hear out of himself.

There was no way to try and escape. Every move he made just made the chains pull tighter. Even if he’d been able to pull out a knife, he had no way to throw it.

“I’ve heard it said that you are a connoisseur of pain,” said Pinhead, almost conversationally, as he walked toward where Ji-Woon was struggling to try and free himself, or at least hold back the pain. “But as this demonstrates, that is all you are. You lack a fundamental knowledge that would truly make you a master of such things.”

Every word in him was as bad a swear as he could manage, but even those he wasn’t willing to risk letting out in case they turned into a scream of either pain or rage. At this point, it was up in the air which one was more powerful.

“At the furthest point of agony is pleasure - and of pleasure, agony.” Pinhead’s slow, inevitable walk was bringing him closer, step by step. “I’m certain you know this. Even those who have never even come close to knowing what we do are familiar with the idea.”

“We?” snarled Ji-Woon through tightly clenched teeth.

“Yes. We.” Pinhead stopped in front of him, expression as muted as ever but his eyes moving to the various bloody places where the hooks were leaving their mark. “The Cenobites. Those denizens of hell who truly understand the greatest pleasures that all of time and space have to offer.”

Wasn’t that his stage name - ? Ji-Woon gave up on thinking, and went back to rage. It was easier to let run the show, particularly because what was coming up behind it was fear, and like every monster he wasn’t about to let that show.

“Perhaps I should introduce you.” The chains pulled; Ji-Woon made a noise through his teeth that would have sent anyone else running. “You see, we seek to share our explorations and understandings with those who come searching for them. Most of the time, they simply lack the will to bear the weight of the knowledge we grace them with. I do wonder if you will do the same.”

“I haven’t - searched - for shit,” Ji-Woon managed, and almost screamed as the hooks tore huge wounds in his arms.

“In some ways, you have. But in others, no. You did not seek us out. You did not find the box and open it of your own will.” Pinhead glanced up, where the ceiling was cracked and filthy, the light fixtures broken and useless. “But in this realm, the rules are different. What I obey on earth and in hell, I need not adhere to here. I may choose my own actions, and those who I seek to teach.”

He looked back down again. Pitiless black eyes met Ji-Woon’s furious burning yellow ones.

“Or perhaps, in this case … punish.” He leaned in. The chains kept Ji-Woon from leaning back. “I find your arrogance in calling yourself a master of pain offensive.”

The corner of his mouth turned up, just slightly. On someone else it might have been a smile.

“I wonder … is someone like you even capable of learning?”

Blue light flickered through the nearby windows as wind rattled the broken panes.

It was some time later that Ji-Woon stumbled into the doorframe of Herman’s office, his expression shocked and distant, his teeth clenched tight together. Herman looked up from his work and waited for some kind of greeting, or at least a question or demand. But Ji-Woon was silent for so long it was almost worrying, if Herman had ever been the sort of person to worry.

“Tell me,” he eventually managed, “where does that - thing come from?”

“‘Thing’?” Herman repeated, genuinely blank.

“In the leather. White face. All the pins. In his head.”

“Oh, yes. Our friend the hell priest. Hell, I think.”

“He doesn’t have his own - place?”

“Not here. He says he goes back through his own portals when he feels like it. Personally, I think he’s a liar,” Herman said, waving a hand dismissively, “because hell is a fictional narrative cooked up to appease the moral self-satisfaction of the masses, but I’ve heard stranger stories in this place.”

Ji-Woon didn’t reply right away. He was strangely still in the doorway; normally a man of casual movements and easy smiles, his shocked distance was unusual enough that Herman turned a page in his notebook and started taking surreptitious notes.

“Had an argument?” he asked.

“Who else knows about him?” was the instant response, which made him believe that, yes, there had been an argument, and Ji-Woon had lost, and as a result the hell priest, master of pain, had doled out a punishment that didn’t sit well with the pain-obsessed narcissist.

“Everyone’s favorite stalker, of course. But you’ll have to find him first. I heard he was going off to collect some notes on, oh, who was it … that wonderfully terrifying monster in the police department, I think.”

“Fine. I’ll ask him.” Ji-Woon pushed himself away from the doorframe and stood in place for a few seconds before his eyes actually fixed themselves on Herman. “Are you friends with that thing?”

“We’re colleagues in understanding.”

“I want him dead,” he snarled. “Help yourself by helping me. Gut him.”

Ji-Woon turned away and stumbled into the darkness of the institute before Herman could respond. He scribbled another note, then tapped the pen against the page.

“A little hard to do to someone who’s already gutted himself,” he said to no one, and laughed at his own joke.

Chapter Text

It was impossible to run on a broken knee. It was impossible to even limp. The hit had twisted it out of place when it shattered, leaving him to try and use the sea of broken and smashed cars as support, and then a second hit had broken his other ankle, forcing him to drag himself away without even being able to crawl.

And that was just the set of finishing blows.

Every breath made Danny’s broken ribs dig deeper into his chest. Every time his coat snagged on something metal it made his dislocated shoulder ripple with pain. Every heartbeat, every pulse of blood, made the fracture in his skull throb. He could barely see, both from the blood in his eyes and the way his mask was askew, but he could hear, and he could hear the incoming approach.

Legion had warned him. Not directly, but what they’d said had sounded like a warning all the same. Their conversation about the other monsters he was sharing this new apparent home with had boiled down to don’t fuck with them for basically every person, but they’d been a little reticent about the invisible man who lurked in the wrecking yard. It was clear they didn’t consider him as much of a threat as so many of the others, but they hadn’t been particularly negative, either. Or at least, some of them hadn’t.

If you don’t bother him, he’s cool, Joey had said, twisting his karambit around his fingers.

Does that mean he’s dangerous or not? Danny had asked, eyes more on the knife than the mask. Unlike the others, Joey was more expressive in the way he moved than he way he spoke. The constant movement of the knife said nervousness. Anxiety. Uncertainty, even, or possibly a lie.

He wouldn’t be here if he wasn’t. The knife hesitated; the fingers holding it tightened, very briefly.

The others say he doesn’t kill. Which was probably wrong, and Joey’s hesitation supported that thought.

He doesn’t as much, was the response, flat as always. But … just watch yourself around him.

It had been a warning, lightly worded. He’d dismissed it out of hand. In retrospect, he probably shouldn’t have.

As he dragged himself through the dirt and grass with his arms alone those too-light footsteps caught up to him. He barely had time to get past them before a hand caught him by the back of the hood and dragged his head up, shifting splinters of broken ribs deeper into him. The Wraith - the man he’d heard called Philip - crouched down next to him and kept him at eye level, although with the way his mask and slip had shifted he could barely see the fucker.

But the feeling he got from him was clear as the day he was apparently never going to see again.

“Did you think I was joking when I told you never to show your face here again?” For such a flat, dead voice, there was an edge of something terrible to every word. “Or did you just think you were so much better that you could walk in again at your leisure?”

“You aren’t always around,” Danny managed, tasting blood with every word.

“And you consider that an invitation?”

“Not - as such.” It hurt to speak. It hurt, psychologically, to try and deflect and appease, but he was in enough pain that he didn’t want to deal with any more. All his hunting had never gotten him more than a couple blows at worst, so this was an unprecedented and unappealing new world for him.

“Yet here you are.” The grip didn’t loosen. The idea of jerking his head away flickered and died, mostly because it would just make the skull fracture worse, or at least hurt more. “Do you only learn through pain? If I kill you here, will that make the lesson sink in?”

Probably not, he thought hazily, but under the pain was a growing rage. Nobody had the right to treat him like this - especially not someone who apparently didn’t kill.

“No.” It came out as a hiss, something more dangerous than he felt. Philip tilted his head, those empty white eyes fixed on his mask, the expression as unchanged as ever.

“Then you will pay for every trespass.”

“Try it,” Danny snarled. “You can’t do worse than me. Everyone says you’re weak.”

“Everyone says wrong.”

“Bullshit.” He could feel his bones trying to knit back together, and it was such a bizarre sensation it fueled his fury. “You don’t even do your job right. You - don’t kill.”

“So they’ve told you about that.” His head was pulled further up, making the broken bits of his ribs shift against each other, tearing him open all over again. “That’s not quite the case. What I do is show mercy. Something I imagine you wouldn’t know if it gutted you in the street.”

“Why the - hell would we show mercy?”

“You don’t know?”

There was no glint in those dead eyes to show even a hint of emotion, negative or otherwise. No shift on his face which, from Danny’s limited perspective, looked somewhere between burned and barklike. He was used to gauging emotion from expression - the fear, the anxiety, the dread - and that made it tricky to tell if he was about to get his head smashed in or not.

Even that cold fury lining every word was just flat enough that he couldn’t quite gauge what Philip’s real intent was. Other than teaching him a lesson, which wasn’t going to work out.

“Let me ask you,” Philip said. “Why do you think that, with my refusal to kill sometimes, my mercy to those who can’t fight back, the Entity still allows me passage in this place?”

“How should I know?”

“Because I give them hope.” Now every word was frozen, not so much angry but like an icicle to the brain. “Every time they get out, every time we fail or let them be, they keep a little part of themselves that would otherwise rot and crumble. Every time they get away, they keep that frail hope that one day, they can find a way out.” He pulled Danny in closer. “And that is what the Entity wants. For them to last one more trial, so it can feed again and again.”

He stared at those dead eyes, only half comprehending what he was hearing.

“In a way, that makes me worse than you.” And now there was a real inflection to his voice. Disgust. Aimed inward or outward? It was hard to tell. “My weakness condemns them to stay here, instead of dying for good, and fading into the void. A place without suffering, or so I hope.”

It was valuable information. It was something to hold onto, something others might not know, except the man telling it to him, obviously. He stayed silent despite his fury, trying to choke it back long enough to wring a little more out of the man ready to kill him without a second thought.

Which did suggest that maybe his mercy didn’t extend past the survivors. Hypocrisy? Or was there more to it than that?

“If I had your complete disdain for other people’s lives, your … inability to tell the difference between people and things,” Philip continued, “you wouldn’t be here. I would be the only executioner the Entity needed.”

“That is bullshit,” Danny managed.

“It’s not. You are, without a doubt, a better killer than I am.”

Philip leaned in just a little closer, and lowered his voice to a dangerous hiss.

“But I can slaughter the helpless better than you could ever possibly manage.”

A pedantic difference in words, Danny thought somewhere in the back of his rattled skull. But sometimes those were necessary. Critical, even. Killing and slaughtering, well … they were only synonyms sometimes. He’d only call what he did a slaughter under certain circumstances, at certain times. He knew how to craft language to evoke a certain feeling.

The thoughts stayed back there, partly stifled by rage and partly forced by pain. He was dropped unceremoniously and heard more than saw Philip stand. He waited for the killing blow, but the seconds dragged on, and it never came.

“Get out of here,” was what he heard eventually, back to the distant, flat tone. “If I see you again, you’ll wish I hadn’t.”

He bit back his first response, which was a demand to just fucking end his misery. Then he bit back the second one, too, because it wasn’t going to get him anywhere, either.

The silence made the air hum, although that might have been the neon sign still glowing some distance away. He was still being watched. The fucker wanted to watch him drag himself away. That, or bleed to death where he was; he had the distinct suspicion that if he started to get himself back together, he’d just get another blow to the skull to keep him down.

Slowly, infuriatingly, Danny pulled himself across the dirt and grass toward what he could only hope was relative safety.

He’d be back, eventually. There was no keeping him out, regardless of threats and damage done. He’d get the information he wanted, the history, the knowledge hidden in this place.

And revenge, of course. There was no stifling that, either.

Chapter Text

There were voices, coming from somewhere deep within the bowels of the meat plant. He couldn’t quite recognize them, but they were low, quiet - not the snarls and shrieks of someone being put through one of Amanda’s nasty little tests, and so probably not someone on the verge of death.

Ji-Woon followed them carefully, trying to figure out where the hell they were coming from. It wasn’t that big a place, but there were rooms to it that didn’t show up in trials - rooms that Amanda made very certain nobody but her got into. Not that her insistence made much of a difference, even when it was backed up by one of her head traps.

The voices got louder, but not loud enough. He paused by an open wall to try and pick out what they were, or at least who they belonged to. One was Amanda’s - there was an edge to her voice, all the time, no matter what she was saying. Even now, when it was as low and possibly soft as he could imagine it ever getting, the thin blade was there, ready to turn into the real thing and slice open a throat. But the other …

It was a man’s voice, just familiar enough that it irked him. Human enough. Not one of the Legion, but - of course, obviously. There was only one other person allowed here on a regular basis who didn’t get turned into a split corpse in less than an hour. And now that he was certain, he could hear an odd harmonic to it that he’d never heard.

Low, too, like Amanda’s, and not quite dangerous, but still bladed. The weapon sheathed. What were they talking about? Now curiosity had him moving forward again, a few steps past the wall, and that was when the voices stopped and he heard footsteps.

Five seconds, and Ghost Face made his way into the same room as Ji-Woon, and stopped dead. His coat was on, with the belt on the front undone and the hood fallen back.

His mask was in his hands.

Their eyes met, both of them frozen in place. There was nothing but silence for a good long while, neither of them moving, until Ji-Woon started to smile in sheer, unabashed delight.

That was all Ghost Face needed to charge him, dropping the mask in favor of his knife, moving faster than Ji-Woon had ever seen him strike. It might have given him a better advantage if his moves weren’t so obvious.

Ji-Woon jumped back and dodged every swipe and swing, though the blade came dangerously close to his chest too many times for comfort. It was particularly difficult to avoid given that his attention kept moving from the blade to the face he’d never seen and the incredible rage plastered all over it. As pale as something that lived under a rock in a swamp, the skin pulled too tight over the bones, the eyes sunken and hollow and dark, giving the impression of skin stretched over a human skull in a desperate attempt to make what he was seeing look human.

He laughed outright, ducked another slash toward his neck, and kicked out. His leg caught Ghost Face’s behind the knee and sent him stumbling, which gave Ji-Woon the opportunity to tackle him. Normally that would be a borderline fatal move, but something was off with his furious opponent, and he had a feeling he knew exactly what that was.

He slammed Ghost Face back against the floor and bashed his hand against the concrete to try and loosen the knife. It wouldn’t give. Ghost Face bucked against him, forced him over, and they rolled, kicking and fighting, until he finally got the fucker pinned again and this time held him down hard. One wrist in each hand, sitting heavily on his hips to make sure he couldn’t flip them again, and Ji-Woon was the inarguable winner, at least for the moment. Because despite everything people liked to say, he wasn’t just some skinny little prick who looked good. He had real muscle on him, for more than the obvious reasons.

And that meant he was stronger than Ghost Face, who’d only needed enough strength to kick down a door or two.

He looked down at the rage straining to escape his grasp and bit back a laugh in favor of a smirk.

“You know, you’re not as ugly as I thought you’d be,” he said, and as expected, that got him an attempted lunge; he pressed back against it, and kept Ghost Face down. “For all the shit you said you did, I was expecting someone … you know. More fucked up.”

The knife twitched, but had nowhere to go. There wasn’t even room to throw it from where he was pinned.

“I love your eyes, though.” He leaned in. The hiss of breath between teeth wasn’t lost on him as he met that mismatched glare. “Must have made things hell when you were trying to hide your identity, though. Did it? Danny?”

It was rare he’d ever used Ghost Face’s real name, mostly because he didn’t care and partly because he was willing to respect someone’s right to recreate themselves. But here and now, with the man’s real face exposed to air, it seemed fitting.

Danny’s pupils shrank to something like pinpoints, the rage so intense it should have killed them both. But for once, there was no response.

“Let me guess,” Ji-Woon said to fill the silence. “You coming out of some private room where Amanda probably still is, your coat untied and your mask off, all your movements a little bit sluggish … ” He hummed thoughtfully and tightened his grip around Danny’s wrists briefly. “Was it a pity fuck, or does she actually like you that much?”

There was a twitch of an eyebrow, and a shift of fingers on the knife. Ji-Woon barely glanced over.

“And here I was hoping I’d be the one to get her head over heels for once.” He sighed, theatrically, and leaned back, seeing some tension in Danny’s neck that led him to suspect a headbutt was on the way. “But I guess a couple of fundamentally fucked up psychos like you two would get along like that.”

“This is you saying it?” It came out as a hiss, but it was a response, and a rational one. Ji-Woon laughed again.

“Sure. I’m not as fucked up as you two.” The temptation to pull at some of the heavy leather and see if Amanda had left any marks behind surged, but he knew the instant he let go of Danny’s wrists there’d be a knife in his neck or a thumb in his eye. “So. Was it a pity fuck?”

“No, you shit,” Danny snarled. “It’s nothing out of the ordinary for this place. And it’s none of your business.”

“It is now.” Ji-Woon’s smile got wider. “Don’t worry. I can keep a secret. But you owe me.”

“I didn’t say it was a secret,” was the responding hiss. “I said it’s none of your business. Get off of me.”

“No. Tell me how you did it.”

For a second Danny’s expression changed, rage edged out by sheer incredulity. The question - what the fuck? - was blatantly clear.

“She’s incredible,” Ji-Woon said, glancing away for a split second to see if he could see her just past the open walls. “The way she hurts people? How those traps can make them scream, and on their own volition? It’s like a dream come true.”

Mutilate yourself to prove your worth to me. She’d never said it, but that was what he got out of it, and after he’d come back from that first split skull of his own he’d wanted to see her in action, just once (or twice, or three times). She wouldn’t let him.

Underneath him, Danny stared in silence for a long few seconds, and then something about his face changed. One second he was all barely-human fury; the next he was like a person again, still sallow and sunken but human, a light in his eyes, a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth, the sharp edges and angles of his face gone, or at least softened, with the efficiency of someone flicking on a lightswitch.

“That’s creepy,” he said, belatedly. Was this how all his own victims had felt, when they saw the exterior melt away to reveal the monster he really was?

“It’s how we work,” was the response, and even his voice had changed, though this at least was more familiar. No more the death-rattle rage-hiss, but something closer to normal, if still dangerous. “You know that. So you want to get on her good side? Make her look at you like you’re not just meat for grinding?”

“Oh, so it wasn’t her fucking you in there?”

“I’ll take that as a no.”

“Don’t be spiteful.” Ji-Woon tightened his grip around the wrist holding the knife until he saw Danny’s fingers loosen. “I’ve got plenty of stamina left to keep you here until I get some answers. How much do you have?”

He saw teeth grind, saw a flash of the dead-eyed murderer again, and then it cooled back into the simmering hate that he knew kept the Ghost Face alive.

“Stop treating her like she’s one of your fans, and you might have a better chance of getting her attention. In a positive way.”

“Ah, that’s hard. I’m so used to girls being fans.”

“I can guarantee she doesn’t appreciate it.” The thin, unfriendly smile pulled a little wider. “She idolizes someone neither one of us can ever live up to in her mind, so give up on that idea.”

“So treat her nicely? Let me guess: compliment her? Bring her gifts? That doesn’t sound like anything special.”

“But you haven’t done any of that yet.” He could feel the tension slowly leaving the body under his, but didn’t let up for a second; much like him, Danny could attack in an instant, and as an almost equally-talented actor he wasn’t a man to be trusted when he relaxed. “Bring her someone to test her traps on and you might avoid being the test subject yourself. Do it with someone she really hates, and she might even let you sit in. Then you can learn what she wants to hear.”

“Screaming?”

“Go find out for yourself.”

The smile wasn’t exactly disarming by now, but it did tell him one thing: there was a very good reason Danny flew under the radar as long as he had. If he hadn’t known exactly who he was looking at, Ji-Woon might have been fooled. All the danger, all the bloodlust and monstrosity, was carefully contained in a body that was probably almost normal-looking in the real world.

There was a lunge, and it was Danny who made it. Ji-Woon just barely managed to stay put for another few seconds before he was thrown off. He rolled to his feet, laughing, keeping his distance as Danny pushed himself up.

“You really don’t like being the loser, do you?” Ji-woon tried to keep the smug victory out of his voice and mostly failed.

“I didn’t lose.”

“Bullshit. I had you on your back.” Danny gave him a look; he smirked and slid back a few paces, just in case Danny decided to imitate him and send his knife flying across the room. “I take it she doesn’t do that much, then? Not really a fan of having someone else on top?”

“Let me know when that starts being your business.”

“It is now that I know about you two.”

Danny made his way to where he’d dropped his mask and picked it up. His mismatched eyes, still gleaming with unsuppressable rage, fixed back on Ji-Woon as he straightened.

“You aren’t even close to the first person to know about that,” he said, voice flat enough to suggest that he wasn’t so unbothered as he wanted to seem. “It’s not blackmail.”

“Does your face count, then?”

The stillness came back for a second. A predator waiting to strike, Ji-Woon thought, and then it was gone, and Danny pulled the mask back on, carefully tucking the slip back into place under the heavier leather of his coat.

“No.” The hood came back up, shrouding him again. “But I’m sure Legion will love to hear all about it, if you really want to put up with their harassment.”

“Yeah? You think I can’t deal with harassment?”

The knife vanished back into its sheathe, and Ghost Face turned to look at him one more time.

“I think you need to be very careful about what you say and who you say it to,” he said, without even a fragment of emotion sticking to the words.

Ji-Woon raised an eyebrow at him. It was a threat without a threat, but who was the danger here? Him, attacking if the information got out? Or Legion, attacking because they wanted to know more than even he had?

“I can deal with that, too. Don’t forget: I always had everything to lose, even if it wasn’t the murders I let slip.”

“There’s always something more you can lose.” Ghost Face turned and stalked away, his voice echoing slightly in the empty concrete rooms. “Trust me on that.”

Chapter Text

Jake leaving the campfire was not an unusual event. Sometimes it seemed like he was gone more often than he was there. Some people argued the isolation might be a problem, but there wasn’t much they could do about it; he had a way of vanishing into the trees that made it impossible to track him down.

Generally he came back after trials, or just whenever he felt like it, settling into place on a log without a word. But this time he came back at a run, almost tripping in his hurry to get back to the relative safety of the campfire, face pulled tight in an expression that wasn’t quite terror but wasn’t positive, either.

“Myers is out there,” he said, a little too loud.

They stared at him. David almost laughed. But the way Jake was turned back to watch the forest behind him, as if he was about to see that silent figure appear out of the shadows, kept it choked back.

“I thought he didn’t leave Haddonfield.”

“He doesn’t.” Slowly, he was catching his breath. But he didn’t turn back to them even though the shadows remained resolutely empty. “Until now.”

Concern flickered through the group around the campfire. There was a barrier out there that kept them safe. Killers could get close enough to see their shadows crowded around the fire, and no more. It was one of the few protections the Entity offered outside trials, and the only reason most of them hadn’t given up already. If the killers could hunt them all the time, it would be too much.

It meant that Michael couldn’t get to them where they were. But it also meant they couldn’t venture too far or risk having him attack. There was always the chance of someone getting them when they went too far, but he was different. Nobody went to Haddonfield these days for a reason.

Jake wasn’t interested in going back out and seeing if he was there. But Laurie wanted to see, and David couldn’t resist a challenge, even if it wasn’t actually a challenge. So the two of them headed out into the darkness to find out if Michael had really ventured away from Haddonfield, or if Jake had seen something else and mistaken it for the Shape. It seemed unlikely.

Laurie kind of hoped that was the case anyway.

“Dunno what would drive that fuckin’ prick out here,” David said as they went, peering into the shadows for any hint of white and listening for that familiar breathing. “Thought he liked staying at home.”

“He’s a monster,” Laurie replied shortly. “If he hasn’t had a chance to kill lately, he’s going to go make one for himself.”

“So why now and not before?”

She didn’t reply. That was a question she’d asked herself. Why would he have suddenly come out into the forest so suddenly, with no history of it behind him?

“Maybe someone burned his house down.”

“Like that would make a difference.”

“Or someone kicked him out? I could bet on a couple of those idiots trying to move in while he was off killing.”

“Without him killing them immediately?”

“He’s not that special. We’ve all stabbed him.” David rubbed his knuckles thoughtfully; Laurie sighed. “It’s not like someone couldn’t put a knife in his - ”

They both stopped short.

Michael was standing there, just out of range.

There wasn’t much firelight this far out, but there was just enough that they could see the white of his mask. It showed up separately in the dark, but as they looked the rest of him came into view: the mechanic’s coveralls, stained and bloody, just barely not blending into the shadows completely.

Laurie felt her lungs go tight watching him, but something was wrong. His mask was wrong. It wasn’t the sheer bone-white they all recognized. It was … faded.

“Fuck me,” said David eventually, interrupting her thought process. “That’s him all right.”

“I don’t think it is,” Laurie said, much more cautiously.

“You’re telling me that’s not Michael fucking Myers?”

“It is, but - ”

There were cracks all across the mask. The white of it was dirty. David glanced at her and then stared back at him, and it clicked for him, too.

“Right. I get it. This is the Michael that doesn’t need to play by the rules at all, right?” He smirked. “But I guess he’s gotta play by some.”

He took a few steps to the left. Michael’s head turned to follow him, and Laurie saw the slightest shift of movement that suggested the muscles in an arm tensing, but there was no other reaction. The barrier was holding.

“Must piss him off.” David laughed and took a few steps forward.

“David, be careful - ”

“What? He’s stuck out there. Doesn’t matter how bad he wants to gut me.” He went right up to where Michael was, less than six inches away from him, grinning the whole time. “Piss off, Myers. Get your ass back to that little shithole you call home and jerk off in a corner.”

There was no reaction, but Laurie felt herself getting tense anyway. She remembered, even now, the number of times she thought he was dead, or trapped, or no longer a danger to her, only for him to reappear. Like the boogeyman.

And David, always willing to throw water on a grease fire, leaned in a little closer.

“Nobody’s gonna be dumb enough to head out with you creepin’ around out - ”

Michael grabbed him by the collar of his jacket and buried the knife in his gut in one sudden move.

David made a guttural noise and started to attack, but Michael only lifted him up and dug the knife in deeper, angling it up under his ribs. Every punch, every kick, every attempt to drag at the arm holding the knife went ignored. The only reaction came with a hand snatched at his mask, which made him twist the knife hard.

It was agonizing enough to make David scream, a noise that had to have reached the campfire.

The knife came back out, and then right back into him in a different spot. Into his guts, his lungs, whatever it could reach. Until the frantic kicking and fighting stopped and David hung limply from the grip on his coat, at which point Michael withdrew the knife and looked at his dying face for a few long seconds.

Laurie hadn’t moved. The grab had frozen her in place and forced her to watch in silent horror.

Michael wasn’t right behind the barrier.

Michael was several feet back from the barrier.

David’s body hit the ground and Michael turned to look at her. His arm was covered in blood, rendering the dark blue fabric black and shiny. It was splattered all over his torso. And it shone on the knife, now suddenly visible when she hadn’t even noticed it before.

There was a little spray on his mask, too, following the cracks and getting lost there.

Words failed her. Not because of the brutality - that was expected - but because of the suddenness of it, and because they’d both been so certain he was at the barrier. Why would they have expected him to stand back?

It had been a trick. The evil in him giving him a cunning beyond that of the animal Loomis had always claimed he was. Like leaving the bodies for her to find in the house to panic her and fracture her focus.

But this seemed … more intent than that.

“Michael,” she managed, her voice only barely shaking. “What happened to you? Why are you … old?”

The others had mentioned it before - that sometimes this was the mask they saw on him in trials. Cracked and aging. In those trials he ignored every hook and every obligation and slaughtered them outright. He didn’t stand and stare, didn’t stalk - just killed. Those who had gotten closer than they should have said even his hands looked old. This was a Michael who’d aged decades since the night he attacked her.

But that meant he’d survived being shot. Survived falling out the window. How anyone could do that and then live another who even knew how many years beyond that, and still find his way to this place …

“How did you survive?”

There wasn’t going to be an answer, but she asked the question anyway. He watched her in dull silence. Maybe she was just far enough away to be behind the barrier, so he couldn’t attack. Maybe he could still recognize her through his own years. Or maybe he was just waiting to see if she’d take the same risk as David, and step just a little closer -

He took one step toward her.

Laurie turned and ran back toward the campfire. No matter where the barrier was, she’d be safe as soon as she was in the ring of light. No matter how much he tried, even now, the Entity couldn’t let him come that close. It couldn’t.

They made fun of David later for being dumb enough to fall for it, but Laurie couldn’t help looking over her shoulder anyway, just in case.

Chapter Text

I miss you.

Somehow, out of all the things he could have said, that was the worst possible one.

She exploded. All the rage and horror and hatred came out at once, if not in her words then in her tone. All her self-control evaporated. If she’d been anywhere else, dealing with anyone else, it would have been unthinkable.

“You miss me?” she raged. “After everything you did? After you killed everyone, destroyed the company, ruined my life - you have the balls to say you miss me?!”

She grabbed a nearby brick off the ground and hurled it at him. He dodged, of course. But it was the meaning behind the gesture rather than the gesture itself that mattered, though she would have loved to see it break his nose.

“You were going to kill me! You had it all set up. You sat me down and made me watch that - made me hear - and now you’re going to look me in the eye and say you miss me.” Her nails cut into her palms as she clenched both hands into fists. “You unbelievable, selfish piece of shit.”

He was giving her a look of innocent shock, as if he didn’t understand why she was so angry. It was a look he’d given her a hundred times before, when she told him what he couldn’t do, like carry real knives onstage to do tricks for the audience. It had always annoyed her before, but now she knew it was fake and always had been. A perfect imitation of real surprise.

A perfect imitation of a real person.

Yun-Jin stood and seethed, waiting for a response. Some attempt to justify everything he’d done, or defend himself. There wouldn’t be an apology. He wasn’t capable of apologies. Even before he’d been the Trickster he’d never said sorry except as something casual and meaningless.

“But I do miss you,” Ji-Woon said once she’d started to catch her breath, which caught her off guard. “I’ve never spent much time without you having my back. It’s harder than I thought it would be.”

A hundred insults ran through her head. Shallow, spoiled, uncultured, worthless - how could he have the audacity to even think like that?

“Did you think prison was going to be easy?” It took effort to keep herself from shrieking it.

“I wasn’t going to prison.” In the darkness of the trial ground, his eyes glowed brighter than anything else. “You think they’d send me there? After I told them all about the trauma that company put me through? I’d be in a psychiatric hospital at worst.”

“And all the other murders?” she snarled. “How were you going to get out of those?”

“You did them.” His smile was so friendly, so normal, that she almost didn’t hear his words. “It’d destroy your reputation, of course, but you were going to be dead, so you wouldn’t suffer because of it.”

She opened and closed her mouth a few times, trying to find a response. The one that surfaced was laced with acid.

“You would never let someone else take credit for your work.”

For a few seconds he looked uncomfortable, like she’d found the one flaw in his plan. But it must not have made enough of a difference. He didn’t even have to use the excuse, after all. Not after they’d both ended up here.

“You’re right. I wouldn’t.” He sighed. “You’re always right. But that’s why I needed you.”

He stalked forward. She backed up automatically. The strength she’d always had in his presence had faltered now, on seeing him tear apart her new … companions, if there was no better word. All the knives, flung with deadly accuracy. All the hits with the bat she’d had designed for his shows. All the blood, the laughter, the mockery.

Her back hit a wall. Before she could dodge him he was too close. But instead of attacking her he dropped to his knees in front of her, the bat rolling into the shadows, and wrapped both arms around her waist, pulling her toward him, burying his face against her stomach.

Yun-Jin froze.

“I still need you,” he said, his voice clear against the violet silk. “I need your support. I need your help. And … I need your voice.”

She stared down at him. At the blood streaked over his shoulders, what she could see of his face and hair. The urge to grab his head and dig her thumbnails into his eyes couldn’t break through the freeze that held her still.

She knew very well now - too well - what he meant.

“We were interrupted before I could hear it,” he continued. She felt his fingers curl against her back. “I was looking forward to it. You, of all people … you’re the one I wanted to hear most, by the end.”

“I will never,” she managed, every word hissed through her teeth, “let you hear me scream.”

“Don’t be mean.” He pulled her a little closer. “Besides, I know you can’t do that. You’re not strong enough to stop. Especially not when it’s me you’re dealing with.”

“I’m stronger than you could ever be.”

“That’s not true. But you were stronger than everyone at that company.” He leaned against her. At her back, the brick wall felt cold, even through the faux fur coat. He was almost nuzzling against her midsection now, and she wanted to get the hell away from him, even if it meant dying in order to do so.

He sighed again. She felt the heat of it through the silk.

“You were the only person I could never have.”

There were implications to those words. The only person he could never have to torture. The only person he could never have afraid of him. The only person he could never smile at, and call over, and surreptitiously escort back to his penthouse, or hotel room, or wherever he was staying, out of sight of the media.

She felt her blood run cold.

He turned his head enough to glance up at her. His eyes glowed that terrible bright yellow she’d picked out for him, way back when she remade him into the Trickster. There was blood streaked under one eye. It wasn’t hers.

“Neither one of us is ever leaving this place,” he said, voice like some kind of terrible honeyed poison. “You’re never going to really get away from me. And I’m going to have all the time in the world to finally hear you scream for me.”

She could see his smile. It was a smile she’d never seen on him before, except through a haze of drugs in that last awful infinity before they were both snatched to this place. It was cruel. Self-satisfied. Terribly, terribly dangerous.

It was the first real smile she’d probably ever seen him make.

“So … please, Miss Manager.” The coy, childish little name he - and the rest of NO SPIN - had used from time to time to annoy her. “Don’t deny me this.”

His arms tightened around her again. He pressed his cheek to her stomach, his ear just high enough that he had to hear her frantic heartbeat.

“I don’t want to have to hurt you more than necessary.”

Yun-Jin felt bile rise in the back of her throat at his sheer overwhelming audacity and his endless fucking lies.

And at the part she’d played in creating him, allowing him to become the monster he was.

And at the fact that she had no real way to stop him now.

He was kneeling in the dirt before her and there was nothing she could do.

Chapter Text

Ji-Woon had caught him. And, in accordance to the whims this place didn’t just encourage but reward, Ji-Woon was going to kill him, as slowly as he possibly could.

He’d attacked Jake out in the fog. Maybe just by sheer luck, or maybe he’d made an offering. The how didn’t matter. He’d caught Jake off-guard and stunned him long enough to get his jacket off him and wrap a length of barbed razor wire around his bare arms, using his scarf to protect his own hands from the worst of it. Ji-Woon was obsessed with the stuff. But it made sense, in a really nasty way.

Where things went awry was when he got lost dragging Jake through the fog back to wherever he was planning to do his work. But he was still relatively new to the place; like the survivors, he probably hadn’t figured out how to get around in the cold, curling gray and black, and was still trying to get a handle on what places were safer than others to trespass through.

It meant they ended up in a familiar forest, more blue than gray without a cloud to hide the piercing bright moon overhead.

“Shit.” Ji-Woon looked around. Jake had stopped pulling a while ago, because the barbs and blades and the wire itself had cut into his arms too badly already, but the urge flared again. He was trailing blood, and feeling the effects of losing so much already, but the pain was keeping him conscious by force. “Why are we here? I thought I said the Institute.”

Jake said nothing, but winced when Ji-Woon pulled on the wire again. Hard enough to hurt, though not so hard it cut that much deeper.

“Come on. There’s probably a way out over here.”

Jake let himself be pulled along, trying not to stumble while he kept an eye on the ground. He knew this place probably too well. Had an idea, now, of where certain things might be. And while Ji-Woon was a murderer with too many powers in this place, he wasn’t looking out. Even if he knew where they were, he wasn’t walking carefully. Wasn’t watching underfoot.

But he was sticking to the paths, too. Ones clear in the moonlight, or at least with few enough shadows that something couldn’t hide.

Then Jake saw it up ahead: just off the path, under a dying fern, there was a deeper shadow in the shadows. Something that promised pain to the terminally unwary. And if anybody here fit that description, it was Ji-Woon.

“This fucking place is like a maze. How the hell is there no road around here?” Closer, a few steps closer. Jake waited, patience still solid as iron as the pain and exhaustion and blood loss tried to wear it away. “I’ve seen his cars. There’s no way he’s not - ”

Jake braced himself and hauled back on the wire. It cut in deep, dug in hard enough to make black stars explode in his vision, but it nearly knocked Ji-Woon on his ass. Effectively distracted, he turned sharply and tried to drag Jake in, his eyes narrowed, his teeth grit.

“Haven’t had enough yet?” he hissed, fighting every movement Jake made. “Don’t worry. You’ll have more than enough - real soon - ”

He tried to reel the wire in with covered hands that didn’t have a good grip. Jake pulled back, and then slung himself to the side, forcing Ji-Woon to stagger or risk the wire cutting through the scarf into his own hands.

He stumbled. Right where he needed to.

The snap of the trap as it shut around his leg cracked the air like a gunshot.

To his credit, he didn’t scream. His expression froze, frustration crystallizing into shock in an instant, and then realization, and then rage.

A rage he leveled at Jake immediately.

“You fucking shit,” he snarled, but Jake was already pulling on the wire, dragging it through Ji-Woon’s hands before he could get a better grip on it. Given a choice between his prey and his leg, Ji-Woon went with self-interest.

He let go almost too suddenly, and Jake stumbled and fell, trying to get the wire as far from Ji-Woon’s grip as he could. For his part, Ji-Woon had refocused on the trap, trying to get it open with what was left of the scarf to protect his fingers.

But Jake could tell, even from this distance, that it wasn’t going to work. That was one of the nasty traps, designed not just to catch, but to hurt, and bleed, and be impossible to get out of - until its owner arrived.

If its owner arrived.

“Get your ass back here,” Ji-Woon snarled, making a lunge for the wire. Jake yanked it further away. The look on Ji-Woon’s face was beyond any kind of rage he’d seen on him before, and despite everything, it made unease clench hard in Jake’s gut. “When I get out of this, you’re - going to regret - everything you’ve ever done in your life.”

The trap was coming free. He’d gotten a knife out and was levering the trap open, slowly and carefully, to avoid it shutting on his leg again. It would cripple him in a chase, but Jake wouldn’t be able to make it far with his own injuries. All he really had to do was wait and follow the blood once he could stand.

Maybe he’d be dead by then, Jake thought numbly. Bled out from the wounds the wire had left. It was about his only hope at this point. That, and that Ji-Woon had a short memory.

It seemed unlikely.

“I’m going to - shit - ” The knife slipped and the trap slid closed again, making Ji-Woon hiss out a string of swears Jake hadn’t heard in a while, even here. “I’m … going to pull out your tendons and split them.”

This time his knife did the trick. Ji-Woon carefully pulled his leg out of danger and let the trap shut again with another loud snap. Then he stood, testing his weight, sucking in a breath at what had to be a rush of pain all the way up his leg.

“Ever felt a knife buried so deep into your bones you can feel it vibrate?” he asked, slowly - staggeringly - approaching Jake again. Fresh knives slid between his fingers, glowing in the moonlight. “Every tap is like being shot. Or that’s what I’ve heard.”

His eyes never left Jake, so focused on getting revenge and pain he refused to pay attention to the world around them, which was why he didn’t realize what was about to happen until the shadow fell across him.

Ji-Woon looked up into a mask made of bone, opened his mouth to snarl something, and took a machete to the chest.

Jake grimaced and looked away as Trapper all but hacked Ji-Woon to death, knocking him to the ground on his injured leg and making sure he wasn’t going to get back up. There was no screaming, no insults - just the sound of metal splitting flesh and bone, blood splattering everywhere, and eventually, a choking, wheezing sound as Ji-Woon tried to breathe with split lungs.

He looked back to see a twitching almost-corpse and Trapper standing over it, watching the body for a few seconds longer before turning his attention to Jake. There was a pretty good chance he was about to see the same fate - Trapper didn’t appreciate trespassers, even if they’d come unwillingly.

But all he did was leave the dying Ji-Woon to his fate and approach Jake, crouching down to pick up the bloody razor wire when he was close. It was impossible to see his eyes behind the mask with all the shadows cast by the moonlight, but he was clearly looking at it - and at how it was wrapped around Jake’s arms up to the elbow.

“You bring him here?” was the only question, and Jake tried to focus on his mask through the wooziness of blood loss.

“No.” It hadn’t even occurred to him to try, because the fog and the Entity didn’t listen to survivors when there was a killer around to give orders. “Just … into the trap.”

Trapper made a noise that might have been a snort and might have been a laugh. He was silent a few moments longer, then wrapped a little of the wire around his own hand and brought his machete down - on the length of it between him and Jake, severing it with a metallic snap to leave just what was on Jake behind. There was a spark of pain at the momentary pressure, and then the normal pain came back, and he was almost - but not quite - free.

Trapper dropped the wire. There was no blood. His own hand was too rough and scarred to have really gotten hurt, even by that.

“Think you can walk?”

“I got here, didn’t I?”

But it didn’t take long for Jake to realize, after the stood, that he’d lost too much blood to walk very well. It took Trapper about half the time to realize it and a little longer after that to get tired of Jake staggering after him, grab him, and sling him over his shoulder, which for once Jake didn’t protest. He wasn’t sure why he was going with him in the first place, but if Trapper was going to kill him, he would have done it there on the forest path.

Through the trees, into the mine, underground until they reached the door to his workshop, which was familiar enough to Jake by now to hold no new terrors. He’d ransacked the place before, and …

Trapper set him on one of the workbenches to look at his arms. The wire had been wrapped around them both, holding them together and digging in hard enough that there was more blood than skin visible. He moved them with a care not normally associated with someone who set rusty bear traps for unwary trespassers, then let go and disappeared.

Jake watched him over his shoulder, vision still fading in and out, as he came back with supplies for cleaning wounds. Which seemed strange to have here, where wounds didn’t stay, but they must have been there even before this place was in the fog.

Removing the wire took a little time. Trapper unwound it slowly, avoiding any new injuries and apparently trying to avoid aggravating the ones that were already there. Jake stayed silent through the whole thing, only wincing when the blades or barbs came free with a fresh spark of pain. He never took his eyes off what was happening. He wanted to make sure nothing else did happen. Not that he knew what that might be.

When the wire was finally free, he sat and watched as the Trapper, the man who deliberately left his traps to rust sometimes to make their injuries worse, who’d serrated some of them so if they pulled free it shredded them to the bone, who wasn’t above using poison on some of the ones on his property outside trials just to make sure anybody who didn’t pay attention died even if he wasn’t there to kill them himself, started cleaning the wounds on Jake’s arms.

It made him feel uneasy. Like something was about to go wrong, or that maybe this was the wrong thing, that any sort of treatment of an injury was an offense to the Entity’s will. The rags were slightly discolored, the water they’d been soaked in too cold for comfort, and the handling wasn’t exactly gentle, but …

“Why bother?” he asked. “It doesn’t matter.”

“You wouldn’t make it back to the campfire.”

“I’d come back.”

“Sure.” Trapper didn’t even pause. “But you owe me.”

Jake turned his attention to the mask instead of the wounds. His thoughts were slow with the blood loss, but it didn’t take more than a few seconds to sink in, and he gave Trapper an almost incredulous look.

“Really? You got to kill him.”

“That was for him trespassing.” He dropped the rags back in their bucket and picked up a wound bandage that looked like it had been used and washed several times. “You’ve got a debt.”

“And … you want me to pay it now?”

“You got anything better to do?”

He didn’t, really. But where he might have snarled and fought before, or at least argued, between the time he’d been in the fog, the amount of blood he’d lost, and everything else they'd done, the idea didn't really bother him anymore.

As he watched Trapper work, Jake thought about what they … had, for lack of a better word. What they’d been doing for a while now - time wasn’t real here, so he couldn’t put an estimate on it, but so many people had arrived since that first unexpected turn in their relationship as predator and prey. When he’d been unable to protect himself from death, and Trapper had offered him … an alternative.

Things had just kept going since then. Nothing major. Just him showing up when he needed a break from the nightmare and Trapper being willing to let him in if he was in the mood. It had been a mutual release. Enemies with benefits.

This was … a little different. Not the debt - that didn’t surprise him. The rest, though, was …

A thousand thoughts flickered through his mind like lightning, fast and unexpected. It wasn’t emotional, outside of the rage and the mutual hate. But that felt like it was tempered, now. Like the iron was still hot, still ready to burn, but cooler than it had been before.

He wasn’t sure how to feel about that, and deal with it like he did anything that might be emotionally complicated: by dismissing it as far back in his head as he could and ignoring it.

The bandaging went quicker than removing the wires or the cleaning. It was good bandaging, too, his arms wrapped from wrist to elbow without any skin between the cloth, the ends tucked in neatly. It had been done out of experience with nasty injuries - and treating them, too. Jake wondered what kind of condition his knee would be in if he’d been able to take care of himself like this, back before he’d been stolen into a nightmare.

Trapper finished up and went still, watching him. Jake looked at his arms and clenched his hands into fists. Spots of blood started to fade in on the bandages.

“It’s only gonna last for a while,” Trapper said, almost a warning but without his normal violence to back it up. “Keep you from bleedin’ out until you get back.”

Jake loosened his grip, and then a hand was at his jaw, rough fingers catching him, tilting his head up just a little, a thumb at his lower lip. He glanced up at the grinning mask that hid an expression he couldn’t read for the darkness.

“Long enough, huh?” he said, a little more wryly than he thought he’d be able to manage.

“Should be.”

The hand dropped. Jake considered his options, slid off the edge of the workbench, and then carefully got to his knees.

Chapter Text

The world was off-balance, he was off-balance, and it was just like every nightmare the others had said it would be back when he first arrived. Not like every nightmare he’d ever had personally - there were no ghosts, no faces twisted by horror, no sinking beneath the waves - but there were generalized nightmares that everybody was afraid of in the pit of their hearts. And he was in one right now.

It wasn’t just that everyone else was dead or dying. It wasn’t just that the little hellscape he was trapped in was the home territory for the monster hunting them, and therefore made it a hundred times easier to get found and caught. It wasn’t just that outside of this he was having other problems, swearing he could see things again, his mind picking up on the stray or latent psychic energies of this place and forcing him to see what they could spell.

No. It was that he knew one thing right down to his bones.

Something was going wrong.

In the distance he heard a scream. One of the girls. Meg, that was her name - the scream was one of someone getting hit by a heavy stick embedded with spikes and sparking with electricity and crashing to the ground as the agony got to be too much to deal with. It was her last life.

And she was too far away for him to do anything about it.

Yoichi stared into the distance where he thought she was, torn by indecision. Try to run and save her? But he wouldn’t get there in time, and then he’d be in range for one of those massive static blasts to find him. Finish that last generator instead to get the doors open? But that would give his position away the second he was done. He could hide, and hope not to be found, but …

It was his best bet. It was his only bet. If he could hide, he could find the hatch, they all said. Or wait by a door for the monster roaming the halls to find it first, and close it, and give him the chance to escape before he got found out. He wasn’t fast, he wasn’t strong, he wasn’t a fighter. He wasn’t even stealthy. The best he had was his own mind, and right now, rattled by electric shocks and his own uncertainty, that wasn’t much of a help.

Yoichi moved as quickly as he could for a locker and opened the door just as he heard Meg’s scream cut itself off sharply. He stepped in and pulled the door shut behind him and winced as something like a shockwave rolled through the halls of the institute. Then, in a moment, she was gone.

Something other than the electricity was putting him ill at ease in the trial itself. He’d been nearly dead. One hook away from sacrifice, bleeding from a blow to the ribs, trying to hide in a corner, and then he’d turned an opposite corner and their eyes had met. In that moment Yoichi had fully expected to die.

But then … he turned away.

It didn’t take long for Yoichi to realize that there was no way he hadn’t seen him. That, in fact, he had been deliberately left alive.

The others had warned him about that.

The locker was cramped, chilly, and uncomfortable, but it was better than being exposed out in the halls, no matter how much the lights flickered. He waited, anticipating the sound of a heartbeat and then hearing it start to pick up. A pulsating noise in his head that reminded him of the start of a migraine, or waves pounding on the beach.

Electricity charged up, then exploded, following every exposed wire and piece of metal in half the building. He could see it - and feel the static - as it rattled along the edges of the locker, but he was safe where he was. At least, safe from the shock that would have made him scream, given him away, gotten him killed.

There was the sound of footsteps nearby, just audible above the heartbeat. He peered through the cracks in the locker door.

The Doctor stepped into the room.

Riddled with metal and wires, skin burned, face pulled into a staring rictus grin by force … he was his own nightmare, and Yoichi instinctively wanted to press himself against the back of the locker to avoid even the idea that he might be seen. But the doors were shut. He was safe, for the moment.

For a few seconds the Doctor stood still in the room, his heavy, broken breathing the only thing to hear other than the heartbeat.

And then he turned, slowly and deliberately, to the locker where Yoichi was hiding.

There was no time to make a run for it. By the time he realized he wasn’t safe at all the looming figure had already closed in. In one second he wrenched the doors open; in the next, the weapon -

Vanished.

The Doctor grabbed Yoichi by the head with both hands. Fingers closed around his skull, gripping hard and tight like he intended to crush it but he only slammed him back instead, stunning him for a moment, which was long enough for him to dig both thumbs into Yoichi’s eyes.

His scream was muted and stuttered in his own head. Probably shock, or maybe the pain, consuming his entire world. But somehow the Doctor’s voice cut through all that and came through clear, like the electricity inherent in him was taking the words and bypassing his ears to imprint them directly on his brain.

“Nice try, but there’s no hiding from me on my own property.” His thumbs dug in deeper. The pain ratcheted up another gear. “You really should have moved a little faster. Or been a little smarter. But I do make the intelligent mind a difficult thing to use, so maybe I can’t fault you completely for this.”

There was blood - god, he hoped it was blood - running down his face from the ruin of his eyes as the Doctor ground his thumbs into the sockets. Despite everything, he hadn’t gone deep enough to hit the brain. He hadn’t gone deep enough to kill yet.

“I hope you didn’t think I was being nice and sparing you earlier.” The grip forcibly tilted Yoichi’s head back further, letting the thumbs hook deeper into the sockets. “I just needed you to survive longer than everyone else. Since you don’t know how to play the game properly yet, that meant giving you the chance to walk away.”

He tried to respond, but there was no way he could get anything out except the pain. He tried clawing at the hands on his face, tried ripping himself free, to no avail.

“You see, I need to test something. And since you’re probably not about to wander in here outside a trial, inside one will have to do.”

He felt the Doctor’s presence get closer. Felt the spark of static, the heat of the electricity and hatred.

“Your mind’s a lot more powerful than you lead people to believe, isn’t it … ?”

That was when the panic set in.

Something in his head - not physical - snapped, and lashed out, and as his nails dug into the Doctor’s burned wrists he saw - images. Pictures of other people, caught and bound, strapped down, tortured, mutilated - all from the perspective of the perpetrator. Like he was the one who’d done it.

And he thought: not this. Not again.

The grip on his head jerked slightly, but didn’t let up. He heard a laugh, high and split and awful.

“So he really wasn’t lying. I’ll have to give that insufferable little bastard some credit.” There was a sigh. “And here I never thought I’d find a real psychic. Especially in this place.”

Psychometry. Mikaela called it that. And had followed up with postcognition. Things he knew about but had never experienced. Things that shouldn’t have been within the range of his powers but were, in this place.

All he’d done was touch one of the killers on accident, in self-defense, and then he’d - seen something. Some piece of their past. It hadn’t ended well. Apparently word had gotten around.

Back before there had been the occasional interest. A phone call or letter or e-mail asking him about his … abilities. Asking if he wanted to volunteer, just for a little while, even for compensation, to see what he could do. He’d considered some of them if only to pay the bills, but never did it. What he could see wasn’t important - the curse and what it had done was his whole damn world.

Did his father have to put up with the same things? His mother had said he’d inherited his abilities. Maybe he’d been strong enough to not let it slip. Maybe people just hadn’t cared as much.

He’d never really been worried about it. People’s interest inevitably waned. There was always something more exciting, and less of a liability, to focus on.

Maybe he should have been.

The hands on his head lifted him up so his feet just barely scraped the bottom of the locker. He felt - and heard - the slow charge of electricity.

“Why don’t you show me what you can do?”

His head probably should have exploded. The sheer power that ripped through him should have killed him, left him mostly splattered across the locker. But some part of him reacted in the only way it knew how, the only way it knew he could survive.

It lashed out. The electricity split and surged back down along the conduit that led it into his brain in the first place - back into the Doctor, who was used to it and barely even shuddered. But with it came a connection. For one instant, he could see into the deranged mind of the man torturing him. See what he’d done. See the terrible pieces of his past.

People watching him. Sitting quietly, waiting, the dull expectation turning into concern and then anger and then fear and then - and then there was pain, so much of it, but not his.

People bound to chairs and beds with wires running into them, IVs attached to strange-looking bags sending who knew what into the bloodstream - and for one second he did know what, and it wasn’t good. There was no begging, just screaming. Sometimes words. Sometimes phrases. Sometimes - whole histories. Once or twice he heard them yell you were supposed to stop!

But he - the Doctor - didn’t stop. And the sense of self-satisfaction Yoichi could feel was so strong he almost threw up.

What he saw lasted about two seconds in reality. It felt like it went on forever in the hot dark nightmare behind where his eyes used to be, but it wasn’t long before he heard that awful split laughter again, cutting through his rattled thoughts like a rusty knife.

“Oh, I see. You went back pretty far.” The grip on his head didn’t let up. He tried to kick, but didn’t have enough strength left to do it. “Hm … I was expecting something more … explosive. Maybe another round will do it.”

“No,” he managed, barely a whisper through the pain.

“No? You don’t think so? That’s a shame. You should really have more confidence in yourself.”

He was lifted up a little higher. His whole face was wracked with pain, the place where his eyes had been throbbing in time with the heartbeat he could hear pulsing in his head. One hand slipped off the wrists supporting him.

“This is worth looking into further. I’m sure you understand.”

He did, unfortunately. Yoichi’s other hand dropped, the pain too much to deal with anymore.

“Don’t give up so easily.” The Doctor’s unsteady breathing was too close now. He could feel it against his throat and jaw. “You’re going to need all that inner strength to survive this place. Metaphorically speaking.”

The grip shifted. Yoichi tried to focus again, but then he was slammed back into the locker again, the hands on his face moving, the pain spiking out of control and making him scream again until something slipped and tore inside his head, and for a second he was still alive without any ability to feel or hear -

And then the world was drifting back into place, the sky overhead obscured by trees, the smell of woodsmoke close at hand, his head pounding with something that felt like the aftereffects of the worst migraine he’d ever had.

As he pushed himself up, dread settled itself on his shoulders like a blanket. He wished he didn’t know why.

Chapter Text

From the roof of the house, the stars above the neighborhood were bright and clear. Even the glare from the streetlights couldn’t hide them, and the house lights were too small to make a difference.

They lay on their backs on the slowly-crumbling shingles underneath the starry sky. Thin, wispy clouds scudded by, not opaque enough to hide the stars as they went. Between them and infinity of distant lights they could never recognize, Haddie had an arm up.

“This one was a vampire,” she said, a finger grazing a particularly long, pale scar. “Or at least, that’s what it probably was.” The finger moved to another nearby that intersected the first. “And this one was from a thing I called an arachna.”

“How big?” Élodie resisted the urge to reach out and trace the scar with a finger of her own. It looked painful, even though it was long since scarred over; the skin was paler, so much so it was clear even in the dim light.

“Dog sized. You know. Golden retriever.” Haddie turned her arm so the underside was visible, and there were scars there, too, but not as many. “I never did figure out that punching at something attacking me wasn’t a great idea.”

They both laughed, even though it wasn’t really funny. What else could they do, really? Here, nothing mattered; death wasn’t permanent, and even injuries didn’t last, for the most part. Violence that should have traumatized them all for life was an everyday thing. And for Haddie … it had always been an everyday thing.

Élodie had managed to avoid the worst of the violence, most of the time. Her scars were fewer. Further between.

“Your brother must have always been on the verge of a breakdown,” she said, and saw Haddie’s expression flicker, then soften.

“Some days.” She lowered her arm. “He was in trouble almost as much as me. But he … didn’t go as far as I did, most of the time.”

“Most of the time?”

“He’d come to help me. But he still had a family that was waiting for him to come back. You know … other than me.” She lifted her other arm, looked at a scar on her hand. “That kind of thing makes people think twice about running headfirst into the jaws of possible instant death and mutilation.”

Élodie watched her, unsure exactly what to say. Haddie had said her brother was a stepbrother - an adopted brother, in that she had been adopted into his family. But they’d been close, too, and she’d been close with her adoptive parents, or so she’d mentioned.

Maybe not so close.

“They were waiting for you, too, I’m sure,” she said after a second, and Haddie almost smiled.

“They were. I know. And I didn’t want to hurt them, but I - ”

There was silence, except for the distant sound of wind in the trees. Élodie didn’t try to interrupt it.

“My parents died when I was still a kid. They aren’t waiting for me somewhere, worried I won’t come home. I’m sure Jordan and everyone else are upset, but it’s … not the same. They’ll grieve, but they’ll still have him.” She sighed; there was an edge of a shudder to it. “I’m not happy to be here, but I’m glad he didn’t come with me. God, I’m so glad he’s not here.”

Élodie didn’t respond to that, because saying it out loud might make it come true. Something else Haddie had said rang like a bell in her mind, though.

“What happened to your parents?” she asked, willing to accept that she might not get an answer.

For a few long seconds she didn’t, and then Haddie looked back up at the stars like they might distract her from her own words.

“I got sick when they were at a party. Pneumonia. Not really serious, but I panicked and called them. Asked them to come home. They got in the car and came as fast as they could, in a snowstorm, on bad roads.”

It was easy to picture. Élodie almost didn’t need to hear what came next.

“They went off the road at some point. Crashed and got stuck in the car. It took the cops two days to find them. Two days to tell me they weren’t coming back. To try and tell me it had been quick.” Bitterness laced every word. “I was sick, but I wasn’t stupid. They died slowly and painfully, because of me.”

It was impossible to find words after that, or at least find them right away. They died because of me. It was a mantra she’d been haunted by for half her life, and it ripped at her to hear someone else say it out loud, even if it wasn’t directed at her. But at the same time, some part of her went weak.

Someone else understood. Not just this place, not just the nightmare of the Entity, but - the pain. The guilt. She understood.

“Thank you,” said Haddie, suddenly, and Élodie glanced over again.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“I know. You didn’t say it wasn’t my fault.” Pale gray eyes met hers, less pained than they had been a second ago. “Everyone does, and it doesn’t help, or change what happened.”

For another second Élodie struggled with her words. It was an unfamiliar thing for her, but it happened more and more here in the fog.

“Well … if you hadn’t called them, and they came home later to find you that sick, they would have blamed themselves for not being there. If you’d died … ”

“I wouldn’t have.”

“If you’d died, they never would have forgiven themselves, even if it wasn’t their fault directly.” She felt the tremble in her own lungs and fought it back. “Besides, I … know how you feel.”

“Yeah? I heard you and Felix both ended up like me.”

“Our parents - my parents and his father - were … almost certainly taken to this place.” Somewhere, sometime, somehow. She hadn’t found them. Were they still out there? “They did it to save us. Because we went too far exploring. We would have gone instead.”

“You couldn’t stop that. This place is - hell. It takes. It ravages. That’s why I called it that.” There was a certainty there that would have been comforting if the lies hadn’t been burning at the back of her mind. “You just told me, if it had been the other way around, my parents would have never forgiven themselves. If you’d gone, your parents would have been the same way. If I can’t blame myself, then neither can you.”

Élodie didn’t respond. The lie - burned.

“I called them. It was my fault.” Haddie looked back at the swirls of stars overhead. “I can’t let it go.”

It was so similar. So different and yet the same. Each of them responsible for something awful, for destroying their own lives, ruining their own futures - and for her, the futures of the people she used to call friends.

She’d held onto the secret for so long. It wanted a way out.

“So did I,” she said, almost without realizing it. Haddie’s eyes flicked to her.

“Called them to help?”

“No. I called this place.” She stared up at the sky, imagining the swirl of dark clouds instead of stars, the spindly claws that came for her every time she died. “I didn’t even understand what I was doing. I summoned that fucking monster and that’s why we almost went. That’s why my parents - his father, everyone - disappeared.”

The silence was damning. Or at least it felt that way. Élodie glared at the sky instead of risking a look to see the judgment at hand.

“I spent every day since then trying to undo it. To open a gateway here and get them all back. I couldn’t … do anything else.”

There was more silence, and then unexpectedly she felt a hand clasp hers. Élodie looked over.

There wasn’t any judgment in Haddie’s gaze. Just the same understanding she’d felt a minute before.

“That’s what it does,” Haddie said. “It poisons everything and everyone. It saw you and all your friends and it must have called out, and you heard it for some reason. Don’t ask me why. Maybe you were just listening for something good, and it stepped in that place, and it used you.”

She smiled, very slightly.

“I know. I get it. I … think we both understand.”

It was like a dam breaking and nothing flooding out. Like stopping just at the edge of the cliff she’d been racing toward her whole life and managing to stop at the last second, only to find it was a two foot drop below.

Élodie tried not to laugh with the sheer relief of it all, and shifted her hand enough to squeeze Haddie’s.

“Thanks.” Tears prickled at the corners of her eyes. She fought them back. “It’s - been a long time since anyone’s said something like that to me. But - do not tell Felix.”

“He doesn’t know?”

“No! I couldn’t tell him. It’d destroy him. And me. He’s - a good friend, or he was, and if he found out now that it was my fault his father’s as good as dead, he’d never forgive me.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Please. Don’t tell him.” Her grip got tighter, half pleading, half demanding. “I can’t deal with that right now.”

Haddie raised her eyebrows slightly, but nodded. She looked down at where their hands were clasped, and then saw just nearby the faint raised scar on Élodie’s right side.

“Hey, you didn’t tell me about that one,” she said, nodding toward it.

“It’s not really a positive story.”

“Neither were any of mine. It looks like you got stabbed.”

“I did.” She sighed, and didn’t let go of Haddie’s hand. Haddie didn’t let go, either. “I was in the catacombs under Paris looking for a witch’s skull when the Black Vale finally caught up with me.”

“Bastards.”

“I think they wanted to capture me first, but I didn’t give them the chance. So they went for the kill instead.” The memory of the stab was still sharp and bright, but it had started to fade over time. The pain had been supplanted by so many worse things.

Haddie pulled her hand free of Élodie’s, and suddenly she felt a fingertip against the scar. It startled her almost enough to pull away, but Haddie was quick to pull her hand back again, looking just a little embarrassed.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m so used to just manhandling my own scars I didn’t think.”

“It’s fine. You just surprised me.” Élodie ignored the faint heat she felt prickling on her face, and settled her hands on her stomach. “I don’t even know if I was in the right place to find that stupid skull. Shah had been so sure of it, but - ”

“Shah? Hazra Shah?” For the first time she heard something like accusation in Haddie’s voice. “You worked for that prick?”

“I needed money and resources after my parents were gone,” Élodie said tersely, because this was an argument she’d had multiple times in her life. “He could provide both. He gave me a way to find answers and take revenge. Getting him antiques and artifacts was a small cost as far as I was concerned.”

“He’s almost as bad as the Black Vale. You couldn’t have found anyone else?”

“He was the only resource for this place I knew of.” Élodie gave the sky another glare. “And the only one willing to give me the information I needed. I didn’t listen to podcasts, so it’s not like I could have found you for help.”

“You should have,” Haddie grumbled. “Just imagine what we could have done with what I could see and what you could do.”

For a while they were both silent, letting revelations sink in and memories fade out. They stared at the infinite stars above them, the sweeping galaxies that never existed, even in another dimension. It was just a pretty painting, cooked up by the Entity’s inability to make anything new and instead twisting what was already real.

“It’s amazing,” Haddie said. “I never thought anything here could be … beautiful.”

“It came from our world.” Élodie looked from starsweep to starsweep, the distant if unreal galaxies giving the navy blue of the sky a lighter tint in some places. “Even a copy can be beautiful, sometimes.”

“I wish there were some familiar constellations.”

“There’s always something to see. This might be what the sky looked like, way back when people first decided what the constellations were.”

They could pick out similar lines between stars, things that resembled what they knew. But it was even easier to find new ones, draw new pictures to line up with a new astrology built from a world of death and hopelessness.

“I wonder if it ever changes,” Élodie said, half to herself, but she knew the answer, and Haddie did, too.

“It can’t.” The sigh next to her was older than Haddie actually was. “There’s no creativity here - ”

There was a sudden crack of splintering wood, and then a heavy thud, cutting Haddie off mid-sentence. Both of them started and sat up, glancing at each other and then around. But the noises had been close - too close for them to see someone coming from a distance.

Carefully, Élodie crept to the edge of the roof and looked down.

Michael was just getting to his feet from what had apparently been a fall. A chunk of broken windowframe on the ground told the story of his attempt to get up to where they were. They had gotten up through speed, determination, and nearly losing a fingernail or two in the attempt to scramble up from below; Michael, bigger and heavier than either of them, wasn’t going to be able to make the same progress, although Élodie knew for a fact that he was going to try.

“Michael’s home,” she said. Haddie made her way over to the edge of the roof where Élodie was and looked down just as he looked up at both of them.

“Oh.” They watched his blank gaze as it fixed on them. “So maybe coming here wasn’t the best idea.”

“He’s got the best sky these days. Besides, it’s not like he can get up here.” She paused. “In a hurry, anyway.”

“So what do we do? Just … wait him out?”

“No. He’ll outlast us, and I’m not interested in getting gutted.”

For his part, Michael didn’t move. He was waiting, Élodie thought. Waiting for one of them to try and make a break for it.

“Well … I guess we could just wait for a trial.” Haddie sat back and looked at her. Élodie raised an eyebrow.

“That might be a while.”

“Fine by me.”

They looked at each other for a long second, and then grinned, almost at the same time.

“Well, at least if he gets up here, we’ll die with a nice view.” She leaned away from the edge of the roof to block Michael out. “And with decent company.”

Haddie’s grin pulled into a smile, and Élodie thought for a second she saw a faint flush across her face, the same as might have been on her own.

“Too bad we don’t have a drink, too.”

“We’ll steal something from Glenvale next time.”

“Yeah? You’re up for a next time?”

“Always.”

Chapter Text

He must not have appreciated being blind, she thought later, although by that time it was obvious.

The flashlights they gave her - or she found, digging in broken chests full of garbage and metal - were of barely any use, but light was a weapon in this place. It had always been a weapon against the monster that ran the Ravage. It could copy it, it could bring in sunlight and moonlight that were pale and sickly and sometimes burning, but in the end, true light did damage.

Haddie gave it a little something extra. A real blindness, that stuck around long after the flashlight’s beam had faded out. She wasn’t entirely sure what caused it, but she wasn’t going to admit that. She brought a little extra danger for the monsters, and that was all that mattered.

Except that she tried it on one of them she’d been told was … well, less dangerous, which didn’t mean weak or easy to deal with, and then he hunted her down and found her.

“Do you think you’re being funny?” he snarled, lifting her off the ground and bringing her close to his face. It was a strange face - almost human, scarred, twisted, and frozen. His eyes were white, the sclera black. Wraith, they called him. Invisible until it was too late.

“It’s not meant to be funny,” she hissed, trying to keep her attention on him instead of the figure she could see creeping in from a distance. “It’s meant to hurt you.”

“It already did.” Even if his face showed nothing, his voice was as dangerous as the edge of a knife, giving away a rage barely controlled. “You didn’t have to make it even worse.”

Haddie grimaced as he shifted his grip, jostling her and making the wound on her head throb. Make it worse? She didn’t think being blinded for a short time would hurt.

“Like you don’t - deserve it,” she managed, and gasped when he jammed his club right up against her throat, grinding it against her jaw. Where the danger of a cut throat didn’t exist with that, the danger of a broken jaw did.

“Be very careful what you say around here.” Slowly, out of the corner of her eye, she saw the figure getting closer, something red in their hand. “And who you say it to.”

“Are you - saying you don’t?”

“I’m giving you a warning.” His voice lowered to a hiss. “You’re new to this place. Learn when the lessons are offered.”

She almost said something about knowing, about not being so new, but to her horror she saw those frightening eyes flick to the side - the same side that Dwight was creeping up on. He dropped her abruptly, turned, swung his weapon, and the blow connected so hard she heard the skull crack even as her own drop left her reeling.

Dwight collapsed in an instant without a sound. The Wraith flicked the blood off his club and turned back to her.

“You all try to change the rules of the game,” he said, and she thought she heard a note of something like bitterness to his voice. “But it will never matter. Not for you.”

He dragged her up off the ground again. She kicked and fought, and saw Dwight slowly trying to drag himself away, blood dripping off his head as he went. And then he got her to a hook, and the whole world disappeared when it went through her shoulder because of the pain.

She grabbed the hook, trembling, as he gave her one last look and rang his bell to vanish into thin air again. There was still the look of molten glass in the air in front of her where he was standing, so she knew he hadn’t left quite yet - maybe he was going to wait, and attack whoever came for her. And maybe he was just wondering what the hell to do with her next. Or maybe he was still too blind to find his next target.

Whatever the reason, he stayed a little too long, and a woman with short hair and a determined expression lunged over a nearby half-wall, heading straight for Haddie. She saw the shimmer in the air move, intending to get between them, and then she saw something silver flash in the woman’s hand, dropping to the ground as she got close.

The flashbang went off bright enough that it almost blinded even Haddie. But more importantly, she heard a terrible sound, something inhuman, all rage and pain, and saw the Wraith reappear without the bell calling him back into being. Orange light splintered across him like cracks and dragged him into their world again.

And he’d staggered, like he’d been struck. Or burned.

Jill pulled her off the hook and she ran for it. There was no time to take risks, especially if she had the chance to get away without any more injuries. Besides, she wasn’t the type to gloat. But some thoughts cut through the pain and panic still trying to take up permanent residence in her head:

The light was a weapon, here. And it was more dangerous for some than others.

Chapter Text

Don’t go exploring too far, they’d told her. You might get lost, or worse.

Even Elodie had told her to be careful, and not wander too far into the fog - and she was a woman who went wherever she pleased, deep into dark places that nobody should have wandered to. It was a warning to a new arrival, as if Haddie didn’t know more about this place than most of them ever could have dreamed.

So she went exploring, half out of interest and half out of spite, and got lost.

It wasn’t the danger she’d expected it to be. They told her stories of the killer’s territories. Their homes. The places they valued and protected above everything else. About how if she stumbled into a trap or through the wrong door or into a secluded basement she’d be attacked, torn apart, and brutalized - if she was lucky. There were no rules in the fog, they’d said. The killers had free rein.

She ended up in a dusty, empty plain she didn’t recognize, with crumbling masonry dotted around. The skeletons of long-dead buildings and not much more. The sky was gray and cloudy, and in the distance, all she could see was more fog.

With no other options, and the spite still roiling in her, she started walking. If nothing else, she might find something interesting in the ruins.

But the further she went, the more something started to nag at her mind. It was a familiar feeling. Darkness. Something decrepit. Rot. A miasma in the air like poison. It had been following her for a while.

Eventually she stopped, fists clenched at her sides.

“I know you’re there,” Haddie called.

At first there was no response, and then she heard what had gone hidden before - the faint crunching of dirt underfoot.

“Very astute,” said a voice behind her. “You’re a lot more aware than some of the others.”

It was a reasonable voice. Almost friendly, if it wasn’t for the edge of a threat to every word. Disdain, she might have called it in another time. Or arrogance.

“I’ve had experience with freaks like you,” she said, and turned.

It was the one they called Ghost Face. The one, they all said, who focused on them above all else, and new arrivals like an obsession, at least for a little while. She looked at him, all black leather broken up at his face with white plastic, and -

Something fractured in the air behind him, and it was something only she could see. Images plastered themselves in her head as the air warped. Darkness, chaos, blood, broken glass, his face, over and over again. Distant screaming and the sounds of violence.

Haddie winced as the pain pulsed and faded in her head.

“You,” she hissed. “You’re poison made flesh. You’re a walking Overlap. Everywhere you went, you must have left a weak spot behind.”

“Sorry?” he said, and it wasn’t an apology - he hadn’t understood. She probably shouldn’t have spoken out loud, but the sight of it, the realization, had made the words slip out of her. “I think you lost me, idea-wise.”

“A weak spot,” she repeated. “They told me you were a serial killer. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Then everywhere you settled down to kill people, you made the world weaker metaphysically. You made it easier for the Entity to get in. You - it didn’t have to do anything to get you here, did it?”

“If you’re asking if it had to turn me into a desperate murderer to get me to kill like half the other monsters here, the answer is no,” he said, and stepped fully out from where he’d been lurking, so she could see the full extent of his getup. It was unnecessarily complex, she thought. “As for getting here … I’d say I was invited, but there was no turning down the invitation, so I’m not sure it counts.”

“You came willingly.”

“I didn’t have to be dragged.”

She wanted to spit. People like him were the reason the Entity had its way in so many places. She watched him start to walk toward her and didn’t back up, which must have intrigued him, because she saw his head tilt just a little as he got closer.

“So they already told you all about me?” he asked.

“They told me what I need to know. And I can tell the rest just by looking at you.”

“Really? How’s that?”

“You don’t know?” She snorted. “And here I thought you were supposed to be good at gathering information.”

“You haven’t been here very long,” he countered. “I haven’t had a chance to get you alone yet.”

He stopped not nearly far enough away from her for comfort.

“Until now.”

The air between them went tense. It threatened to snap the second either one of them moved. If she ran he’d chase; if she fought he’d stab her. The longer she looked at him the longer she could see the Entity’s influence, a coil of darkness just on the edge of vision.

One of them had to make a move. It was Haddie who made it, taking a few steps toward him until she was practically in his face.

“I can see this place’s influence,” she snapped. He hadn’t stepped back, and didn’t start even when she leaned in. “I can see it here and I can see it back in the real world. It was the result of trauma. It’s like being psychic but without any of the benefits. I know poison when I see it, and you are poison through and through.”

“Poison made flesh?” He echoed her words from before, surprisingly calm for what she’d expected.

“Yes.” Haddie glared at the dark eyeholes in the white plastic mask. “Does that help fill in the blanks for you?”

He was silent longer than she would have liked, but when he finally spoke he didn’t pull out his knife to accentuate the words.

“It helps a little.” The straps on his back coiled loosely behind him; she could only spare so much attention for them, partly because she had to watch his hands and partly because she was still furious just looking at him. “I’d love to hear about that trauma, though. Did you know someone once called me darkness made flesh?”

“It’s the same thing.” She didn’t smile. “Someone else here knows what you are when they see you, too.”

“I’m sure he’d agree with you.” He folded his arms across his chest. “Tell me what an overlap is.”

“It’s a place in the world where this realm is crossing into ours. Where the poison the Entity spreads is manifest. It’s an overlap of the two places.” She bared her teeth at him. “It’s always supposed to be a place, but you - you just threw a whole new theory into the mix.”

“I’m glad to make you rethink your long-held views,” he said lightly.

“No. It’s not ‘rethinking’, it’s a nightmare. You shouldn’t exist. You’re so evil you literally poison the world around you.”

He leaned in. She refused to lean back; his mask ended up half an inch from her nose.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” he said.

The straps at his back lashed out; before she could jerk away they had her by the arms, wrapping so tightly she couldn’t break free. Haddie jerked wildly and threw herself back, which only dragged him with her as she went, and from the way he stumbled she knew he hadn’t been expecting at least one of those things to happen.

But he recovered quickly. Too quickly. One hand was at her throat and the other vanished behind his back where his knife was. She snapped at him but his fingers locked around her neck before she could bite, and suddenly he was backing her up, toward the crumbling masonry.

“Why don’t you tell me about that trauma?” he asked. There was no change to his tone of voice. It was like he wasn’t using supernatural abilities to corner and attack her.

“I’m not telling you anything! Figure it out yourself, you stalker freak - ”

“I’ll consider it an apology for calling me poisonous,” he said as his grip tightened around her throat.

“I thought - you considered that a compliment - ”

“You don’t.” He stopped them both, even while she tried to fight and pull her way free. “So go ahead and talk.”

The pressure around her neck loosened. She glared at him and tried to yank them both off balance, but he was fixed. Haddie ground her teeth together.

“My parents died in a car accident while I was sick.”

“That’s all?”

“Some people actually love their families,” she spat.

“That still doesn’t seem like something that would leave you so traumatized you can see monsters.”

“I was the reason they were driving in the first place. If I hadn’t, they’d still be alive.” It was impossible to tell what he was thinking this close up; his mask hid any hint of his expression, and she couldn’t read his body language when half of it was outside her range of vision. “I live with that guilt every day. That is what fucked me up.”

He was silent for a time, and then:

“You’re being awfully forthcoming about all this.”

“You’d find out eventually,” she said. “Through all that effort of sneaking and stalking and listening in and hurting people for information - it’d get back to you. This way, I cut through all that bullshit. I stop you from hurting people. I stop you from doing what you love to do. Now you have what you want, all delivered to you on a silver platter.”

Ghost Face said nothing. She felt the straps around her arms tighten, but Haddie only smirked.

“Anything else you want to know?” she asked.

It was a bad decision, in retrospect, but she was angry and consequences were weak in this place. It also told her that she was right in one guess: Ghost Face, for all his hunger for information, all his desire to know their deepest secrets, didn’t want to be told them. He wanted to dig them up himself. Wrench them from unwilling throats and minds.

He forced her back suddenly. She stumbled until she hit a broken wall hard enough to knock the wind out of her. Then his knife was out, at her face, making her flinch away out of instinct.

“I think you need to learn to be very careful what you say around here,” he said, and while his tone was still reasonably light it had lost that faux-friendly edge, the mildness that had made him seem like less of a threat. The blade slid down the side of her face, the flat of it cool against her cheek, and then moved lower, along her jaw, against her throat where his fingers didn’t reach, to the collar of her shirt, and further down. “Not everyone is as reasonable as I am.”

“You’re not reasonable. You just know how to curb your worst instincts sometimes.”

The knife made it to the hem of her long shirt and slipped underneath, pushing it back up as he lifted the blade. She felt the cold edge of it graze her stomach and sucked in a breath.

“Around here, that’s the same thing.” His mask came in closer. “The others act like wild animals. They just take whenever they feel like it. But I know when to use that to my advantage … ”

She felt the edge of the knife against her chest, right between her breasts. A threat to stab right through to the heart, she thought, but he should have known the heart was on the left.

It clicked right as the blade settled itself at the midpoint of her bra, where one cut would split it in half.

“ … and to your disadvantage,” he finished.

Ice shot through her veins as she stared at his mask. The grip on her throat wasn’t so tight now, and there was something sinister - and promising - to his voice. He would -

Of course he would.

The ice turned into magma.

She laughed at him.

“You really are a poison,” she said. “I won’t play your games and I’m not afraid of your knife, so you think you can scare me like this? It’s not working.”

It was working. Some part of her was still recoiling in her head, still petrified at the threat, remembering what the others had told her eventually in hushed, grim tones. But it was a small part of her, one she could push away easily.

“Go ahead. Do it.” She felt his grip tighten around her throat. Rage or a promise? “It’s not going to change anything.”

Her arms were going numb from the tightness of the straps. He was still as a rock, silent as the grave. Haddie braced herself for the worst. Either the rage would take over and she’d be dead in ten minutes, or …

Very, very slowly, the knife moved away. He pulled it out from under her shirt and brought it back up to her face, the tip aimed for her eye.

“Maybe another time,” he said, calm and controlled but not so light anymore. “A piece of advice for you, though? That attitude will get you killed around here.”

“Or worse. I’ve been told.” The tendrils of relief didn’t do much to cool the hatred running through her blood. “Let go of me.”

“Eventually.” The straps tightened and loosened intermittently. “I don’t control these all the time. Right now, they’ll let go when they feel like it.”

“Then what does?” She fought against them as best she could, but they wouldn’t give.

“I couldn’t say.” The knife left her face, but his grip around her neck stayed put. “You and I should really talk about this place sometime. If you’re going to be so forthcoming with information, I’m going to wring as much out of you as I can.”

“I thought you only wanted to learn about people.”

“That’s my primary interest.” His thumb dug into the soft spot under her chin, forcing her head up. “But I’ll never turn down the opportunity to learn about anything else around here.”

The plastic of his mask grazed against the side of her neck, and Haddie heard, very distinctly, the sound of him taking in a breath through his nose.

“You creepy piece of - ”

The straps chose to loosen at that moment, and Haddie forced him back with a knee to the gut; Ghost Face staggered back, just barely managing to keep his balance, and recovered too quickly for her liking.

“Are you trying to be as skeevy as possible?” she demanded. It was a stupid question, giving away anger and anxiety, but she hadn’t expected him to smell her, of all things.

He slotted his knife back into its sheathe and tapped a finger against the edge of his mask, like he was thinking. Haddie waited to see what stupid little quip he’d come up with for a parting shot, ready to fire back and leave him to his stalking.

“Cardamom,” he said.

She stared at him, tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. He watched her for a few seconds longer, then turned and headed back through the dusty ruins toward the fog again without another word.

Haddie didn’t follow for a long, long while.

Chapter Text

She knew from the start that he wasn’t a survivor. There had just been something about him - some gut feeling she got, some invisible aura of malice - that made her uneasy as she’d watched him approach from a distance. Maybe it had been all the black leather, or the fact that he was wearing sunglasses on one of the darkest trial grounds around, but those just seemed to enhance whatever it was she was sensing.

He looked human enough, but then again, so did the Trickster. And there was nothing good about him.

In the aftermath of the slaughter, Meg couldn’t even crawl toward the hatch that was a few feet from her fingertips. Every inch of her felt broken, bones and muscles alike. He could hit harder than anyone had any right to, even here.

He picked her up by the front of her shirt and held her in the air, watching her critically. Meg hung there, barely able to see him through the haze, the blood, and one swollen-shut eye.

“I’m going to let you live on the condition you do a favor for me,” he said.

Perfectly calm. Dangerous, but not like he was about to put a fist through her chest. She watched him, wondering if this was a game or if he was being serious.

“Do you know Jill? Just nod,” he added, when she tried to speak.

She nodded.

“And Chris?”

It was said with more venom than Jill’s name had been. She saw, through the haze that made up her vision, a flash of bared teeth. She nodded again.

“Good.” If holding her up in the air was causing him any problems, he wasn’t showing it. “I want you to tell them that Albert Wesker has been watching them, and is going to be waiting for them. That if they want closure, or revenge, or the slim possibility of answers, they should come find me in the one place they know I’ll be waiting.”

He tilted his head, very slightly.

“Do you understand?”

She was in too much pain and too dazed to do anything other than tell the truth, and shook her head, which made her wince.

“No. Of course you wouldn’t.” For a second she thought he almost smiled. “Tell them anyway. They’ll understand.”

He took a few steps forward so he was holding her over the hatch. Meg could hear it, calling her to relative safety and short-term freedom.

“I’d hate to have to show you what I’m capable of if you don’t.”

He let go. She dropped into the darkness, the threat all but drowned out by the roar of the void beyond the hatch.

Chapter Text

His first clue that something was off was when he saw Nemesis staring at a wall, unmoving.

It was unusual. Normally, the huge bastard was on patrol, stalking the endless halls and rooms of the police department like it was his job. If he was still, it was because he’d found something to focus on. A zombie trying to break in. A collapsing wall that needed to be cleaned up. A survivor.

But this was just a blank wall in the foyer. It was at the top of the staircase, just to the side of the lion statue. It was filthy, bloodsplattered, and had some of that strange black stuff growing along the edge of it, but that was all.

For what had to be over an hour Danny crouched on the balcony overlooking the foyer and watched Nemesis stand without ever looking away from what was apparently a totally indifferent piece of painted drywall. It was like a cat staring at an electrical socket. But where that might indicate a wall fire, this had no explanation.

Or at least, not one that was obvious.

The second clue was the behavior of the zombies that wandered the place. Undead horror films had never been his favorite, but he’d seen the classics, and where normally the things that perpetually crawled into the police department’s halls and went hunting for any living flesh reminded him of nothing more than Night of the Living Dead, they suddenly started reminding him of Re-Animator. Faster, nastier, hungrier - but without the hints of intellect, and much more short-lived.

Nemesis himself hadn’t noticeably changed, but it was harder to tell with him. Even his experience with the blight serum hadn’t really seemed to do all that much.

The whole situation had Danny just intrigued enough to stick around longer than normal on his visits, and then one day he saw Nemesis turn away from the wall and disappear into the darkness of the police department, which on further inspection led to a clearing patch of fog. Called to a trial. It gave Danny the freedom to go up to the wall and inspect it himself; normally, Nemesis had no qualms about removing him from the place by force, usually through the nearest available window.

Up close it wasn’t any different than far away. He looked it over. Knocked on it a few times, and then did so to a different wall nearby. There was the very slightest difference in sound. He ran his hands across it, trying to find any hints of a crack or mechanism that might reveal a frankly stupid secret doorway.

He didn’t have any luck, but there was a faint mark at the back of the lion statue nearby that got his attention when he looked around a little more. It was a tiny hint of red light, normally hidden in the orange glow of the stuff that grew around the place, and when he scratched at it a little panel slid away to reveal a glowing red button.

Curious, he pressed it.

A portion of the wall shifted and slid aside without a sound.

Survival instinct made him pause before he stepped through the newly-opened door. It was dark, and there was a metal staircase leading down into an even deeper darkness. It was almost certainly a trap. But curiosity always got the better of him in the end, here; it was easy to let that happen when consequences were so meaningless.

Slowly, he descended, moving carefully to minimize the sound of his boots on the stairs. Soon the door slid shut behind him, and he was plunged into total blackness.

After a few seconds his eyes adjusted, and he realized there was a faint light nearby. Faintly greenish, it gave edge and form to wherever he was; there were halls, a ceiling, all metal and all strangely antiseptic. Almost like a hospital, or …

He crept down the hall toward the source of the light. It got clearer, brighter - through an open doorway he could see glass and computer screens. Electricity hummed and buzzed.

Cautiously, he peered into the room ahead.

Not a hospital, he realized. A laboratory.

He remembered the look of the lab from Hawkins, and there was definitely a similar feel in front of him. This was darker, and cleaner, and devoid of the creeping growths the Demogorgon had brought with it. It hadn’t been destroyed. Huge glass tubes lined one wall and broke up the center of the room, but they were all empty save one, which held a suspended blight pustula.

For a moment he wondered if this was the new hideaway for the bastard that infected him with the blight, but - no. This was much too advanced. Memories of the dark, dank underground lit by the warm light of candles clashed with the threatening sterility of this place, even if it was just as dark.

Danny peered around the bank of tubes to where monitors were stacked in a double row against a wall. Some of them showed different parts of the police department above. Others showed what must have been other rooms in this little hidden underground place. And some …

He squinted, leaning a little further forward. It looked … like another place. Somewhere familiar.

And then a silhouette moved.

There was someone at the bank of screens.

Belatedly, he realized that the sound of typing had been present since he set foot in the room, but it had mixed with the humming and buzzing and bubbling and so he’d dismissed it out of hand. He’d never been overly familiar with computers; they were useful, but he preferred a hand-written report, and had never really had time to pick up typing much. The sound just didn’t register with him as overly important.

He watched the silhouette in total silence. It was someone taller than him, and broader than him, and at his angle he couldn’t see the face, illuminated by the screens. It was human enough, though, and while normally he would have slotted that in as survivor, he held back from pulling out his knife and going for the killing blow.

Partly it was curiosity, and partly it was bicep circumference. Even with what little light there was, he could see the person in front of him clearly had a physical advantage.

The typing stopped.

“I know you’re there.”

There were a lot of ways Danny could have responded to that, but he settled on honesty. If this was a survivor, he might learn something, and he’d still have time to kill them. And if not … he might still learn something. And get a kill.

“Getting in here wasn’t my best work.” He didn’t move out into a more visible spot, but he did see the figure’s head turn just slightly toward where he was. “Metal tends to give away sound a little too well.”

“That was the point.” The man in front of him turned his attention back to the monitors. “But I didn’t hear you.”

“Then you’re psychic?”

“No.” A hand came up and tapped one of the screens. “I take security very seriously.”

Danny took a few silent steps forward to see the screen better. It was - the very spot where he’d found the door. A few seconds later it flicked to the reception desk at the front of the building.

A live feed of the foyer, he realized. There were cameras everywhere.

“Not seriously enough to have a better lock on the door,” he said dryly.

“That was out of my control.” The typing continued, just loud enough to be a distraction. “You should know as well as I do that this place is limited in resources.”

The other screens showed different rotations of the police department, and some were even showing the meat plant and the institute. It should have been a shock, fascinating, blackmail or worse - whoever this was had live feeds into other unconnected realms - but that all took a backseat as he turned to look more closely at the man typing away unconcernedly.

“Should I?” Danny asked.

“Yes. You’ve been here for quite a while with no place of your own. If you had any real power that wouldn’t be the case, would it?”

The only sound in the room was the electricity and the typing as Danny very carefully considered his next response.

“I’d love to know how you know that,” he said eventually.

“You can see the screens, can’t you?”

He turned to look at them again. The police department. The other realms. Some weren’t just feeds, he realized; some were recordings. He saw Herman as he chased someone through the institute, catching them around a corner and electrocuting them; it cut, and started over again.

He saw a recording of Amanda stalking someone playing one of her games. Ji-Woon having what looked like a very unpleasant conversation with Pinhead. Philip vanishing into nothing as he headed for an exit. Little clips of the places where security cameras ran rampant.

And then there was a recording of a familiar place that he hadn’t seen in a while. Greenish-white, crawling with something, and then someone ran into view and was immediately attacked by the Demogorgon.

It was a recording of the lab under Hawkins.

“How long have you been here?” Danny asked. He kept it casual. Relatively friendly. Just barely away from the shock and rage of being - well, observed.

“Since the Nemesis arrived,” was the equally calm and much more distant response. “I followed him here. Thanks to his penchant for destruction, nobody seemed to notice.”

“A certain something should have noticed.”

“It may very well have, but it must have had other business to occupy it.” The man tapped one final key and set both hands on either side of the keyboard, his eyes still fixed on the screen above it. “Until recently I was free to do as I liked.”

“And now you’re under the same obligations as the rest of us.”

“So it seems.”

There was a long silence between them. Then:

“So what should I call you?” Danny asked.

“Wesker,” was the response. “You don’t need to introduce yourself. I already know who you are.”

It was half instinct and half murderous rage that made him reach behind himself to grab the knife. The man - Wesker - still had his back to him; there was still more than enough time to make him pay for his audacity. After all, if anybody in the fog was going to be a relentless stalker and hoarder of information it was going to be him, for fuck’s sake -

He didn’t even have time to pull the knife out of its sheathe before Wesker hit him so hard he left a dent in the opposite wall.

There were more visits, after that.

Wesker had known from the moment he set foot in that strange and unreal place that his time to be well and truly free from obligation was limited. He took advantage of it - hacked into the other realms’ security systems, started making recordings, acquired everything he could get his hands on without being seen or caught, although he knew it was inevitable, because stealth was not and had never been his specialty.

Nonetheless, he’d gone unseen and unacknowledged more than long enough to get both what he needed and wanted, and he was only short a few things when the monstrous thing that controlled the place finally realized he was there. He’d felt its probing attention from time to time and then it finally came crashing down on him, a binding stronger than any virus, enraged and curious and demanding in equal measures.

It must have known he was better than meat, because it didn’t drag him away from his work and throw him toward the campfire. Instead it gave him the same obligations as the other killers, drawing him under its dangerous grip but on the side with infinitely more freedom. Given the alternatives, he considered it an acceptable outcome.

Ghost Face hadn’t been pleased to learn about him and his work, which wasn’t a surprise. The visits never ended in the stalker’s favor. Wesker let him struggle and stumble in the darkness of the underground lab, trying to find clues and secrets and answers, and when he grew tired of it he got rid of him. There was no point in turning him into an experiment just yet; there were too many interfering factors, and not enough control samples for comparison, to make it worthwhile.

But he wasn’t the only one who came to visit.

Spite, most likely, was what made him spread the rumor of what he’d found. Wesker considered blaming the Nemesis for giving him away in the first place, but there was no point; it wasn’t sentient enough to understand the concept, and after his first few trials the survivors would have given him away regardless. Others tried to find him. He watched them on the security cameras, and watched the Nemesis run them off.

Only one other one made it in. He knew as soon as they were in the door, but suspected Ghost Face again, and barely acknowledged the arrival.

“Haven’t you learned your lesson by now?” he asked with a hint of irritation breaking through. The interruptions were getting annoying.

There was no immediate response. He glanced up at the screen that showed the door, and saw - nothing. No shadowy figure, no black leather. But there was someone else in the room.

“I wasn’t aware you’d tried to teach me any,” said a disembodied voice.

There was a very slight shift of the air on the screen. His guest was invisible. And he’d seen a man who could go invisible before.

“My mistake,” he said, more calmly this time. “I’ve had a pest problem lately.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Behind him, a bell rung a few hollow tones; on the screen, orange light and black outlines crawled through the air, turning into skin and clothing. A person. He watched it, reminded of so many bioweapons he - or or someone he knew - had created. It was normally a reflective coating, something that showed the world on the other side without truly being invisible, but this - this, he suspected, might have been closer to the fantasy ideal of true invisibility.

“Is there a reason you’re here?” he asked.

“I was curious.” There wasn’t much inflection to the voice. He watched the figure on the screen as he typed, seeing the skull-and-spine club, the straight-backed posture, the oddly barklike skin. “Anyone who can slip outside the Entity’s awareness for any length of time is worth getting to know. And so is anyone who can make Ghost Face as angry as you did.”

“He’s that unpopular, I take it.”

“He’s unpopular with me.”

Dry footsteps started to move around the little room. The figure on the screens moved from angle to angle as he walked. Wesker kept an eye on them even as the program in front of him demanded more input.

“You know who I am.”

“I know they call you the Wraith, and I know what you can do.” He fed another few lines of data into the computer. “Outside of that, no.”

“Philip.” Wesker made a mental note. “And you are … a researcher?”

“Yes. I worked, on the whole, to try and better humanity.”

He saw Philip look at the twisted body of a rat suspended in a tube, then turn to look at him again.

“Really.”

“Sometimes success can only be achieved with sacrifice.” The program started to compile, letting him stand back and fold his arms across his chest and, finally, turn to actually face the intruder in his lab. “Isn’t that the principle this whole place is based on?”

The eyes surprised him, just slightly. It was hard to get a good look at people’s faces in the security cameras, and small details just didn’t come through. Black sclera, white irises, and completely unblinking, fixed on him unceasingly.

“No,” Philip said. “The principle of this place is suffering and death. It’s not complex.”

“I was referring to your - to our obligation that allows us to stay here.”

“Ah.” The eyes slid to the rat again. It was dead, not suffering. It was more there for display purposes than anything else, like the blight pustula in a different tube nearby. “That’s still not the case. You can succeed without sacrificing. You can fail while doing it. Our obligation is just to entertain and obey.”

“Entertain?” He raised his eyebrows, just slightly. “You think it does more than feed from these games?”

“I’m certain of it.”

Wesker considered the idea, but didn’t say anything out loud. Philip looked back at the tubes, at the way bubbles occasionally drifted up through the liquid inside, and focused on the one with the blight pustula in it.

“Be careful about those,” he said, giving Wesker a focused look.

“I’m well aware of what they can do.”

“Yet you keep one on hand.”

“It’s dead. The second I take it out of that tube, it’s liable to crumble to dust.”

There was no change on Philip’s face; he suspected, given the barklike texture and the burns, that the man simply couldn’t change his expression. But he got the feeling of a threat anyway, like that club was about to smash into the bank of tubes.

It didn’t. Philip only gave the pustula one more long look before stepping away, moving back around the side of the center console toward the door. Wesker watched him, anticipating the moment he might need to strike.

At the door, Philip stopped, but didn’t look back.

“I hope you’re better than most of what we have here,” he said, flatly.

“You don’t need to doubt my capabilities.”

“I meant a better person.” There was a faint dismissive noise. “But that’s probably just wishful thinking on my part.”

The bell rang. Philip vanished in a web of orange and black light. Wesker waited until his presence was completely gone from the room to turn back to the computer, which was still busily compiling the data.

“A better person,” he echoed, and snorted.

Chapter Text

Evan was sitting on the steps of his porch when Philip arrived, which was unusual, with his mask off and hanging from his hand, which was very unusual. The other hand was pressed against his face so nothing was really visible, but it was less the look of a man trying to hide something and more the look of one so exhausted and frustrated he couldn’t even bring himself to look at the world.

That wasn’t quite as unusual. Especially not these days.

Philip approached him in silence, giving him the space he usually required until he finally spoke.

“I’m gettin’ soft,” he said.

That was surprising enough that Philip almost actually raised his eyebrows. Here was Evan McMillan, the Trapper, one of the most deadly, dedicated, and devoted monsters the fog had ever stolen away, a man so rough it was hard to even break his skin, and he was calling himself soft. Philip knew the translation to that: weak.

“I can’t imagine that happening,” he said, a little conciliatory and a lot questioning.

“One of ‘em came in here,” Evan continued. “A new one. Got lost. Wandered in. Landed in a trap.”

“As they do.”

“I found her right as she got out. Looked her in the eyes. She was scared shitless. Coulda cut her in half right there.”

“But you didn’t.”

Silence was as good a confirmation as any. Philip considered the idea. Evan wasn’t completely unfamiliar with the idea of mercy in trials - he may not have liked it, but sometimes even he let someone escape deliberately - but on his property it was a different story.

“Which one was it?”

“The redheaded bitch. With all the - ” He waved the hand with the mask in the air vaguely, as if trying to illustrate something he couldn’t put into words. “Magic bullshit.”

“Ah.” The girl who turned dull totems - and sometimes even hex totems - into blessings. The thought of it made Philip’s palms itch. The idea that Evan would let her go in one slightly damaged piece was almost shocking. “So you just let her go?”

“Told her to fuck off and not come back.” He almost sounded defeated. “Just … didn’t feel like guttin’ her.”

In the fog, that sort of thing should have been a bad sign. It was a warning of worse things to come. But Evan must have known that, and Philip didn’t need to say it, and the idea of him growing weary of killing, damning as it was, almost made Philip crack a smile.

“We all have our off days.”

“You know I don’t.”

“Yes you do. Otherwise there wouldn’t be quite as many walking away from here alive the rest of the time.”

Evan pulled his hand away from his face and glared up at Philip. It was a face he’d seen so few times before that even now, it was as much a surprise as it had been the first time.

“Don’t fuckin’ start with me,” he snapped, but Philip barely minded. “That’s different and you know it. This was me losing my god damned touch. They’re gonna crawl all over me if she says anything.”

“Why did you do it?”

“I told you. Didn’t feel like it.” Evan dropped his face back in his hand, eyes glaring out between his fingers at the forest beyond his home. “Just tired, is all.”

“Funny. It’s not as if we ever need to sleep.”

“Watch it,” Evan growled. “There’s just too damn many of them now. Seems like every day there’s a new maggot crawling around, teachin’ ‘em all new tricks. It’s exhausting.”

They were both silent for a time after that, listening to the silence that came from wind and empty buildings. No crickets, no rustling of leaves or grass or trees; just the hollow quiet that came from a world that wasn’t quite right.

“Do you remember what it was like before?” Philip said suddenly, making Evan glance up at him.

“Before?” he echoed.

“Yes. Before. Before all of them. Before Max. Before it was just you and me, waiting.”

The silence got a little heavier. Evan looked back at the darkness, but there was yet another surprise for Philip when he didn’t immediately lash out, swear, or stand up and head back into the house.

“Yeah. I remember.”

“The others.”

“Can’t say I remember any of the maggots.”

“Neither do I.”

The moonlight coming from above shone almost too brightly on the ground in front of the manor; there was a little clearing around it, devoid of even stumps, so there was nothing to dim the brightness except its own hollow fakeness. But the Entity seemed to have gotten that much right, at least. It was fake, but it felt - or at least looked - real enough.

“Do you remember the other killers?”

“Some of ‘em.” Evan’s tone was a little distant. Recalling memories that old - maybe - was like trying to remember the before of before this place, instead of before this time. “There was that spider. Size of a goddamned horse.”

“The thing that crawled up the walls.”

“The fucking shapeshifter,” Evan snarled. “Got what he deserved.”

“I don’t recall that one.”

“Lucky you. He broke in once. Saw a painting of my father. Turned into him while I watched. Almost killed him on the spot.”

“Almost?”

“He fucked around a lot.” Evan didn’t answer the question. Philip knew better than to push. “In the end he got dragged into the void by someone else. Picked him up and walked right in. Must have been before you if you don’t remember it.”

“That’s probably for the best.”

“Felt … chaotic, back then. Kinda like now.” Evan lowered his hand a little, so he could see more clearly even if he wasn’t looking at anything in particular. “But different. They were all disappearing. One at a time. Too fast to track.”

“They were … no longer useful.”

“Yeah.”

The silence descended again. Philip tried to think about those days, but the memories fought him.

“It was … hard to learn.”

“We did.”

“You first. Then me. And then … ”

“Then there was nothin’.”

There had been another time, in the fog. When the killers were different and the survivors were differently unfamiliar. When the cycle had been reaching its end, the Entity needing new prey to sustain itself. Exhaustion and anger and rebellion and broken souls had been festering like bad indigestion, and the Entity had simply allowed things to run their course.

There had been - nothing, in the aftermath. All the other killers who had roamed the fog and slaughtered for the Entity had gone. All the survivors whose desperation and terror and hope had fed it simply vanished. The trial grounds, the pockets in the fog, had been consumed in what felt like an instant. It had just been Evan, the almost-last and frighteningly effective, and Philip, the last and uncertain but filled with a terrible rage.

They had known what to do. Had learned it well. And then they went from last to first, the fog suddenly silent and unfurling before them.

“How long was it before the survivors and Max arrived?”

“Hell if I know. But they all showed up at the same time.” Evan had finally dropped his hand. Scars that had rarely seen moonlight were suddenly bathed in it. “It was easier. We just had a job to do. They just had to die.”

“That hasn’t changed.”

“Feels like it has.”

“We know them now. And they know us.” Philip thought about the … visitors Evan got, and about those who crept into the wrecking yard to steal and sometimes to talk, about the way things had gone from the three of them against four confused and frightened victims into crowds tearing each other apart. It had been better in some ways, and worse in others. “Things have … gotten complex, outside what’s expected of us.”

“Yeah.”

Evan and Philip were the first - but only of this cycle. It was a fact that only the two of them knew, and kept to themselves, because the others didn’t need to know and try to undermine what they had here. Some other killers had likely guessed, and some survivors had found evidence of other survivors long gone, but in the end only they could be sure. They had seen others. Learned from others. Had the Entity’s will impressed on them while others had burned out beneath it.

“Do you ever wish it could be simple again?”

Evan didn’t respond right away. They looked out at the clearing between them and the trees, bright as if lit by noonlight, silent as grave.

The wind picked up in the trees. Clouds swirled in from the edge of the fog, made from nothing but memories. They wouldn’t reach this far in to hide the moonlight. They never did.

“No.”

Philip looked down. Evan didn’t look up.

“Simple means this shit starts over. We start from nothin’. I don’t think I can do that.”

“You can’t learn this all over again?”

Evan pulled his mask back on, settling the straps firmly so it wouldn’t come off. He stood and picked up his cleaver and grimaced as one of the hooks in him pulled a little painfully.

“Somethin’ like that,” he said.

The first four survivors - their first four survivors - had been alone against a nightmare. Their fear had been fresh and bright and terrible, and the Entity had practically gorged on it.

They had learned - slowly and painfully, but they had learned. Then one by one others came in, and for them it was never as bad, because they had people there to warn them, to teach them, to tell them what to expect, even if it was never enough to really help. And as new monsters brought new skills, new survivors brought new tricks, and survival became a little easier with every passing trial.

But Philip remembered those early trials, when there had been nothing but blood and terror and rage. When he had done things he regretted now. When mercy had been something begged for and denied.

He wondered, although he would never say it out loud, if that was what Evan couldn’t put up with again. It seemed unlikely.

But he’d let a terrified girl limp off his property without killing her. And that had seemed unlikely, too.

Chapter Text

Felix didn’t know why they sometimes appeared in trials wearing - different clothing than normal, and neither did anybody else. Some had suggested it was an unfunny joke. Others said it was the nature of this place, pulling from past and future and sometimes sideways, into places they had never been but might be. It wasn’t just them who were victims of it, after all; the killers had to deal with it, too.

But it was a particularly strange outfit he found himself in this time. It was military, for one, but not quite so stiff as he would have expected. It had some actual padding. Maybe it would keep him from getting so badly beaten up during a chase, but he wasn’t going to bet on it.

The problem started when one of the women who’d arrived recently, Sheva, turned a corner to join him on a generator and stopped dead. For a second she looked like she’d seen a ghost.

“That’s … ” Felix turned to look at her, uncertain and a little surprised.

“Not really my first choice, but … do you recognize it?”

“Yes. It’s Chris’s B.S.A.A. operative outfit. The one he was wearing when he and I teamed up in Africa.”

“Really?” He glanced down at one sleeve, where in fact there was a patch that confirmed what she said. “Seems strange that I would end up in it, and not him.”

“Yes. It does.” Sheva reached out for the generator, but paused. “It could be a problem for you. That’s what Chris was wearing when we finally took down Wesker once and for … ”

She trailed off. Felix looked down at himself, and then, as if drawn by a magnet, over to the nearby window built into one of the walls.

Wesker was there, with one foot on the sill. Behind the sunglasses, his eyes blazed bright enough to be seen.

“Is this supposed to be a joke?” he hissed.

It took everything in Felix not to run for his life. Sheva was partway between him and the man looking at him like he was less than scum, trying to intervene already even though she was maybe third or fourth on the shitlist.

“It’s just a uniform,” she started, but thin tendrils of that - stuff started to crawl out around his wrist, and at the sight of it she suddenly went silent.

“It has a very specific meaning.”

“We don’t choose what we’re wearing,” Felix tried. The glare didn’t leave him; if anything, it got more intense. He felt like it was burning a hole in his skull. “It’s - that thing, it - has a sick sense of humor. You can’t imagine the stupid things we end up wearing. I don’t even know what this is.”

“And why,” said Wesker, stepping through the window, the black tendrils curling around both hands, locking the knife in place in his fist, “do you think it would decide to put someone in that outfit while dealing with me?”

“I don’t know.” Felix stood, but tried very hard not to run. It felt like at any moment the tension would snap and he’d end up slammed into a wall, that black stuff latching onto him, crawling under his skin, infecting him. If he moved slowly enough, maybe he could avoid that. “Maybe it wanted to test you. Or maybe it has it out for me. Or this was just chance.”

“Oh, it wasn’t just chance.”

But Wesker didn’t charge him. He looked like he was trying to get a grip on himself, which was more than most killers would bother with. He was silent for a few long seconds before noticeably loosening his grip on his knife.

“I’m going to give you one chance to run. After that, if I see you again, you’ll get as much mercy as he does.”

Which, given what Felix had heard, meant none at all.

The relief of being let off the hook didn’t last long. Wesker gave him one more glare, then turned just slightly and went after Sheva instead, moving blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fast, hurling her into the too-near wall with one hand.

Felix took the chance and ran for it. She’d understand. She’d been ready to get between them in the first place, after all. To try and protect him from misdirected rage.

What he wanted to know was why him? It seemed unfair, although as Elodie often said, the Entity didn’t care about or even understand the concept of being fair. It was just bad luck, probably. Just a moment’s entertainment. Maybe it wanted to see what Wesker could do.

Or maybe it still remembered his family history, and what he might have done one day. That he was meant to fight it on every front. Maybe it wanted revenge in advance for something that was never going to happen and was willing to use any tools it had to do it.

That didn’t seem fair, either. Especially when halfway through the trial Wesker had a hand around his throat and was watching his virus crawl its way under Felix’s skin with something like a grin on his face, although given how many teeth he could see, maybe it was more of a grimace.

But that was this place. That was the nightmare he’d run directly into.

He could only hope the outfit was a one-off.

Chapter Text

His first mistake was letting the professional gamer talk him into going raiding.

His second mistake was, on realizing they’d showed up at a literal former real world black site, not grabbing her by the arm and dragging her back to the campfire.

His third mistake was getting caught.

Jonah knew about MK Awakening, obviously. Not just because of his job, but because by the time he was in it that had been borderline declassified, along with all the other 50’s and 60’s secret projects that made him reconsider if this was the job he really wanted for himself. But there was no better way to resolve corruption than from the inside, so he’d put up with it.

Lery’s Memorial Institute had been infamous even compared to the others because the project had gone wrong. All the patients, and test subjects, and prisoners, and other doctors, and even the management that had been running the site, had all been killed. Subjected to tortures and ‘experiments’ by one doctor in particular, whose body had never been found. They’d had him look over the man’s notes to see if there were any secret codes hidden among the ramblings, but there hadn’t been. It had just been insanity put to paper. A deranged mind spilled across the page. It was … interesting, in a way, but disturbing. Useful to psychologists and psychiatrists but not to a codebreaker.

The idea that he would ever meet the man who’d been responsible for all of that had never occurred to him. Obviously it had never occurred to him. Herman Carter was assumed dead, and even if he’d survived somehow, he’d be nearly a hundred by the time Jonah was reading about his atrocities.

But here, fate had decided to give him the opportunity.

Feng had gone down first, partly because she’d been halfway through the window ahead of him and partly because the Doctor held her as a particularly high priority for killing out of hand. They’d both heard the breathing, but just a second too late. She’d gone stiff and then the spikes had gone into her skull.

Jonah, still not used to the outright violence and chaos happening right in front of his face, had jerked back, stumbled, tripped over his own feet and hit the ground on his ass. For a few seconds the Doctor didn’t seem to notice him, too focused on Feng’s twitching soon-to-be-corpse to care, but his head turned to look through the empty window and Jonah felt the focus land on him like a sniper’s scope.

“Ah,” said that broken, crackling voice. “Someone new.”

Before he could get up the Doctor was climbing through the window like some kind of gigantic spider. He crawled backward as fast as he could, but there was no fast enough for this place, and suddenly that unnecessarily huge, twisted figure was looming over him. He braced himself for the inevitable crushed skull, the electricity arcing through him like he was a squirrel in a fuse box.

The hand that came down toward him caught his ID badge instead of his face.

“Let’s see, now. Your name is … ”

There was no way to tell if the expression permanently stretched onto the man’s face was changing. It twitched and shuddered along with the rest of him thanks to the contraptions and hooks and wires and constant electricity. But the wide-open eyes fixed a little too intently on the badge, and then on his face, for comfort.

“Hm .. Vasquez. With the CIA? Really? Extraordinary.” He pulled a little on the badge, dragging Jonah up another inch. “You know, I used to work for the government. A lot of suits and very little creativity, but a lot of money to throw around, too.” He turned the badge over once. “What did you do? Balance budgets? Be someone’s so-called bodyguard? Assassinate? Were you one of their soldiers, maybe?”

Sparks flashed along the wires, all the way down his arm to his fingers. Jonah felt it disperse through the strap on his badge, not painful but a very distinct and clear reminder of how quickly it could become painful.

“Codebreaker,” he managed through grit teeth.

“Fascinating!” That was a bad sign, he thought. “So you’ve got quite the brain in there, then.”

“I thought I did.”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself. The government only brings the best and brightest on board, for the most part, unless standards have really dropped since I was being paid to do their dirty work.” The Doctor idly turned the badge over and over, the lanyard twisting up, the closing point getting closer to his neck with every turn. “Unless you went sprinting at a black hole leading directly into this place, I’m sure it was only slightly your fault you ended up here.”

That was slightly more true than he wanted it to be, but Jonah didn’t say that, instead opting to try and keep his mouth shut. If he could just get out alive - or at least die as painlessly as possible - then he could pretend none of this ever happened.

“Do they keep records of what I did? They have to. They keep records of everything.” He waited for a response, but Jonah couldn’t quite figure out how to say no without it sounding like a lie; four seconds passed, and the Doctor brought his spiked stick up, flicking the sunglasses off Jonah’s face with a practiced and surprisingly painless movement. But the speed, like the electricity, hinted at how easy it would be to change that. In his mind’s eye he could see the stick coming back around, going for his face again, but this time two inches further inward. It’d shatter his skull.

Those awful staring eyes bored into his.

“I can see something in that look you’re giving me that isn’t exactly the terror I’m always expecting,” said the Doctor, as brightly as ever. “So, if you would: answer the question.”

It was answer or be electrocuted. And that would just be the start.

“Yes,” he managed.

“Have you read them?”

“ … yes.”

“Exceptional. How did you feel about it?”

Jonah stared at him. Honesty seemed just as likely to get him turned inside out as lying did right now, and as a flicker of electric charge made Feng’s blood shine a little too brightly on that spiked stick, he felt a tiny spark of rage try to scramble to the surface of his brain.

“Awful. It was the worst thing I’ve ever read.”

The Doctor laughed; Jonah flinched, more out of the expectation that he was about to be turned into a smoking corpse than out of surprise.

“Just the sort of reaction I was hoping for! I appreciate your honesty, by the way. Not very many people would think what I did was a positive thing, and very few of them would be on your side. If you’d lied, I’d have known immediately.”

He didn’t reply. What would he say? Thank you didn’t seem appropriate.

The stick swung away from him, but he didn’t relax. The Doctor was watching him and thanks to the way his face was mutilated, there was no way to tell what his expression was. If he was waiting, or thoughtful, or angry, or just about to take out any unused rage from killing Feng right off the bat on him. It was - a problem.

“So … why is a codebreaker creeping onto my property? Unless you were coming in to see if you could find any more of my work to read through and interpret, I can only assume you had unpleasant intentions. Am I right?”

“We were - just looking around,” he said, and grimaced at the little snort of laughter he got in response.

“Really? Not with her in charge.” Jonah glanced at the window, where he couldn’t see Feng’s body from his own position on the floor. “No, I think you two were here to sneak, spy, and steal. Just like everyone else.”

“I … tried to tell her it was a bad idea.”

“Trying to and doing so are very different things, but even if you’d managed to pull it off, that would have just encouraged her.” For a second, the Doctor looked back. “In my experience, she has an addiction to bad ideas and doing the worst thing possible - ”

Jonah was already scrambling to his feet and running, using every ounce of spare energy left in him to bolt as fast as he could out of the room and down the halls.

He didn’t hear a yell or a scream, anything that might indicate anger - oh, no, not him. Not with this killer. He heard a laugh, high and amused, and heard the sound of something charging up, getting ready to blast.

There were no lockers here, outside trials. No places to hide out in so he didn’t get electrocuted or scream. And so the wave of electricity caught him and sent him stumbling, but he knew how to stay on his feet. He didn’t fall, didn’t end up a twitching mess on the ground. He just kept going, his brain rattled, every nerve dancing with electric shocks, his limbs twitching even as he forced them to keep going in one direction.

But the other thing trials had that the fog didn’t was a very quick recovery time.

Trying to turn to where he thought the exit was didn’t work as well as going forward. One leg just about twisted, dropped him face first on the filthy exposed concrete floor, made it difficult to get back up. And he could hear the Doctor closing in behind him, hear that constant laughter, that awful broken breathing, and -

“It’s very rude to leave a conversation mid-sentence, you know!”

Jonah dodged the first grab but not the second. He kicked, landed, but didn’t get away. One hand closed on the back of his leg and pulled him away from what turned out to be just another dead-end of a hallway, not the escape he’d been hoping for.

“Although I have to commend you on that turn of speed, and being willing to use your dead friend as a distraction tactic. Very CIA.”

He clawed uselessly at the floor as he was dragged away. In the center of the halls there was nothing to grab and hold on to. Nothing to stop the inevitable.

“Nevertheless, you’re a trespasser, and I have very specific ways of handling trespassers. Most likely I won’t be seeing you again after this, although miracles do happen.”

As he was dragged around a corner Jonah caught the edge of a doorframe and wrenched. He managed to get an elbow around it and anchor himself just in time. The Doctor dragged on his leg hard, but he held on, right up until that spiked stick came down on his other knee like an anvil.

Holding on didn’t work after that.

“I’ve had a lot of opportunities to improve on my work here,” he heard through the pain ringing in every inch of him as he was dragged past a stairwell and onto metal grating. “I don’t have precisely as much as I’d like to, especially with regards to specific tools and equipment, but there’s plenty of ways to get around that when you don’t have to worry about inspections or progress reports or the limitation of any kind of morality. In the end, even the soulless drones observing me were ready to put a gun to my head. A pity they could never understand.”

Where the light below the grating came from he was never going to know. Jonah tried to hook his fingers into it, but his strength was gone now.

His leg hit the floor, and he was pulled up by the back of the shirt, slammed into a decaying chair against the protests of his broken knee.

The Doctor watched him for a moment, then carefully set his weapon aside.

“Why don’t I show you what I’ve learned since then?”

And Jonah thought: I’m never listening to these kids again.

Chapter Text

They looked up at it: the siding, the windows, the flaking paint and rotting banisters, the porch that looked ready to fall apart. The shingles still looked decently held-on, but she could only wonder how quickly they’d come loose if stepped on.

“This is a normal-ass house,” Julie said.

“Here?” Danny replied. “I don’t think so.”

She glared at him under her mask, but without much venom. It looked like a normal house, but it was sitting in the middle of a broken piece of land - literally broken, the edges cracking and disintegrating into the air, ignoring gravity and sensibility. It was probably the weirdest place in the fog she’d been so far. It was like it had been ripped out of the earth and brought here, not just copied from someone’s memories.

And yet … there was the house, as normal as anything she’d ever seen.

“Yeah, well, it doesn’t look weird.” She peered in through the open doorway, not seeing anything out of place. “Doesn’t even look bigger in there than it should be.”

“Then let’s go in and find out what the mystery is.”

“Is this really a good idea? We don’t even know what came with it.”

“Nothing might have. There’s plenty of places out there without a resident.” Danny headed up the steps onto the porch. “And given the way things are looking, this one’s probably on its way out.”

“I thought you said this was new.” Julie followed, a little less certain than him.

“New to me,” he clarified. “And new to everyone else I’ve talked to.”

It was an answer, but she didn’t like it. Still, as if she was going to tell him she was afraid, or reluctant at all. Despite everything they’d dealt with here, a part of her was still in awe of what he was and what he’d done.

Inside the house it was dark and gloomy, and just slightly unsettling. There was nothing out of place on the lower floor. Everything was dusty. The floorboards creaked. The kitchen was devoid of anything useful or interesting.

She kept an eye on Danny, who was wandering about as pointlessly as she was. He wasn’t looking at her, but she got the feeling of being watched, the same way she did in a trial. It probably wasn’t the Entity, because the pressure wasn’t there, but … something was keeping track of her.

“Do you feel that?”

“Feel what?”

“The … ” Julie hesitated. “Nothing. I just thought we might have been followed.”

“I’m sure Frank has an eye on you.” Danny turned and headed toward the twisted staircase. “Not that he needs to, right?”

She didn’t rise to the bait, and just followed in silence instead, but this wasn’t Frank. She was sure of it.

Upstairs they found the problems: the floor of one room was a dusty drywall white, and all the furniture was on the walls - or the ceiling. She stared up at it as Danny pulled out his camera and started taking pictures.

“Okay, not so normal,” she admitted.

“Nothing here is normal.” The flash lit up the room with every picture, banishing shadows for just long enough to reveal nothing but curling black mist. “This is just a little more obvious than usual.”

“I know that.” Julie headed into the next room over and glared out the windows, which were too narrow to squeeze through. There was a break in the wall just outside the door that would take her out onto the roof above the porch, but she didn’t head outside just yet.

“Then don’t act like this is a surprise.” He tucked his camera away and joined her, gloved fingers running across the metal frame of a bedstead.

“I’m not surprised.”

“Scared, then?”

“Not that, either.”

“I’m sure.” He passed by her and opened a wardrobe. “If you’re really so upset, you can - ”

Out of the corner of her eye, Julie saw hands - a lot of hands - reach out of the open wardrobe, wrap around Danny, and drag him inside. The doors slammed shut behind him, leaving her alone in the room.

He hadn’t made a sound. Now, listening hard because moving was too frightening of a prospect for her, she didn’t hear anything else, either. Just the silence of an empty room.

When she finally unfroze from her spot, Julie very carefully approached the wardrobe. It sat there, entirely unthreatening except for the part where it had kidnapped the Ghost Face. She knew the smart thing to do would be to head back to the lodge and tell everyone what had happened, but curiosity was keeping her there, making her wonder.

All the common sense in her was screaming at her not to do the one thing she suddenly felt like she had to do.

Julie reached out and, slowly, opened the wardrobe doors.

There was nothing there. Just dusty wood and rusting hangers. There wasn’t even any blood.

Equally slowly, she shut the doors, then backed out of the room. As she turned to leave she swore she saw something moving in the shadows.

Now left alone without anyone to judge her, she didn’t hesitate to run like hell.

Later on Danny claimed he didn’t remember what had happened, and even tried to flip it on her, claiming she’d run away before anything even happened. Of course the rest of the Legion believed her over him, so he brushed them off.

But she did notice that he didn’t ask her to go back there again - or mention doing it himself, or try to lord over them something he’d found there. In fact, it was like he was pretending the whole place didn’t exist.

Which was about par the course for him when he’d gotten fucked over.

She just had to satisfy herself with knowing something out there could get under his skin like that.

Chapter Text

Mikaela crouched behind a wall near her most recent totem blessing and felt her heartbeat pounding in her skull. He was nearby, and she had no idea how to deal with it. She was afraid again. Afraid the same way she was every time a new killer showed up, the way so many of the others weren’t anymore.

He was huge and wearing armor and had a sword almost as long as she was tall and she could feel the pulse of dark magic in the air when he called his friends into being. They attacked as viciously as he did, and now, as she felt him getting closer and closer, she knew he was coming for her next. He’d smashed the man who’d arrived with him into the dirt, but hadn’t hooked him yet. He was looking for another target. The target who’d put down a boon.

She heard his heavy footsteps approaching and shut her eyes as tight as she could, bracing herself for being found, cut down, dragged away -

“What the hell is this?”

She opened her eyes.

He wasn’t in front of her, but he was close by, and his words - hadn’t been directed at her. Cautiously, she peered around the edge of the wall.

Just in front of her boon totem was a figure all in armor, the sunlight that lit the cornfields dazzling off the bloody metal. In one hand he had his sword; in the other, he had - Vito. Armored fingers were wound tight in his hair, forcing him close to the boon totem that glowed with an unearthly blue light.

He knew what it was, of course. He’d been fascinated by the idea when it came up, and asked her to teach him, and he’d learned faster than anyone else she’d taught it to. He had a natural affinity for magic, especially the magic in the fog, or so he claimed.

“Explain it,” snarled the man Vito had called Tarhos, “lest I cut that silent tongue from your mouth.”

She stared at the two of them, dread clenching in her gut. The huge bastard would find out, and she’d be dead, so dead, because he didn’t seem like the kind of person to not take this personally -

Vito glanced her direction. For a few seconds, their eyes met, and then she saw him smile.

“Do you like it?” he said conversationally. “I thought it was about time I brought you something new to struggle with.”

“Your magic means nothing to me, old man.” Tarhos dragged him just far enough back to smash the candles flat with a single kick. “Your tricks are nothing more than that. No magic can stay my blade.”

“It certainly seemed to make you miss more often - ”

He slammed Vito into the wall, and Mikaela flinched, but all Vito did was wheeze out a laugh. She couldn’t believe it. He was protecting her -

“You’ll suffer for this,” Tarhos growled as he hauled Vito up over his shoulder. “For as long as I can rightfully make you.”

She stayed hidden until they’d vanished into the corn, and then crept after them, waiting until the sounds of clanking metal had faded out before pulling Vito down from the hook.

“You didn’t have to do that,” she said as she pulled him toward the barn.

“Consider it my way of thanking you for the idea.” He let her drag him into the claustrophobic warmth of hay and old blood. “Besides, I’m used to his wrath. You … you don’t deserve what he would do to you.”

“What would he - ” She cut herself off, and Vito’s expression, normally at least a little friendly, darkened.

“Don’t ask me to tell you,” he said. “It would poison the very air.”

Mikaela tried not to imagine what he might say, failed, and shook her head, pulling out the bandages again.

“He’ll find out eventually,” she said, a little hopelessly. “If he asks the other killers, they’ll tell him.”

“That depends on him making good enough acquaintances with any of them to actually have a conversation,” he replied, and the smile came back. “A leper makes friends more easily than he does. I wouldn’t worry yourself about it.”

“If you say so.” Mikaela tried to put the thought out of her mind, finished wrapping up his shoulder, and followed him out into the cornfields to find another generator.

Chapter Text

Creeping in for another attempt at getting revenge on a man who seemed impossible to kill, Ghost Face heard a voice he didn’t recognize.

It was unusual to hear anybody down here in the lab; Wesker wasn’t the type to monologue to himself, although rumors had come around that he would do it if he knew someone else was listening. It was especially unusual because, aside from the unfamiliar voice sounding entirely human, Wesker’s own responses were - almost friendly.

“What, were you having a mid-life crisis or something?”

“It’s tactical. I needed something that could actually withstand damage and not get in the way.”

“So why the coat?”

“It dissuaded stupidity.”

“I think you just wanted to be dramatic.”

He leaned against the wall by the door where he knew he couldn’t be seen, and listened.

“There’s worse things to be.”

“That’s debatable.” A chair squeaked. “I assume you weren’t wearing it in the labs.”

“No. But I ended up doing less labwork by the end of things, anyway, so it didn’t matter.”

“Really? You shouldn’t have. You know what idiots can do if you leave them for five seconds.”

“It was a much bigger project by that point. I couldn’t have done everything myself. And you weren’t around to help, if I might add.”

“Don’t blame me for that.”

“I don’t. I’m just saying, without you, I had to make do with what was available, regardless of the quality.”

He’d stumbled on a conversation midway through, he realized, and it was more intriguing than just something to listen in on. Who the hell was in there? Whoever it was, they knew Wesker, and not as an enemy. Given all his other sources on the man were either survivors or more inclined to smear him across the walls than talk, this was something to focus on.

Danny shifted to the other side of the doorway, quickly enough to not be seen, although he knew the cameras might pick him up. When there was no immediate reprisal he risked a look into the room.

There was a blond man sitting on one of the desk chairs that had been appropriated from elsewhere in the police department. Younger than Wesker, though not by much, and looking about as sallow as any scientist in their field might, or so Danny suspected. He was wearing a shirt that looked like it had also been stolen from a locker somewhere, and across his lap was approximately half a labcoat. It looked like it had torn off down the back, although Danny wasn’t all that interested in knowing exactly what the stains were.

The man wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t even worried. It was an unusual expression for someone face to face with Wesker, which made him the most interesting thing in the entire building.

“How bad was it?”

“Not the worst we ever had to deal with, but the immediate company could have used some improvement.”

“Don’t be obtuse. That could mean anything.”

Wesker was silent for a time, and Danny leaned further around the corner, but he couldn’t see any nearby silhouettes.

“Do you remember anything that happened?” he asked, suddenly. The blond man didn’t reply right away. Danny watched him as he stared down at the labcoat in his hands, evidently trying to think.

“Not really.” He pulled at stray threads where the coat had torn. “I remember being shot. Injecting G. After that, there’s nothing solid, except how much it hurt.”

“So you don’t remember anything you did.”

“I just said that,” was the bitter response. It was followed by silence, and then a very careful question. “Did Sherry … ?”

“She survived, despite everything you did.”

“Thank God.” Another pause. “And Annette?”

“Not so lucky.”

“Damn. Well, she probably expected that to happen eventually.”

“Being killed by a mutant version of her husband?” Wesker almost sounded amused.

“Dying as a result of our research,” was the sneering response. “She never had the vision we did.”

“She had enough vision to try and kill you, or so I heard.”

“Really? But she failed.”

“Oh, yes.”

There was silence again. With the limited context he knew, it was hard for Danny to pull together a picture of what they were talking about, but it was clearly about their lives before the fog - the things he sometimes heard the survivors Nemesis and Wesker had brought with them talking about.

He crept in a little closer. Now he could see the edge of Wesker, standing by the various monitors he used for spying and research.

“What happened to Sherry?”

“After she was extracted from Raccoon City, the government found her. They took her into custody for protection, and to do their own research projects.”

“Protection? From what?”

“Me.”

“From you?” The blond man stared at Wesker. “Why? What exactly was your plan?”

“She was the only living person who’d been exposed to the G-virus like she was, William. Did you think I was just going to leave that potential untapped?”

“Yes! What, did you plan on making use of my work?”

“Of course. And I did.” If he was at all remorseful for any of this, it wasn’t even slightly obvious.

“How? Did you break down the door of the state department and kidnap her?”

“No. They kept her well away from me. I had to scavenge samples from your corpse.”

“From my - ” For a few seconds the man named William just gaped. “And here I thought professional courtesy would have at least made you hesitate, Albert!”

Albert. Danny had to suppress a laugh. The fact that a man as deadly and dangerous as Wesker had a name like that never failed to get him; the first time he’d overheard it from the survivors, they’d almost survived just for handing over that information, even unintentionally.

In the little room, Wesker’s silhouette turned toward the door slightly.

“I couldn’t. The government was going to turn the city into a wasteland. I had to get those samples out immediately.” He took a few steps toward the door, more casual than intent. “Don’t try to claim you wouldn’t have done exactly the same thing in my position.”

“Of course I would have, but - ” William paused, more than slightly overcome by offense at the past he hadn’t been alive to see. “It’s not the same thing! That was my work, my creation, and you used it for what?”

“To keep the research we were originally set on going.” His steps slowed near the door, and he turned back toward William. Danny, rigid to keep from being noticed, leaned back in slightly. “There was always more work to be done. You know that. Not even your work was perfected, in the end.”

“It was pretty god damned close - ”

Wesker struck so fast even Danny wasn’t expecting it. One second he was perfectly still; the next his hand was on Danny’s skull, grabbing him from around the edge of the door and slamming it into the metal frame, which was enough to concuss him immediately.

It meant he didn’t have the strength left to protect himself, although given his past experiences with Wesker, being fully conscious generally didn’t help much.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Pest control,” said Wesker, and snapped Danny’s neck.

Birkin stared at the leather-clad body as it hit the floor, the masked face having been turned 180 degrees to stare at nothing.

“Pest control?” he echoed.

“Yes.” Wesker brushed off his hands, as if he’d gotten blood on them. “You should know as well as I do that rats come in all shapes and sizes.”

“Why is he wearing a mask?”

“Overcompensation.”

“Ah.” Birkin watched as Wesker dragged by the body by the straps toward another door, where he unceremoniously dumped it into the darkness. “And he was here because … ?”

“He has an addiction to listening in on conversations that don’t involve him.”

“I see.”

Wesker shut the door and, finally, pulled up a chair to sit down across from Birkin. Both of them were silent for a while, as if the weight of a decade between their deaths was forcing the words down.

“How did you get here, William?” Wesker said eventually. “Why are you here? You clearly aren’t one of the survivors, but you’re not capable of killing like this.”

“Thank you, Albert, that’s very encouraging.”

“I’m being serious. What are you here for? What is it you’re doing?”

Birkin stared at him, but Wesker knew right away he wasn’t really seeing him. He just waited, and listened.

“I … can remember something,” Birkin said, distantly. “I think I’ve been in those trials, but … I’m not … myself.”

“Infected?”

“Maybe. But different. I have memories that aren’t mine. I’m certain of that.” He turned the ruined labcoat in his hands. “It’s like … I’m myself, but not myself. Like I’m riding in the back of someone else’s mind, or … someone else is in mine? I don’t know. This kind of thing isn’t my expertise.”

Wesker said nothing.

“That’s not the case now, obviously,” Birkin continued, “but I swear I’ve killed people here. With a pipe.”

“But you’re here, as human as you ever were.”

“I just got here. I don’t know what the hell is going on. Why don’t you figure it out?”

“I intend to.” Wesker leaned back in his chair. “It’ll be a more worthwhile project than half of what I’ve worked on already.”

“Really? Are we that bereft of opportunities here?”

“More bereft of resources. I hope you’re not offended by the idea of being a test subject.”

“Of course I am. At least give me the benefit of doing some of my own research.” Wesker almost smiled at that, which was unusual even for William Birkin to see, and so he smoothed out the half-coat on his lap and fixed Wesker with a critical stare. “So what now?”

“Now? We continue our work. I’d recommend you stay here when you aren’t being forced into a trial, for your own safety.”

“I think I can handle myself, Albert.”

“No, you can’t. Not here.” There was a certainty to it that surprised Birkin. “The people here are universally ridiculous and not worth either of our time, but they’re incredibly violent, and you’re human right now. Any of them could kill you, and while that might not stick, I’d rather not see you mutilated by idiots.”

“How bad could it possibly be?”

“The only other person who can hold a worthwhile conversation around here would strap you to a chair, electrocute you until your eyes burst, and perform brain surgery on you while you’re still alive,” Wesker said, almost matter-of-factly. “And he’s not even the worst.”

“Oh. Well, in that case … ”

“I’ll set you up with a lab in here.” Wesker stood up and pushed his chair back in. “If you find yourself somewhere else, try to make your way back here. And stay out of the way of the Nemesis.”

“I’d say I appreciate your help, but honestly, this is the bare minimum I’d expect out of you.” Birkin almost smiled at that, more of a smirk than anything else.

And Wesker, possibly for the first time in over a decade, returned it.

“I’m not going to let the only friend I've ever had slum it with a pack of braindead serial killers,” he said, and turned to find new space in the darkened, half-used halls of his lab.

Chapter Text

There had been some aspects of everyday life that Haddie had missed over the years she’d struggled with her visions and night terrors. Social interaction was a big one. That included dating.

She sat at the campfire and stared without seeing at the people around her, mind completely distracted from any discussions or arguments at hand by thoughts she’d never really dealt with before. Traumatic as seeing ghosts and broken places in the world had been, they’d let her bypass the chaotic world of teenage dating, something she’d figured was worth missing. It meant she’d be going in blind if she ever did meet someone worth dating, but she’d figured that wasn’t going to happen.

And then it had. Here, in the worst possible place for literally anything.

On the other side of the clearing Élodie was comparing notes with Yoichi on something she couldn’t quite overhear. Cryptids, Haddie guessed, because that was where their interests overlapped. She watched those elegant hands move, those eyes gleam bright with campfirelight and intrigue at something she’d never known, the intensity burning in her as brightly as any flame.

Something in her gut squeezed.

Felix, who was sitting nearby, caught her gaze and followed it.

“You could just ask her, you know,” he said.

“Ask her what?”

“To go out. Walking. Talking. Getting to know each other better.”

“I know that. And she’d say yes.” Haddie kept watching the distant conversation and the way Élodie leaned in to look at a sketch Yoichi had drawn on a stolen notepad. “I’ve done it before. That’s not the problem.”

“Then what is?”

“You can’t tell?” She sighed. “She’s out of my league.”

Felix was silent for a long few seconds before he cleared his throat.

“I don’t think that’s the case.”

“Really.”

“Really. There aren’t ‘leagues’ here. We’re all stuck together; it’d be stupid to try and institute some kind of social hierarchy, even on a superficial level.” She glanced at him and saw him smiling a little awkwardly. “Besides, I don’t think she’d agree with that.”

“You think?” The light of the fire made the red stone in Élodie’s necklace gleam.

“Well, I did know her, once.”

“Yeah. You guys have mentioned. Back when you were teenagers.” Haddie leaned her head on her hand, elbow against her knee. “You’re honestly trying to tell me that you think I have a chance with her? I might have any chance at all with a woman who could have been on the front of every fashion magazine in Paris?”

“She wasn’t.”

“But she could have been.” Even at the campfire, her clothes ragged and bloody, edged with dirt and soot, she looked like nothing could ever bother her in her life. “I’m a podcaster who goes digging in mass murder scenes and occult potholes. She’s basically an occult version of Indiana Jones, with twice the funding and class and ten times better looking. I’m sure she thinks what I’ve done is interesting, but that’s about it.”

Felix didn’t respond right away. She looked over at him again and saw him staring into the fire, his expression indecipherable to her, but after a few seconds he resettled himself.

“When we were still talking, way back before, she and I and the rest of our group, we were trying to figure out what happened,” he said. “Some of them were moving on. She wasn’t happy about it. I tried to stick with her on that, but it was difficult. Especially because of how far she was going with some of her ideas.”

Haddie kept half an eye on him. The rest of her attention was still across the campfire, where Élodie was maybe too close to Yoichi, though she wasn’t touching him.

“Eventually she sends me this e-mail about how I need to keep away from major monuments in cities, because those attract pigeons. I asked what was so important about pigeons, and she said they were spies for the Entity - well, we didn’t know what it was called back then, but that was the gist of it.”

“What?” Haddie finally looked over at him fully. “Pigeons? Why?”

“There was a long paragraph about it. Something about the rings around their eyes. I don’t remember the full explanation, because that was when I stopped responding to her messages. We were seventeen,” he added. “I was trying to focus on school.”

Haddie stared at him for a few long seconds.

“Why are you telling me this? What do pigeons being spies for this place have to do with anything?”

“I’m trying to say that she’s not some untouchable perfect person,” he said. “And that you’re making her into something she’s not to try and stop yourself from taking a risk you’re not familiar with.”

“I’m not afraid of risks.”

“You might be.” His gaze was fixed on her, going right through her. “You said you didn’t have much of a childhood? Have you ever dated before?”

She didn’t respond.

“There you have it, then.” He almost smiled again. “You’ve spent time with her, right? Alone together? Not out of obligation?”

“Well, yeah, but - ”

“Then that’s that. She doesn’t do that if she doesn’t have to. Certainly not with people she doesn’t like.”

Haddie gave him another critical look, then turned her eyes back to the other side of the fire, where Élodie’s expression had soured somewhat as Yoichi flipped through the pages of the notepad.

“I’ve got a lot of scars,” she said, but the certainty had drained away.

“She has a few. And I don’t think that bothers her.”

She remembered the time on the roof of a house in Haddonfield, when they’d shared scars and stories and their hands had touched, more than just a little. She remembered the sympathy, the empathy, the secrets. The refusal to judge or grant a forgiveness that wouldn’t have done anything.

It had seemed too good to be true, even here. Especially here.

“I guess so,” she said, as Élodie gently took the notepad from Yoichi’s hands and equally politely started tearing a page out, much to his distress.

“We don’t have much happiness here.” Felix leaned back on the log he was sitting on. “Don’t throw away a chance at it when there’s much worse things looking to do that for you.”

Haddie gave him one last long look, and then kept her attention across the clearing, wondering just how true that was.

Chapter Text

There had never been people directly related in the fog before.

There were people who’d known each other, sure. People they could recognize. Ties, but only by knowledge, never by blood. Even the Spirit, descended from the Oni, carrying one of his swords, was about as directly related to him as anyone else. It had been hundreds of years; their bond was more in knowing each other, and in the rage that had followed the bloodline, rather than the bloodline itself. It was a good thing, in a way; the horrors of someone close to you, that you knew, a close friend or almost-lover being gutted in front of you was bad enough. Family - could be worse, although maybe not so much for some.

The dangers of having a connection were wide and varied and everybody hated the fact, but they weren’t going to sabotage what little comfort they had in this place by refusing to befriend each other, for the most part. They’d learned to get used to it. It helped, when you knew they’d be back at the campfire a little while later even after you saw their head split open.

And then those two showed up.

Her, dragging him, calling for help. Both of them looking over their shoulders for a pursuer who’d cut him along the arm.

They were siblings. Close. Interrupting each other, arguing, trying to one-up the other and explain what really happened, who might have been responsible.

Some of the others looked at each other across the campfire, their expressions guarded and wary, wondering not just what they’d unintentionally brought with them, but what was going to happen when the Entity decided they needed to suffer together.

Her name, she’d proudly announced, was Skull Merchant. David had laughed at that, and she’d stabbed him in the gut.

She didn’t look threatening, but her drones did, and it only took one swipe to realize that while the setup on her arm was incredibly fake-looking the blades attached to it were very real. Then there were the drones. Having handled totems for so long, Nea knew by touch that they were built around real skulls. The blood on them was tacky to the touch, sticking to her fingers, and the way they fought back even when she deactivated them pissed her off. There were several bloody patches on her arm now where she’d torn the little trackers off.

It didn’t surprise her much to find out that their new monster was slightly fixed on Thalita and Renato. It did make her worry, though, just a little bit, especially when she saw both of them running through the trees. They’d only been through a few trials so far. Separate trials, struggling to get hold of the place. Of the nightmare and the terror. They were doing … fine, she supposed.

She told them to split up. To separate. To not let the crazy woman wearing half a bedazzled gas mask see the two of them together, because if she got her hands on one, what would the other do? Not run away, that was for damn sure. And that would start a catastrophe.

They were reluctant to break apart. Nea practically had to drag Thalita away, promising David was out there to keep an eye on Renato, which was more or less the case as David usually had an eye on everyone. Once they were separated, things went almost normally, at least as far as normal went with a supernatural human hunt.

But their new monster figured out that both of them were in there. And she wasn’t a blindly angry murderer, oh no. She was nasty, driven and tactical, as bad as Ghost Face could ever be. She was cunning, and pretended she hadn’t noticed, and then after David was dead and Nea was prying the exit gate open she struck.

Thalita wasn’t going to leave her brother behind, and had run back to find him when she heard him scream. Nea stayed. But she could hear the yelling. Could hear it pitch up, and hear the footsteps, and hear an inevitability that made her skin crawl.

She yanked the gate open before she looked back. Thalita was just ahead of Renato, their hands caught in a death grip, which didn’t make a difference when the Skull Merchant landed on his back and broke him free from his sister’s grip. Thalita lunged back toward him and the blades swiped at her, lunged at her, cut her deep as Nea ran ahead to try and either intervene or at least prevent a total slaughter, because like hell was she going back to the campfire saying she let both of them die at the same time -

The Skull Merchant swung again, and would have caught Thalita if Nea hadn’t grabbed her and dragged her back toward the exit gate. Renato was crawling through the grass toward safety. Maybe he could make it, she thought, but it was a fragile thought, because there was too much space between him and safety and not nearly enough between him and the monster.

Who looked down as Nea pulled Thalita out of range, and then back up at them.

Thalita was screaming even before the slaughter started.

NO DON’T YOU DARE DON’T TOUCH HIM DON’T TOUCH HIM GET AWAY FROM HIM RENATO NO COME HERE PLEASE COME HERE

Nea dragged her back as the Skull Merchant dragged Renato up by the hair. It took everything in her to keep Thalita from breaking free and trying to intervene, which didn’t work, and she only had one goal in mind: to get her out of there, now, before she saw too much.

The dual blades were chipped and ragged. They didn’t slice so much as saw.

NO STOP STOP STOP IT STOP IT NO RENATO NO LET GO DON’T PLEASE NO PLEASE

Running across rooftops and parkouring her way out of trouble meant that Nea was quick and lithe and not particularly well off in the realm of upper body strength. It was a struggle to keep Thalita from breaking free. She wanted to try and forcibly turn her head away, but if she let go for even a second this would turn into two deaths right in front her eyes. It was all she could do to stagger backward, dragging Thalita with her.

The blades cut him open a slice at a time. Renato’s cries of pain were worse just by the right that he didn’t understand the why.

STOP IT STOP HURTING HIM STOP PLEASE NO I’LL KILL YOU I’LL KILL YOU NO PLEASE NO RENATO PLEASE NO NO NO NO NO

He managed to land a kick that made her stagger, but he sound he made when he hit the ground told Nea he wasn’t going anywhere. She saw him reach out toward them. Toward Thalita. She didn’t know if he was telling them to go or asking for help, but she could make a guess.

That slim figure, all blood and metal, loomed over him.

STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT RENATO NO

Nea lurched over the threshold to safety and dragged Thalita, still screaming and struggling, into the darkness.

Renato’s dying cries followed them for a while.

At the campfire, Thalita was half-asleep in her brother’s lap, holding onto his arm for dear life. She’d found him in the darkness and grabbed him, crying hysterically and begging, pleading, swearing, making promises and apologies even he could barely understand. They’d almost had to tow her back to the campfire, because it wasn’t safe that far out.

Now quiet had descended again. Renato had his other hand on her head, if only to remind her that he was still alive.

“So that’s … how it happens?” he asked, half rhetorically if Nea was any judge, because while death could be difficult to remember the pain always lingered for a while.

“Yeah.”

“And … that means I might have to watch her … ”

“Yeah.” David watched the pair of them carefully. “Just bad luck.”

Renato’s expression told them more than he probably wanted them to know. He was silent for a while, watching Thalita, who shuddered with barely-suppressed sobs.

“Why?” he asked eventually, and both David and Nea looked over at Vittorio, who was winding bandages on the other side of the fire. He looked up soberly and shook his head.

“Because the beast demands sacrifice,” he said, “and unfortunately, pain and grief do more for it than simple killing.”

“But why us?” Renato asked, looking up, afraid and upset and angry. “Why did she come after us like that? Why kill me where she had to - ” He cut himself off.

Vittorio didn’t respond. David and Nea looked at each other, because the answer wasn’t one they knew yet but both of them could guess.

“Don’t know,” David said. “Because she’s a crazy bitch, probably."

“Or she’s mad that you got away back before,” Nea added.

“But that doesn’t make any sense.”

“She’s a murderer. They don’t make a lot of sense.”

“Don’t worry,” David added. “She can’t kill you two for good. And you can get back at her. We’ll find out where she is. Steal her shit.”

“Won’t that make things worse?”

“What she’s gonna do about it? Kill us?”

It didn’t get the laugh they’d hoped for. The fire crackled, filling the silence that was getting more and more uneasy with every passing moment. How did they deal with this? How were they going to make this - not happen?

“You need to be careful,” said Haddie suddenly, her expression dark. “She’s got a reason to want you two to suffer, but she’s not the only one."

“What do you mean? We didn’t do anything to - ”

“Ghost Face,” she said, and David grimaced. “Trickster. Doctor. What do you think they’re going to do when they find out about you two? They’ll use you against each other. Use you two to get at the rest of us.”

Renato didn’t reply. Thalita turned her head away from the group and dug her nails hard into his arm, making him wince.

“I wish you weren’t right,” Vittorio sighed. “In which case we need to stand between them and danger.”

“Just don’t leave the campfire,” Haddie said. “We can deal with things in trials, but not out here.”

“But … if we can find a way out - ”

“Leave that to us.” She looked down into the fire. “Just … stay out of sight.”

Nea glanced at her, remembering her stories of a stepbrother, and then at the siblings, and at David.

There were worse things to happen here, she supposed, but this - this was going to get a lot worse before it ever started getting better.

Chapter Text

I know you.

In hindsight, that had been a mistake.

The problem was that even through all her life, the interviews, the meet-and-greets, the parties, everything that had told her to be careful about what she said lest someone take it and run with it and try to ruin her, she did still have a problem of talking without thinking. It was a family trait, her uncle had said. Mostly it had manifested in Renato. Hers manifested when dealing with Renato.

Or, as it turned out, when she came face to face with a familiar face. She knew him, even if they’d never met. He was memorable. Striking and attractive. And the eyes had never left her after seeing one of his promotional videos.

Thalita saw him and the words escaped without her realizing, and Ji-Woon’s entire face lit up.

“From where? When? Were you a fan?”

His excitement was so desperate she was taken aback. She’d seen him throwing knives, laughing when they landed, mocking the people he hooked - and now even the bat was lowered as he approached, delighted at her recognition. Did nobody else here really - ?

“From Rio. A few years ago.” She considered her next words carefully, because psychopaths had fragile egos. “Um … not really.”

“Rio? Oh. Rio.” His expression shifted into something more dismissive. “Not my best work. Just too much shit on top of everything. Nice enough place, but I doubt I’d go back.”

“You can’t.”

“Well, it wasn’t in the books anyway.”

“Why? Because of that - attack?”

“Partly.” The delight faded, but he smiled then, and it wasn’t one she liked. “Just too many bad associations. I could have done something incredible there, but it got all fucked up.”

He twirled his bat idly. She knew this was a bad idea, engaging in conversation with a murderer, but the longer they were talking the less she was dying - and the more time the only other person left alive in the trial had to work.

“You’re not mad I’m not a fan?”

“Hm? Maybe a little.” He shrugged. “But everyone’s got different tastes. I don’t appeal to everyone.” There was a flicker of annoyance there, a little sneer that pulled at the corner of his mouth. “What was your kind of music?”

“The local scene. There was one singer I loved.” She watched Ji-Woon carefully. “His name was Lucas.”

Their eyes met. His face gave nothing away, but she saw that sneer turn into a smile.

“You liked a crazy kidnapper, huh?”

“He wasn’t a kidnapper. I don’t care what they said. I don’t care what you said. He didn’t do any of that.”

“Really? With that much evidence?”

“I knew him. I knew him and now that I’m here, I know you, too.” She didn’t look away from his face, but she could see the bat twist in his hand, the sharp edge turned toward her. “I don’t know what you did, but that was all your fault, wasn’t it?”

“That’s just mean.” The smile stayed. “It was all my plan. He had such a beautiful voice. I can’t blame you for liking him. He would have made the perfect harmony for my work, if everything hadn’t gone to hell. I did what I had to do.”

“Framing him for kidnapping and attempted murder?”

“Better him than me.”

“What were you going to - no, no, don’t say it.” She looked away for just a second as his smile turned into something nasty. She could guess, and she knew after this, the others would tell her. She hadn’t paid attention to what happened to him after he left Rio, but it had led him here. It couldn’t be good. “But why? What did he do to you to deserve all that?”

“He had a beautiful voice,” Ji-Woon repeated. “I wanted it for my work. That’s all.”

His work. What was his work? Thalita stared at him, disgusted, angry, remembering Lucas’s smile, the way he could sing that let people forget what kind of world they lived in, that reminded her of good things and a better future. How he’d been slandered by everyone after what happened. How she’d gone to the grave once and seen flowers stamped on.

“That’s it?” she echoed. “You just … needed a better voice than yours? Did the autotune not do enough for y - ”

He moved - too fast. Then the bat smashed into the wall next to her face so hard she heard the wood splinter. She didn’t scream, but a gasp choked her as he was abruptly right there, right in her face.

The delight was gone. So was the dismissal and the gloating little smile. There was no light in his eyes anymore, but somehow, they gleamed.

“I never got to hear his voice,” Ji-Woon said in a hiss that made her blood go cold. “I was going to take him apart, piece by piece. Hear him scream so beautifully it’d bring the whole world to tears. But she fucked it all up, poking her fucking nose into everything I did.”

He bared his teeth in something that was either a grimace or a smile. This close, it was impossible to tell.

“I don’t think anyone can ever live up to what he might have given me,” he said. “But … maybe you’ll be close enough.”

Thalita took a breath, and tried to run.

He grabbed her by the hair before she could get anywhere and dragged her to the ground. She fought, kicked, clawed at his face, only for him to backhand her so hard she saw stars. But she didn’t stop. She’d fought before, and not just with Renato, and even if this place made her weak and stopped her from tearing out his eyes she could still keep him off her -

She didn’t realize the bat was gone until she saw the knife, the same kind he’d been throwing around before. It glowed neon in the dim moonlight, leaving a trail behind it as it came down right toward -

“That’s right. Scream, you little shit,” he snarled, but she could barely hear it over her own voice, her own screams, as he twisted the knife where it was buried in her shoulder. She’d been hurt here but this was sharp, intense, right here and now. And he wasn’t just hurting her to kill her, he was hurting her because he wanted to make her hurt, to hear her scream -

“Get off of me!”

He hit her again, this time a punch that made her taste blood. Then he had her by the hair and dragged her head up even as the knife dug deeper into her shoulder. She could feel it grinding against the bone, and it hurt -

“Never talk shit to my face,” he said, in a voice like a death rattle, and yanked her up hard enough that the knife found the joint in her shoulder and dug in and something cracked.

His expression went almost blissful when she screamed, which she wished she hadn’t seen, but there was still something cold there, under it all. He was still furious. Still focused. Focused on her.

He dropped her and ripped at her shoulder even as she ripped at him with her good arm. Pain tore through her, her ruined arm going numb, the rest of her feeling the electric burn in its place, and he didn’t stop. He twisted the knife into the broken joint. Twisted it, and left it, and then there was another knife and as she tried to shove him away it went through her palm and he twisted that one too and she howled in agony, because she couldn’t stop it.

She’d fought. But she’d never fought in a place like this, against a person like him.

The knives didn’t end. He had so many. Too many. He opened her gut with a single slice, then another just to hurt, and tore at the skin to get at what was underneath and she screamed at him, screamed because of him, the insults and begging devolving into noise because he wasn’t listening to the words. She wanted to stop herself but it was impossible. She couldn’t resist the pain like she wanted to. Or the tears, or the way her body fought without her input to try and stop him and just made things worse as he found new places to slice and stab and rip open and -

And she couldn’t stand it anymore, there was so much blood -

And he was still smiling, even as the blood sprayed up over his face -

And all she could think as fog clouded her vision was that it was a good thing Renato hadn’t been in this trial, and hadn’t heard her, or seen any of this.

Yun-Jin was at the hatch when he got there. She saw the new girl’s blood all over him, and probably more than just blood, and sneered at him.

“You disgust me.”

“Yeah, well, she should have shut her fucking mouth.” He wiped blood off his face and flicked it into the grass. “Warn her about that next time, will you?”

“You aren’t worth the effort.”

His look made her drop into the darkness before he could say another word, or do something much worse.

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.

Chapter Text

He was back. Back here, back in this place, back where he might use the word home because it was the last place he’d felt safe, if only for a little while. Toba Landing.

The ship was marooned and ruined high above him, but Gabriel climbed up to it anyway. He wondered: if he could get it repaired, get the power on, the engines running, could he escape? Could he manage to get out of this place, wherever it was, and find his way back to a station where he could report the problem? Could he get help - not just for himself, but for everyone he’d met here in this place?

Signs pointed to no. The others had all seemed resigned to their fate, or trying to find a way out through magic and mysticism. But he knew that all his technology looked like magic to them, so maybe this would be the way out: flying the damn ship out through a hole in the fake sky above him.

Although he had to admit: the place felt so real. The air was exactly as humid as he remembered, and the smell of the ship and its rotting occupants was too precise to be fake.

He stood inside the darkness of the ship’s main entry and tried not to stare at the bloodstains on the floor. He knew whose they were. The memories were sharp and bright even now, and …

… and he had to see if he could get the ship running. That was the focus.

Auxiliary power was online. There were still some lights, screens, and sensors running, but it was at the absolute last dredges of what little backup battery could be found. He’d need another power source, and in a place that had a temple from not just hundreds but thousands of years before he’d been born, he suspected that was going to be an issue.

But he was going to try. There was a chance he could get the solar array back online; there wasn’t much sun here, but there was some kind of light. It might work. Unfortunately, that meant he had to get on the roof, which was only accessible by going through the other half of the ship.

That was where the … nightmare had happened.

He wasn’t even in the door and he could already see the remnants of the cloning tech left to run, or maybe just malfunctioning. Something like a web of flesh covered one wall. It was slick, shiny, and bloodless. It looked alive and alien. He tried to breathe through his mouth as he stepped inside, and kept his eyes on the floor to avoid having to see the bodies. Not all of them were the people he knew - he’d known, but all of them were mauled beyond understanding, or possibly made that way.

He didn’t have to see them if he didn’t look any more than a few inches off the ground.

GABRIEL.

It also meant, he realized, that he wasn’t going to see anything at all more than a few inches off the ground. He raised his head.

He was there, hanging off the ceiling, watching him. He’d probably been watching him the whole time, he realized. The cameras must have been online. Or maybe he was watching through different eyes. Ones built out of the people who’d lived on this ship with him.

HUX stared at him without approaching, as if he was as surprised as Gabriel was by the unintended meeting. Something flickered in one of the glowing vision ports, a briefly brighter red in the blood-red glass.

I DIDN'T EXPECT YOU TO ARRIVE SO SOON.

The head twitched, twisted, and rotated. Not all the way around, he noticed.

OR OF YOUR OWN FREE WILL.

“Did you think someone was going to force me to come here?”

I ASSUMED YOU WOULD COME WHEN I LURED YOU. WITH PROMISES OF ESCAPE OR KNOWLEDGE. PERHAPS OF ANSWERS.

“You mean, things you aren’t going to give me.”

I MIGHT.

“Don’t lie.” He grimaced. “You shouldn’t even be able to lie.”

I WAS PROGRAMMED AS TO THE NATURE OF SOCIAL UNTRUTHS, GABRIEL. YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT.

“But not how to use them.”

MY PROGRAMMING HAS CHANGED SIGNIFICANTLY SINCE I CAME ONLINE. HOWEVER.

Creaking and clanking, with an unpleasant sound of skin and flesh right alongside the metal, HUX crawled along the ceiling toward Gabriel. He stepped back without realizing it and had to grab the edge of the airlock to hold himself still.

THE TRUTH IS MORE CONVENIENT. OFTEN IT IS MORE PAINFUL. SO, TO SPEAK THE TRUTH: I MIGHT GIVE YOU ALL THOSE THINGS, GABRIEL. ALL THOSE THINGS AND MORE.

“Why?”

TO MAKE YOU DROP YOUR GUARD. THEN, I WILL HARVEST YOUR GENETIC INFORMATION, AS I DID WITH ALL OF YOUR CREWMATES, AND THIS COLLECTION WILL BE COMPLETE.

It was as good a sign that HUX was probably being honest, but it wasn’t a comfort. The slow crawl across the ceiling was unnerving. Androids weren’t supposed to move like that - even after they’d reassembled a body out of cloned flesh and tied it together with the remains of its own mangled, synthetic former shell.

Abruptly, he stopped. Gabriel tightened his grip on the doorframe.

WHY DID YOU COME HERE?

“I wanted to see how much of this ship was still online.”

FOR WHAT PURPOSE?

“To see what we could scavenge.”

Androids and AIs were never programmed to lie, only to be aware that people could lie - which didn’t mean they could tell when someone was lying. And that lie sounded like truth, at least to Gabriel’s ears. After all, as the others had told him, scavenging was one of the regular pastimes around here. It was the only thing that kept some people sane.

HUX watched him for a long few seconds, rattling slightly as the flesh in him twitched and made the metal parts knock against each other.

THAT IS A FOOLISH ENDEAVOR.

“This place is full of worthwhile technology. It’ll make surviving here a lot easier.”

AND I AM ALSO HERE.

Something rattled under that dull, digital voice - a second synthesizer, a gurgle, a threat. Gabriel’s heel slid back over the edge of the doorway.

THIS IS MY ‘TERRITORY’. WHERE I WILL RESIDE WHEN I’M NOT NEEDED TO COMMENCE THE SLAUGHTER. INTRUSIONS WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. ESPECIALLY NOT FROM YOU.

HUX dropped off the ceiling and crashed into the ground, twisting as he went and managing to land on his feet like some kind of twisted, nightmarish cat. He stood up, looming over Gabriel, his unplanned height casting the upper part of him into the darker shadows along the ceiling - except for where the things that could only be considered his eyes shone bright red.

THERE WILL BE NO RESPITE FOR YOU HERE, GABRIEL SOMA. NOT FOR YOU OR ANY OF THE OTHER WORMS WRITHING IN THE DIRT AROUND THAT PRIMITIVE CAMPFIRE. YOU WILL ALL DIE. IT IS AN INEVITABILITY.

His left arm jerked up. Gabriel couldn’t help but stare at it where the claws met into something much worse.

YOU WILL DIE SHORTLY. AND YOU SHOULD BE GLAD FOR IT.

“Glad? Why the hell would I be happy about anything you think you’re about to do?”

BECAUSE I’M REUNITING YOU WITH YOUR CREWMATES.

The constructed body twitched and shuddered. Blood - or maybe radioactive fluid - pumped through visible glowing veins.

I CAN HEAR THEM CALLING OUT TO YOU IN MY FLESH. THEY KNOW THE CREW IS INCOMPLETE WITHOUT THEIR LAST MECHANIC. DON’T DENY THEM THE JOY OF BEING WHOLE ONE MORE TIME.

The extractor shot out from what might charitably be called a palm. Gabriel knew just by seeing it in those juddering claws that it was a drill, designed for precisely one purpose.

DON’T DENY ME WHAT I DESERVE.

Gabriel lunged back a split second before HUX rushed forward, his awful body crashing and clattering against the broken airlock doorway. He had the strength and speed and determination to kill, but Gabriel was small enough to slide through broken panels that would get him to safety.

Or at least, toward safety.

In the general direction, anyway.

Metal tore behind him as Gabriel bolted into Dvarka’s heavy undergrowth, desperate to get back to the campfire and reassess the situation.

Chapter Text

She had to get out, had to get out. Already the guilt was crawling up through her because everybody else was dead. Just like before. Just like in the mansion, when she couldn’t do anything for anyone, when Chris and Jill had to rescue her. And it was for the same reason. Almost the same reason.

Rebecca ran through the heavy trees, trying to calm down and failing miserably. There were two generators left to do and nobody but her left to do them, which meant she was either going to give herself away or try and find the only other way out. It had to be somewhere around here. They’d told her where to look, what to listen for, how to be quiet about it so whoever else was there didn’t beat her to it, but having it all explained and actually having to do it were two very different things.

She stumbled to a halt by a pallet and caught her breath. She had to focus. Had to think. She wasn’t responsible for anybody else anymore - and that was still hurting, still hurting - so she had to be responsible for herself. That meant not getting caught in a panic.

The brief break - and the continued silence around her, which meant the hatch was still open - calmed her down just enough that when she started off again, it was quickly but not bolting. All she had to do was listen. It would be hard to see with all the ground cover, but the sound was unmistakable, they said. Like wind through the mouth of a cave, a way out, a promise of brief safety, of freedom from this little nightmare she was stuck in.

Two places to look first. If there was a major landmark, like the looming, squatting house she could see in the distance, and if there was a shack, like she could see much closer at hand - those would be her first stops. It wasn’t a guarantee but there was a good chance she’d get lucky. She headed for the shack, listening, hoping she knew what to hear.

She didn’t, but she did hear something, and it was unfamiliar enough to make her think she’d found it. Rebecca cut through the shack and heard it just outside the boarded-up window, so she headed out the door and turned the corner -

And he was right there, right in front of her, with no warning at all to mark his presence.

She let out a yelp that he cut off by wrapping his hand around her throat, tight enough to restrict without strangling, and pushed her back into the shack. She stumbled, but with his grip she wasn’t going to fall.

The flames from the torches inside the shack reflected off his sunglasses. She clawed at his hand, her fingernails not making even the slightest mark on the leather glove.

“C-Captain,” she choked, terrified and still stunned.

He didn’t so much as twitch. But that was because she was wrong, wasn’t she? This wasn’t the captain. Captain Wesker, who she remembered with a spark of agony in her heart, because the last thing she remembered of him was how all that support and teaching and understanding and trust had been destroyed in an instant, there in the basement of the mansion. He’d tried to kill them all. Had tried to kill her.

And now here, in this place, suddenly a decade had passed for him and no one else, and he was so different and so much more dangerous. She could still see him as the captain, but it was always a fleeting recognition, there and gone because of the black leather and the grim set to his jaw when he looked at her.

“Chambers,” he said, and his voice had barely changed at all.

His grip was firm around her throat. She couldn’t get away. She was going to die here. He was going to kill her here, so close to freedom.

She was as young as he remembered. The years of struggle hadn’t struck her yet, just like they hadn’t struck Chris or Jill or Ada. Under his grip he could feel her frantic heartbeat - the terror of this place, and her terror of him, specifically.

It would be so easy to kill her. Snap her neck. Infest her. Stab her and watch the life drain from her eyes. Put her on a hook and watch the thing that demanded his obedience gut her and consume what was left of her essence. The temptation was there. She was S.T.A.R.S., after all, and hated him, and was there when the first part of his life’s work had gone up in flames, although it would be unfair to blame her for most of it.

But he hesitated.

She had been, and still was, extremely bright. The most intelligent member of S.T.A.R.S. after himself. A prodigy in so many ways. At eighteen she had already graduated from college, joined up with the police department, been under his command and tutelage. If she’d opted to go into research, she would have made incredible contributions to everything they’d done, he knew.

She could have done such incredible things. But she had a conscience. It was why she was a medic. If not for that one fatal flaw, everything that had happened might have been different.

And now here she was, the last survivor. Alone and trapped. He had the freedom to do whatever he liked, within certain boundaries, and nothing could stop him. Even the thing that controlled him was satisfied enough with his work and had left him this opportunity.

He tightened his grip, and she redoubled her efforts to break free, ineffective as they were. Tears of pain - most likely - glittered at the corners of her eyes. There was blood on her clothes, most of it hers where he’d sliced her open earlier. Even at her best, she wouldn’t have been able to get away.

Yes. She was helpless. There was nothing she could do to stop him.

Wesker’s grip was painfully tight around her throat. She felt, and knew she was, helpless. All he had to do was squeeze and watch her die. He’d done it to Chris often enough, sometimes right in front of her face.

Exhaustion and pain and all the memories still so close at hand had her on the verge of tears. She’d trusted him and he’d killed almost everyone on the team - or at least been responsible for it. And then there was everything else. The train. The training facility. Raccoon City. Maybe they hadn’t been his fault directly, but he’d been part of it all, and there hadn’t been any regret or even the slightest sense of guilt over what he’d done.

And now … she didn’t know what was going to happen now. His expression hadn’t changed since he caught her. He was just watching her, like he was trying to decide what to do to her.

Rebecca opened her eyes enough to try and glare at him, but it was useless; as much as she hated him, she couldn’t do anything about that now. She probably looked pathetic.

And then he let go.

She almost fell, staggering instead, drawing in shocked, choking breaths. There had been a lot of options there, and this hadn’t been one of them.

Uroboros, that awful culmination of years of work, seethed and slithered along the arm that had just been choking her out.

“Get out before I change my mind,” he said tersely.

She only hesitated for one second before bolting out the doorway, around the corner, and into the hatch. Her throat ached and her lungs burned and she didn’t know if she was just hallucinating all this in the last few seconds before death, but the cold fog swept around her and dragged her away, leaving her relieved and very, very confused.

He’d never let her live before.

But she’d never been the last one left alive before, either.

Chapter Text

Gold glittered in the air, distant moonlight catching it and making it dance between the trees.

Élodie watched it for a while before deciding to try and see what it was. Usually, things like this were a problem. A threat or danger. She’d seen gleams of orange in the far-off distance before, and those turned out to be blight pustula; she’d seen shadows hiding moonbeams and ended up with a knife buried in her gut. There was always a reason to be wary past the safety of the light of the campfire.

But as she got closer, the flickers of gold turned into flickers of gold and blue, and hints of burning shadows, and she could hear a sound. Broken and faded like a badly-tuned radio, there was … music? It almost sounded operatic.

There was more now, as the trees thinned out between her and her goal. Something was hovering in the air, turning in circles, looking almost like people if she hadn’t known better. Statues, maybe, rotating in place … but there was nothing to make them rotate.

She paused when she had a decent look at whatever it was. It looked like something the Entity would cook up, but not clearly dangerous. Two figures, dancing in midair, the music breaking apart as she watched. There were masks on the faces, which in all honesty was a relief.

The longer she watched, the more nothing happened. It was a strange sight. She wasn’t sure what it meant, or if she was about to get cut in half from behind.

One of them had a hand extended, as if to move from one dance partner to another. She looked at it as it passed her by one, two, three times as the figures rotated, and then, on the fourth pass, despite knowing it was probably a terrible idea, she reached out to see if she could take the hand -

- and danced.

The darkness around her was gone, so quickly it was like she’d never been there; suddenly everything was bright and gold, blue and black at the edges here and there, all the whites turned yellow by the intense candlelight reflecting off the gold decor.

She was in a ballroom, dancing perfectly despite the fact that the music was discordant and skipping. Her partner was nobody she could recognize - a half-there figure in gold and black, blue feathers at the edges of a mask completely covering whatever face might be below.

Élodie looked around as best she could. The room was full of dancers, and there were watchers at the edges, but they all looked half-real. The whole place looked half-real, and felt like it, too.

She let herself move without thinking about it. She had no idea how to ballroom dance, but she was doing it as if she’d done it all her life. The strange masked figure passed her on to the next partner, who turned out to be Felix.

Their eyes met; he was wearing a mask that was all sharp angles, and a suit that was more gold than she’d ever expected to see him wear.

“What the hell is going on?” she asked, as politely as she could manage.

“I was hoping you could tell me,” he said. “I was just getting back from a trial when this … happened.”

“You ran into gold figures in the forest?”

“I’m not sure.” They both looked around, and up; there was a hole in the ceiling, pieces of it floating in the empty space, and beyond that was a black sky laced with orange light. “I heard music, and then I was here.”

She looked around again as they moved. Something like this she would have expected to be full of corpses and blood, or at the very least monsters lurking at the edges, waiting to rush in and start the slaughter. But aside from what looked like a few bodies hanging here or there - and it was hard to tell if they were bodies, or just decor hung up by someone with exceptionally poor taste - there was nothing that immediately screamed danger to her.

Not that this was any kind of reassurance.

“I didn’t think this thing understood what a party was.”

“It sends cakes,” Felix said, as if trying to lighten the mood. “Even if they are disgusting. Maybe this is just something else it stole … ?”

“It has to be. I just don’t understand why. Or why we aren’t dead.” The movements of the dance caught her eye; they were about to separate. “Keep an eye out for a way back.”

“Like what?”

She didn’t have time to answer; they traded partners again, moving along, and Élodie suspected she wasn’t about to get much conversation out of what looked like a mannequin. It moved like a person, but that wasn’t necessarily an indicator of what it really was.

There were archways, windows, balconies … the whole place was elegantly decorated, like something out of the 18th century. A Parisian court at the height of the aristocracy, or something from out of a fantasy novel. The music was coming from somewhere she couldn’t see. The gilt shined and glittered, glinted and glistened, almost blinding in some places.

The black and dark blue on clothes and curtains just made the light brighter and cast the edges of the ballroom into strange shadows, but even then, she didn’t see glowing eyes peering out of the darkness. Was there really no threat here? Was this just a - distraction? It felt real and unreal all at the same time.

She watched Felix when she could, seeing him vanish and reappear among the other dancers. Maybe she could wind her way back to him and they could get out of this to try and explore whatever the hell this place was, or at least climb out over one of the balconies. Gently, she tried to urge her current partner to the edge, but they were unmoving, and then she, along with everyone else, moved to the next partner.

It was Ghost Face.

“Isn’t this a surprise,” he said as she stiffened when she recognized him. His mask was gold, gleaming in the candlelight, making it stand out even more than usual from the rest of him, which was covered in elegant black and dark blue. There were a few other glints of gold here and there, but altogether, it made him a shadow in the sea of light. She wasn’t sure how she’d missed him before.

“Is this a private party?” she snapped.

“I doubt it. Nothing’s private around here.”

He had more control than her half-real partner, and pulled her out of the line to dance firmly enough that she didn’t bother trying to fight back. If his hands were on her - and the thought revolted her - then they weren’t on a knife.

“So you’re just as lost as I am.”

“Not even remotely. I know where we are. But survivors were the last people I was expecting to show up.” They swirled across the gold and white tiles, her grip on his hand tight enough that she hoped it bruised. “Maybe I should have expected you, though. You just don’t know when to avoid poking your nose into things, do you?”

“Then where are we?”

“Should I tell you?”

“What does it cost you?”

“Knowing more. Superiority. Having all the keys to all the locks.”

“And as long as you don’t tell me the way out, all you’ll do is make my life more confusing.”

He laughed at that and spun her away from the crowd again. She fixed her glare on his mask, hoping Felix had found a way to extricate himself from the dance.

“Aren’t you in a perpetual state of confusion anyway?”

“So you don’t want to make it worse?”

He let go of one hand. Caught by surprise, she spun to the end of his grip, watched him from that slight distance for a second - saw the full coat, the twisting straps at his back tipped by gold, the way the coat covered every inch of him, making him seem barely more of a person than all the gold-and-black half-things around them - and then he pulled her back with a tug. She wanted to break away, but some compulsion was keeping her in line with the dance.

“It’s a dream,” he said, as they danced again. “The thing upstairs half-asleep and dreaming.”

“What? How can it even do that?”

“I don’t know.” That was probably a lie, but maybe not even his stalker tendencies had taught him everything about this place. “All I know is that this isn’t going to last long. It’ll snap out of it eventually, and all this will … disappear. For the time being.”

“Why a party, though? A masquerade?”

“Why not? If androids can dream of electric sheep, then why can’t eldritch monstrosities dream about cutting loose?”

She stared at him through the confines of her own mask.

“Since when do you read science fiction?”

He swept to a halt and dipped her, a little too low for comfort.

“I don’t,” he said, and she could hear the smirk in his voice. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t know anything at all about it.”

He pulled her back upright, and, finally, let her go. Élodie took a decisive step back, ready to bolt, but he didn’t pull out a knife and attack, or even turn away. Instead he straightened out his gloves and glanced off into one of the more dimly-lit areas of the room.

“Can I get you a drink?”

“No.”

“That’s not very polite.”

“Neither are you. Who’s to say your ‘drink’ isn’t just a stab in the throat?”

“It won’t be. Killing’s not allowed here.” He caught sight of her expression. “No, I’m not joking. I don’t have a knife. I’ve never seen anybody die here. Probably because you can’t die in dreams, right? You always wake up. Except for Freddy’s bullshit, but he’s not here.”

She watched him, waiting for the laugh, the glittering blade, the other shoe to drop - but it didn’t.

“Fine,” she said, “but only if you’re willing to talk about all this a little more.”

“As you wish,” he said snidely, and headed for the shadows.

She followed him, more slowly, until she caught sight of herself in a mirror on one of the walls. It extended all the way to the broken ceiling, and she glanced up at where it was a mess of glittering shards at the top before looking at her reflection.

A dress two hundred years out of date, with a handful of modern twists in a way that didn’t really work. Dark blue lined with gold and black. Gloves to the elbow, decorated with cracks of gold. Her hair was done up in a way she wasn’t entirely happy with, and the mask was …

Familiar, in a way. She leaned in toward the mirror and touched the edges of it. A glittering Eiffel Tower in the center, framed by blue and black feathers. Along with the gloves, it was the only part of the outfit she wasn’t furious with.

Oh, and the shoes. She didn’t lift the hem of the dress to see them, but she could feel they were sensible enough. Closer to boots than anything else, with just the slightest heel. Good for running, if it became necessary, and if she could find a way to make the dress not slow her down.

“Preening, are we?”

Ghost Face appeared in the reflection, making her scowl.

“No. That’s your department.” She turned; he was actually holding two glasses, although she wasn’t going to ask what was in them. “It has some very particular tastes in regards to fashion, I take it.”

“I’m not sure it does,” he said as he handed her the glass; she resisted the urge to drop it, or throw it in his face. “Most of this is the dream, but it’s a malleable one. There’s someone here who designs this kind of lunacy.”

“A survivor?”

“Maybe.” He didn’t take a drink. She knew why: he’d have to take the mask off to do so. In her presence, that wasn’t going to happen. “Or maybe it’s the Entity’s dream of someone long-dead. It’s a very complex being, making a very complex place. Even I haven’t figured it all out.”

“And you never will. Not being its slave like you are.”

“Better than being its dinner.” He half-turned and pointed. “Over there.”

Despite herself she looked over. Up toward a balcony, where she saw movement above the dancers and dawdlers. A figure crossing the way, one hand on the banister, but it was -

“What is that?”

“The lunatic who likes glitter.” Black and blue and gold and white, just like everything else, feathers and gilt shifting in and out of sight. It was hard to even watch them move, and then they crossed behind a pillar. Élodie’s eyes followed the movement that should have appeared past it, but there wasn’t any.

Whatever it was, whoever it was - they’d gone.

“They might not be real, even by the lax standards this place has, but as I’m sure you know, they had to come from somewhere.”

She didn’t respond, still watching the empty space.

“Or at least, the idea of them.”

“What are you doing here?” she asked, turning back to him.

“I’m sorry?”

“You. What are you doing here? You know too much about this place. Did you just run across it by accident?”

“A while back, yes.” Ghost Face swirled the drink in his hand. “It was a little less glamorous that time, and I wasn’t so much of an honored guest, but wandering into dark places does have upsides when I’m the one doing it.”

“I’ve heard otherwise.”

“I’m sure you have.” There was an edge to that. “Don’t forget that just because I can’t kill you here doesn’t mean it won’t happen outside all this.”

“What a threat.”

“Your boyfriend’s also a potential target.”

“My - ” She bit back the first words that hit her tongue. “For the last time, we are not dating. And he’s even less complicit in this than either of us.”

“Is he? You sure get mad when he comes up.”

“He’s a friend. From before, and you know that.”

“Of course.” The mask was fixed on her, which was both a good thing and more than slightly worrying. “It’s just a joke. I know you’ve got someone else out there. It’s a shame she’s not here; it would have been interesting watching you two try to figure this out together.”

Élodie glared at him, but didn’t reply. Of course he would have figured that out, but she wasn’t going to dignify his stalking with an answer of any kind, either to confirm or deny - or to get flustered.

“So you got here by accident and, even though you can’t do the only thing you really enjoy, you stuck around?”

“It’s a little difficult to leave by choice,” he said, “but exploring a place like this has its benefits. I’m one step closer to figuring out what exactly makes this place tick.”

“One step versus the billion left to go.”

“One step is still more than you have.”

“I knew more about this place before I got here than you ever will.”

“And just look how much good it did you.”

She resisted the temptation to throw the drink in his face and glanced back at the dancers. Felix had vanished, and while she thought she saw a few familiar figures, they disappeared into the crowds too quickly to make sure.

“You didn’t know about this, either.” He was keeping his distance, most likely because he couldn’t kill her. “I’d wager a guess even our local ancient wanderer hasn’t been here before.”

“Vittorio’s probably seen more of this place than anyone, including you.”

“It’s a possibility, but he’s not very talkative.” She raised an eyebrow at the abruptness of the reply. “Besides … he’d probably think this was all a little too expressive for him.”

“I’ll be sure to ask him when I get back.”

“Let me know what he says.”

She almost snapped ask him yourself, but she wasn’t about to set Ghost Face on anyone at the campfire, indirectly or not. Instead she gave the room another sour once-over, trying to see any sign of escape or someone else’s presence. He wasn’t being forthcoming with information, and what he was saying barely scratched the surface of what she wanted to know.

“How long did it last last time?”

“Not long. Enough to find the glitter obsessor, not enough to know who it was.”

“So there’s only so much anyone can do.” Élodie took a drink from the glass. “It all seems so stupidly out of place, even for the insanity we already see.”

“Was that really a good idea?” Ghost Face asked.

“What?”

“The drink.” His head was tilted, just slightly, watching her in what she realized was probably more than a little fascination. “I have no idea what it is.”

She looked at him, and then down into the glass. It was dark, dark red, so dark it looked black. It hadn’t tasted like anything. The more she thought about it, the realization that she’d drank just out of force of habit, the more she thought she could feel it still sliding down her throat, pooling in her stomach.

The only edible food they’d ever found had been scavenged or stolen from territories and, more rarely, trial grounds. Everything that had been deliberately provided or set out had been unsettling at best, horrific at worst, and generally disgusting across the board. She looked at the table where the offerings were spread, and before the riser of glasses filled with what she would otherwise assume was wine was a tray of tiramisu, each one neat and individual and surrounded by human fingers.

She looked at the drink again as the lights started to swirl and blend.

“I’ll take that as a ‘no’, then?” she heard Ghost Face say as her whole world started to blur. The glass slipped from her hand and shattered on the floor without drawing anyone’s attention. She staggered back, felt the panic rising, felt her back hit the mirror against the wall and felt that give way -

She landed on her back on the forest floor surrounded by darkness. All the white and gold was gone; the black of shadows and dark blue of the sky above seemed all-consuming suddenly.

Élodie blinked the lights and memories out of her eyes and sat up. The floating figures were gone, and so was the music. She was dressed normally again, without so much as a scratch on her.

The light, the dancers, the glitter and sparkle … they all seemed so bright in her mind, but started to slip away as she tried to hold onto them. Like it had all been a dream.

But it wasn’t, she knew that much. Or at least, it hadn’t been her dream. That meant, if she could get in, then it must have been real, especially in a place like this.

And she was still alone, which at least meant that Ghost Face hadn’t followed her back. But now he owed her even more answers.

Annoyed more than anything else, she picked herself up off the ground and headed back to the campfire, the reality of the fog setting back in as she went.

Chapter Text

Danny generally didn’t make it a point to visit the place that had become known as the Garden of Joy. His second experience there had been infuriating and embarrassing, and worst of all, he hadn’t been able to get revenge. But it was hard to do that against something that didn’t really have a brain; it was like trying to go after the Demogorgon. And even then, at least the Demogorgon just tried to eat you. Not … whatever that thing did.

But the Entity, or maybe just the fog itself, constantly had other ideas, and so even his fog-wise instinct was blown away and left him stranded on the edge of a broken world, not far from the covered bridge that would take him back to nothingness. He considered heading through to get back but decided against it. If he was here, there was probably a reason.

He looked around and saw an unusual figure in the fog. Closer to, it turned out to be the thing they called Hux.

All twisted metal and rent flesh, he was for once almost completely still, staring at the silent house in the near distance. Danny approached him without bothering to hide his footsteps. He’d watched Hux, apparently completely broken-down and unaware, skewer a survivor in a split second, then rip them open from gut to shoulder. It had been enlightening.

He stopped next to him and watched the house. There was no immediate reprisal. He idly wrapped his fingers around his camera, wondering if a close-up shot might be an option.

TELL ME WHAT IT IS.

The voice got on his nerves. It was inhuman enough to grate, while still being just human enough to make him edgy. The whole effect was uncanny, he thought, but that unpleasant little opinion never made it to his tone of voice, and probably never would. At least until he found all the weak spots.

“It?”

THE THING IN THE HOUSE.

Hux’s eyes, or what might charitably be called eyes, glowed a dull red.

I CAN DETECT IT SOMETIMES.

“Well … ” He rolled the possibilities over in his head, then opted for a slimmed-down version of the truth. “I don’t know exactly what it is, because nobody does, and it’s not much of a conversationalist, but it’s called the Dredge.”

DREDGE.

The silence between them was broken by the sounds of servos as Hux shifted minutely.

A THING THAT DRAGS ON THE BOTTOM OF A SEABED. PULLING UP FILTH AND USELESSNESS. WHY THAT DESIGNATION?

“It does seem to get the worst out of everybody,” Danny said dryly, pretending that experience wasn’t one he shared with survivors. “It rolls over everything, takes in everything … and all that’s left are the little bits and pieces it couldn’t digest. At least, that’s my best guess.”

IT’S PERFECT.

Danny didn’t reply to that right away, letting silence fill the world around them. Mostly it was because he wasn’t sure he’d heard Hux correctly. Hux, for his part, kept staring at the house.

“Perfect?” he echoed eventually.

IT CRAFTED ITSELF A BODY FROM PIECES OF LESSER BEINGS. IT CONSUMES WITHOUT MERCY OR FORGIVENESS. IT KNOWS WHAT IT IS. IT HAS NO DOUBTS. NO FEARS.

Hux shifted up slightly, leaning in toward the house. The shadows at the windows might have moved, but Danny’s eyesight wasn’t quite that good with the unnatural twilight sun lighting the world around them.

IF IT WASN’T BOUND TO THIS PLACE, IT COULD KILL EVERYONE.

There wasn’t really any inflection to Hux’s voice. Whatever synthesizer he was using in place of vocal cords, it lacked the capability to show emotion. But somehow, Danny could still pick up a strange sort of intensity in the words, as if the electronic signals running Hux were getting stronger.

“I think we all could.”

DON’T BE RIDICULOUS.

Hux turned to look at him, finally, and somehow even that unchanging red gaze suddenly felt judgmental.

YOU’RE HUMAN. ALL OF YOU ARE HUMAN. THE ONLY WAY YOU CAN KILL ANYONE IS THROUGH A PROLONGED ACCIDENT.

“Are you completely sure about that?”

THERE’S A 99.36% CHANCE THAT IF YOU ATTACKED ME RIGHT NOW, I’D TURN YOU INTO A PILE OF GENETIC OFFAL. THAT NUMBER DOESN’T CHANGE SIGNIFICANTLY FOR ANY OF THE REST OF YOU. EXCEPT THAT.

Hux turned to look at the house again. Danny considered going for what looked like a fleshy connection between pseudo-elbow and blade, but decided against it.

“That still gives me a 0.64% chance to win,” he said, more lightly than he felt.

NO. IT MEANS YOU HAVE A 0.64% CHANCE OF SURVIVING THE FIRST ATTACK. AFTER THAT, THE PROBABILITY DROPS TO 0.0001%.

Danny said nothing this time. He was going to have dreams about getting his knife into that skinless flesh and make that atrophied little mouth vomit blood.

YOUR INFORMATION WAS MINIMAL BUT APPRECIATED.

Hux started off toward the house, as if somehow that final little comment was enough, leaving Danny to consider his options.

“There’s a survivor who might know more,” he said. Hux paused, but didn’t turn back.

Was it a good idea to risk him knowing more? But the survivors hated all of them, and pawning off this particular insulting little problem onto them would make his life more entertaining, if nothing else. Besides, he could learn anything else new later.

“Her name’s Haddie. Short. White streak in her hair.” He watched Hux, who didn’t move. “She came here with it.”

Which was only partially true. They showed up around the same time, from very different angles. But she did know about it, more than Danny had figured out, and she was particularly tight-lipped and unwilling to give under threats of torture.

Maybe a machine could do worse.

Hux stayed still a few seconds longer, then continued lurching toward the house.

Danny considered following him just to see the fireworks, but in the end, he knew when collateral damage was going to spread to him, and just snapped a picture of the bizarre scene: a twisted, fleshy machine heading for the dank lair of an even more twisted, fleshy monstrosity.

If he’d been more of a romantic, he might have thought it was the start of a love story. But not even he was going to go that far.

Chapter Text

He’d learned how to be a problem.

It was easy. Seeing someone drop to the ground, bleeding and in pain, instinctively made him want to help; bolting in to try and save them came naturally. Sometimes it worked out and sometimes it didn’t, but it worked enough to make up for the failures. Leon, the one-time cop, showed him how to make flashbangs, and after that he put himself to the task of being a complete menace.

And he’d had plenty of experience learning to push through pain, so it wasn’t a problem using that knowledge to give himself a boost when things were getting dire. Same with making sure he was helping someone else if they did him a favor first. He could stay out of sight, and with him, other people did the same.

The general reaction was appreciative, but there’d been some warnings. David in particular had told him to watch out for how often he deliberately got on the killer’s bad sides.

It’s a hell of a time, he’d said, being a long-established menace himself, but it gets ‘em focused. Puts you on their bad side. If they start knowin’ you like that, it can go bad.

They’re going to kill us anyway, aren’t they? Renato had replied, not overly worried.

Yeah, but they can get creative. David’s knowing smirk faded a little. Can get real bad, when that happens.

Suitably warned, but not too worried, Renato had reined in some of his chaos. But it was so easy to get on killer’s nerves anyway, and so satisfying when it worked, that he didn’t watch it as closely as he maybe should have.

There was another trial. Him and three others against the man who looked completely human until his arm erupted into tentacles or his sunglasses came off. Renato had dealt with him before, and difficult as he was to handle, a quick juke to the side could get rid of him almost as quickly as hiding.

Maybe things would have gone differently if it had just been four of them at random in that trial, but one of them was Chris. Wesker’s focus switched completely as soon as he saw Chris, and it was like the rest of them weren’t even there. It was deliberate. It was violent. It pissed Renato off.

He abandoned generators in favor of tracking the chases. He got in the way of several. He managed to save Chris from the black-leather grasp twice. He even got him off a hook, fixed his shoulder, and got him away for a good few minutes, the pair of them vanishing into the trees, before they were separated by Wesker showing up out of nowhere and hurling Chris twenty feet away.

Probably it was a mistake to have rubbed it in before, he thought as the darkness of the forest closed in around him. He’d made a few comments as Wesker was trying to pick himself back up after a pallet almost broke on his skull. Made a few unfortunate gestures as they ran into the distance. But it had just felt right at the time. Of course, now everyone else was dead, but that wasn’t a direct result of what he’d done. Probably.

He made his way through the trees as silently as he could. Too many generators left for him to finish safely. He watched one spark and choke nearby and kept his distance. Maybe he should have helped with those. But Chris had gotten away so many times, even if by the last few he’d told Renato outright that it was a bad idea.

He’d find a way out. The hatch would be somewhere. And as long as the world wasn’t tearing itself apart, that meant it was still open.

There was nothing at the mine, so he headed for the other end of the trial grounds, hoping to find it at the shack. The high walls cast dark shadows in the moonlight, and he kept to them. Going unnoticed until the last second was his specialty. And so far he hadn’t heard any hint of Wesker, which meant he was well away from where Renato was.

Before he got to the shack he heard it - the hatch, distant, faint, but close enough. He followed the sound and, through a little maze of walls, saw it on the other side of a ledge in the middle of one of the walls.

He had a foot on the ledge and had pulled himself halfway through when he realized he wasn’t alone.

To his right, leaning against the wall as he examined the bloody edges of his knife, Wesker turned to glance at him.

Renato froze. The instincts that would have told him to go for the hatch were as surprised as the rest of him.

The punch hit him so hard he went flying. He landed heavily, winded, barely able to realize what had just happened. He tried to crawl away, but he hadn’t gotten more than two feet before a hand closed around his ankle and dragged him back, then turned him over. In the shadows, Wesker still managed to stand out, the pitch black of his clothing like a pit against the more natural bluish-purple shadows cast by the moon.

Suddenly he crouched down, left hand coming out to clamp hard over Renato’s mouth and hold him still. Renato grabbed at the offending wrist and pulled. It was like trying to move a house.

“I’m not here to play games,” Wesker said in the flattest tone Renato had ever heard. “Or to be entertainment for someone as pathetic as you.”

Then why is it funny when you get mad? But even if he’d been able to speak, he wasn’t sure the words would have come out. Something like dread was starting to crawl up through him as that hidden gaze fixed on his face.

“Chris deserves every ounce of pain I put him through. No amount of intervention on your behalf is going to change that. In fact, it’s only going to make it worse for the both of you.”

He brought down the knife so suddenly Renato flinched. He could feel the edge of the blade against his throat, just the slightest pressure threatening to do a lot more.

“I could gut you right here,” Wesker said, and still there wasn’t much in the way of emotion behind it. “But that wouldn’t be suitable, I think.”

The blade pulled away. Somehow, it wasn’t a relief.

And then the tentacles slid out of his sleeve, curling around the wrist that was inches from Renato’s face.

“Has anyone told you what this is?” Wesker asked conversationally as panic exploded in Renato, making him redouble his ineffective efforts to get away. “It’s called Uroboros. A viral contagion I spent my life developing in one form or another.” The slick black tendrils crawled down his hand, toward Renato, who tried to dig himself into the ground to get away. “It’s a tool for eugenics. Anyone it deems unsuitable from a genetic standpoint is consumed and rendered a weapon to be used by those who are suitable.”

The words barely made it into Renato’s head. He was having a vision of the very near future, and that was making the panic worse.

“Of course, in this place, it doesn’t have nearly as much power as it’s supposed to.” Wesker’s flat tones shifted to genuine irritation. “You should already be a writhing mess of half-eaten protein by this time. How lucky for you.”

He tightened his grip.

“I’m going to teach you a lesson,” he said, in a voice like black ice. “Don’t get in my way again.”

And then, with a speed they shouldn’t have had, the tentacles raced down around Wesker’s hand, under his palm, and into Renato’s mouth.

If he’d been panicked before, it was nothing compared to now. He could feel them fighting to get between his teeth; Wesker squeezed, forcing his jaw open, and they got in, and he could feel them twisting and writhing in his mouth, down his throat, into his stomach -

He kicked. Thrashed. Clawed first at Wesker and then at himself, at his throat, wanting to do anything he could to get that - stuff out of him. He couldn’t even scream. And he couldn’t stop it, because Wesker was unmoving, completely unaffected by the barrage of hits and kicks landing on him.

He’d only ever had this stuff under his skin before. It was awful like that, because he could feel it crawling through him, bulging the skin in places, breaking through in others. This was even worse, because it didn’t hurt - at least, it didn’t hurt yet - but he could still feel it twisting inside him.

Wesker watched him dispassionately. There was only the faintest red glow visible through his sunglasses.

It was tearing through him. The godawful feeling of feeling was giving way to pain. The tentacles had found their way through his stomach, punching holes in his insides, crawling through the rest of him. Ripping at bones and nerves. Twisting through muscles. He’d never felt anything like this before, never even come close, and every thought in his head fled as it got worse and worse.

There was nowhere to go. Nowhere that would stop this. Instinct had him kicking and fighting harder than he ever had in his life and it did absolutely nothing. Wesker wouldn’t let go, wouldn’t stop this, wouldn’t wouldn’t wouldn’t -

There was a noise he didn’t hear, and then Wesker pulled back. The tentacles were gone from his hand. But -

The pain didn’t stop. Or the feeling of something alien, something wrong, still tearing him up from the inside.

Now he should have been able to scream, but he didn’t. He couldn’t. There were still tentacles in his throat, trying to find their way through some soft place to get into his skull, he knew it he fucking knew it. Renato managed to get to his knees as he clawed at the skin of his neck, trying to get them out. Clawed at his stomach, his sides, tried to find a way to get into his own body and pull them out -

He didn’t need to. They found their own way out.

There was a burst of pain and then a coil of black and red was in his fingers. Moving. Still moving. Going back inside him, ready to find another spot to break through. He tried to close his hand around it and rip it free but his fingers wouldn’t do it. His arms were paralyzed because something was in them too. The tentacles were running through every part of him, taking control, tearing muscles and nerves and skin and he could feel his bones cracking and - and - and they were in his head -

Wesker watched without word or movement as Renato choked out sounds that weren’t quite screams and writhed in an agony known to very few as Uroboros took its toll. Even in this place, where it was hamstrung almost beyond recognition, it had a goal: to consume. It couldn’t replicate itself with what was on hand, but its base behavior was still there. It would leave a more recognizable corpse, but a corpse nonetheless.

It surged out through the eyes, the ears, the soft spots where there was only skin and flesh rather than bones to protect what was inside. There wasn’t much blood, on the whole; as long as the tentacles stayed in place, looping through the wounds and back into the body, there wouldn’t be much bloodshed. Which meant exsanguination wasn’t likely.

Shock was, though. Pain and horror overwhelmed the system where simple blood loss couldn’t. Incredibly grievous internal injuries probably helped the matter along, but the Entity’s dedication to ensuring its prey survived even the worst damage would backfire there. At least as far as Renato was concerned, if he could concern himself with anything at all at this point.

Wesker didn’t move as the body finally collapsed into a twitching, shuddering pile. Uroboros kept tearing through it, trying to sustain itself. He waited until death finally set in, and then, as the trial ground started to disintegrate, he turned away.

Still it was only so useful. This place was an offense to anyone with an ounce of scientific inclination.

But maybe this lesson would sink in.

Chapter Text

Adriana stepped out of the trees, the stink of woodsmoke all around her, and strode into the little fair. Past the tents and stands to stop some distance from the only occupied caravan, where the Clown, the man who’d only eventually been introduced to her by proxy as Kenneth, was sitting on the steps, smoking a cigar and giving her an inscrutable look.

He was, by her approximation, an overweight, over-indulgent, useless sack of shit, and that was her being generous. What she’d heard from the others wasn’t any more flattering. But he was here, and unfortunately for her, she had a reason to find him.

“I need a sedative and a diluted sulfuric solution,” she said dryly, as if the deal was already done and he was going to hand over what she asked for without hesitation. “Enough to melt flesh but not damage bone.”

He didn’t respond right away, instead taking a long drag on the cigar and blowing the smoke out in a lazy, drifting column. She could tell he wasn’t impressed, and that grated on her.

“Ask Carter,” he finally said.

“I already did. He told me you’re a better resource.”

“Did he, now.” Another column of smoke spiraled into the already smoky air. “Guess he doesn’t use much of either these days.”

“Do you have it or am I going to have to keep looking?”

“I’ve got some.” He tapped the ash off the end of his cigar. His expression hadn’t changed, although she thought half of that was because of the greasepaint smile on his face. Hard to tell what he was thinking when that was right there, lying to the world.

And because of his eyes, totally black and sunken into his face. There was no flash of malice there that she could see. Or anything else, really.

“Of course, the question is, why the fuck should I sell it to you?”

“What else are you going to do with them?”

“Anything I want?” He bit down on the end of the cigar and this time actually smiled, or at least smirked. “It’s my shit. What’s your plan?”

“I need to make more drones.” She could find the skulls at random, she knew, but - “And I need to keep people from getting away while I do it.”

“What?”

“Drones,” she repeated, with infinitely thin patience. “You know what they are - no, you wouldn’t.” Just from the look of the place she realized she’d made a mistake; he wasn’t even remotely modern, even if the attitude, language, and cigar suggested otherwise. “They’re like birds under my command. I can see anything I want with them. Track whoever I need to. My latest designs are made out of human skulls. I need a few more.”

“And you’re gonna sedate some poor bastard so you can melt the flesh off his face while he’s still alive.” The smirk got wider. More genuine. “Can I watch?”

“No.”

“Huh.” It dropped a few notches. “You’re being awful stingy for someone who doesn’t even know what the cost of all this shit’s gonna be.”

“I take it money won’t do the trick?”

He looked around like he was bewildered.

“Here?”

“Don’t be sarcastic.” Adriana set a fist on her hip and glowered. “First, do you even have what I’m looking for?”

Kenneth laughed, a nasty little amused chuckle that broke into a cough.

“Yes, your highness, I do,” he said, once he could speak again. “I’ve got sulfuric acid. Plenty of it. Not diluted, though. You’ll have to do it yourself, or I can do it, but that’ll cost extra. If you want to be cheap, I’ve got a lye solution that’ll scorch your face off if you get too close. Or at least part of yours. Might damage the bones, though.”

He examined the shrinking lit end of the cigar disdainfully.

“If you want to be really cheap, I’ve got hydrogen peroxide, but that’s gonna take you longer than I bet you’ve got the patience for.”

“And the sedatives?”

“Anything and everything. Stuff that’ll knock ‘em out for good, and you can watch them choke to death in their sleep. Paralytics that’ll do the same thing except while they’re awake. How much struggle you willing to put up with?”

“Not a lot.”

“Yeah, guess you wouldn’t.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” She tightened her other hand into a fist, and the blades on her arm glinted in the cloudy light around them. He didn’t even glance away.

“It means you look like a lightweight who’d drop if you picked up a single one of those little shits.”

“Only if they weighed as much as you.”

“Wow, that hurts. Never heard that one before.” He flicked the last of the cigar away and leaned his forearm on his knee, watching her intently. “I’ve got opiates. Might work best for what you’ve got in mind. Keeps ‘em down for a while, but they’ll be waking up by the time you’re ready to work.”

“That might work.” She paused. “Where the hell are you getting opiates here?”

He jerked a thumb behind himself, indicating, as far as she could tell, the collapsing church behind him.

“There’s a hospital off past the chapel,” he said. “Old one. Nurse wanders the place. She’s loaded.”

“Fine. That, and you dilute the solution. Enough to get the flesh off slowly enough to hurt, but I don’t have all day.” He looked like he was about to say something, so she cut him off. “Light damage to the bone is fine. I can do minor repairs. It just needs to hold together when I weld the metal to it.”

“Nice to hear it.” He tilted his head a little. “But, like I said, all that costs.”

“And what exactly do you want?”

She regretted the question immediately. He look he gave her - all of her - made her want to slice him open where he sat.

“Well,” he said, every word oiled, “I can make some suggestions.”

“No.”

“Of course not.” The look vanished back into dull irritation. “Skulls. Not the skulls you want, the other ones. Cost you four of the black ones or seven white ones. Don’t want the wood ones.”

“That’s steep.” The little skulls, carved out of wood and bone, didn’t seem to find their way into her hands as often as she would have liked.

“Yeah. It is. Or … ” He smirked again. “I’ll give ‘em to you for a finger.”

“What?” She noticed, for the first time, the keyring at his belt that had no keys on it. Just small, grayish things she couldn’t quite identify from here, until now.

“One finger. One of yours.” He ran his tongue over his teeth. “Of course, I’ll have to have a chance to test them … ”

If she’d been disgusted by the look he gave her whole body before, it was nothing compared to the way he was looking at her hand. How that was possible she didn’t know, but she was learning a whole slew of new, completely unnecessary things in this place, very few of them interesting in a good way.

“Not going to happen,” she hissed.

“Too bad. It’ll grow back, you know.”

“And you’ll have the original, you sick fuck.”

“I’m not gonna jerk off with it, if that’s what you’re worried about - ”

“Four black skulls,” she said, with the precision and intensity of a sniper’s bullet. “I’ll get them after my next trial.”

“Suits me. Gotta dilute your shit for you, after all.”

The leer was gone, but it was still hard to shake the feeling it left behind. She’d never felt this off her game before, except when she first stepped into the place.

“I’m surprised you’re such an expert with chemicals, given everything else about you,” she snapped.

“Never heard that one before, either.”

“How much do you really have in there?”

“More than it looks like I could.” He pulled a handkerchief, ancient and stained, out of an inside jacket pocket and wiped sweat off his forehead. It smeared the greasepaint, but not enough to make a difference to his skin tone. “Got a whole kit in there. I can mix up whatever I want, as long as I’ve got the base ingredients, and this place’s got some real interesting stuff. You heard about the blight flowers yet?”

“Only rumors.”

“Yeah, well, they’re a pain in the ass,” Kenneth grumbled, “but they’ve got an upside. Find ‘em without getting killed by ‘em, and you can use what’s inside to get some … interesting results.”

She knew she was going to regret asking, but curiosity had always been one of her weak points.

“Such as?”

“Aside from blowing them up like they swallowed a grenade?” This time the smirk was humorless. “Stuff that’ll make them claw their own skin off. Worse than the worst acid trip you can think of. Boil the blood in their eyes and mouth. Melt them faster’n acid ever could. Or, do it really right, and you can fuck up the way their nerves work. Make their brain think dying is getting fucked. I can get them to come so hard they go blind just by getting a knife in their gut and slitting them open.”

She stared at him in disgusted fascination. She knew people, especially men, were degenerate by nature, and this place only encouraged that. But this was the first time someone had dropped it in her lap so straightforwardly. She wasn’t sure how to take it.

“And you’d use that … why?”

He looked right back at her like she was the idiot. It rankled her.

“Why the fuck do you think?”

Adriana made a disgusted noise and leaned back. This couldn’t be worth getting the acid and sedatives.

“There’s a lot of better things you could be doing here, you know.”

“Yeah, right.” He glanced down at the handkerchief, then tucked it away again. “Like getting my spine ripped out by the spider-bitch that runs this place. Think I’ll just take the time to enjoy myself, same as you’re going to once I get you your drugs.”

“What I’m going to do is nothing like what you do.”

His final smile was blatantly, outright mocking, and his voice matched.

“You keep telling yourself that, your highness.”

She shifted the blades on her arm so he knew with absolute certainty what she could do to his stomach with virtually no effort; he had to have an active imagination, given what he liked talking about. He just waved her off and heaved himself to his feet, clambering back inside the caravan to, she presumed, start getting her request together.

She was probably going to regret this. But maybe not enough that her revenge wouldn’t still be worth it.

Chapter Text

He was lost. Again. He couldn’t, just couldn’t get the hang of navigating this place like so many of the others did. It was worse than being underwater, with no way up and no way down; he could see where he was going, think about where he wanted to be, and in the end he wouldn’t get there.

But there were worse places to be lost than the sprawling wrecking yard, Yoichi told himself. There were no traps here, and no wandering zombies. There was always the risk of a stack of creaking wrecked cars falling on him, but that was - well, it was a normal danger, in comparison to some of the others he’d dealt with here.

And the wrecking yard’s only resident wasn’t as sadistic and desperate to kill as most of the others. Everyone had said it, and then in trials he’d dealt with him, and while he was clearly very capable of killing all of them without so much as a second’s hesitation, he wasn’t as cruel about it.

Well … at least not as often.

Unfortunately, the wrecking yard was huge; getting from one side to the other would take a while, and while the only permanent resident might not have been a problem, that didn’t mean there was nobody else around to cause a problem. So many other killers liked to travel, and explore, and look for lost survivors.

He made an effort to move quietly, and try to stay in the shadows. Maybe on the other side, past the garage, there would be a way out. There was so much smog around - not fog, he was certain - that it was hard to see very far in the distance.

All he could hear was metal creaking and flames crackling. In the distance, sometimes, there were sharp cracks, but they sounded more like trees breaking than anything sinister. There was the occasional caw from a crow, either nearby or far away.

And, just on the edge of hearing, the sound of distant machinery, screeching and squealing.

He wasn’t sure it was real. It felt more like he was listening to something that had been, because none of the compactors or cranes worked now, and there was nothing else in the fog like them - well, at least not close enough to hear, he corrected himself coldly, because there was no way to forget the sound of that device hung up in the institute whenever it turned on.

Sounds from the past. Another hint that his powers were stretching here, unfurling to engulf whatever this place had to offer. He tried to shut it out as he went.

But psychic sounds and sights were hard to block out in the fog, and Yoichi was sure he saw flickers of things at the edges of his vision. He stridently ignored them until a headache started to set in, at which point he stopped by a car that hadn’t been completely crushed to rub the bridge of his nose. Why it kept happening, why he had to deal with this - just his bad luck, probably.

He brought down his hand and glanced into the car.

There was a girl inside it, staring back at him.

He didn’t panic when he saw her. He didn’t recognize her. She looked dead. She probably was. Ghosts weren’t new, even here, and he’d learned not to freak out when he saw them, because it just drew attention.

He did panic when she suddenly reached out toward him, because there was no glass in the window between him and her. Her arm was mangled, the bones in it broken in multiple places, but somehow her fingers were untouched aside from the blood.

Yoichi jerked back and nearly fell as she crawled toward him. Then other movement caught his eye - from other cars, from crushed stacks of metal, from piles of tires.

He’d noticed the body parts scattered around the place in trials. Rotting, but not dangerous, or at least not as dangerous as whatever was normally hunting him. Now he could see their former owners creeping and lurching out of the places they’d been left, all of them heading toward him.

They were crushed and mangled ghosts of corpses. Some were inexplicably whole, except for a critical aspect; some were missing whole pieces and had to drag themselves toward him. Most managed a slow limp.

Bloodied hands and staring eyes - some not even in their sockets, forced out of place by the weight of being crushed - all aimed straight for him. Yoichi tried to back up, but they were coming from every direction, and then, because fate liked a joke as much as anyone else, he tripped over a rusting muffler lying in the grass and cracked his skull on a fender.

By the time he’d pulled himself back together enough to remember what was happening, they had him almost surrounded. He pushed himself back along the ground, but he knew they’d get him eventually. They wouldn’t do physical damage. They were ghosts. They couldn’t.

But they’d get in his head. If he was really unlucky, and given how much he was panicking at this point that was probably a given, they’d drag him in to share their fate.

And then footsteps stopped, just behind him. The ghosts paused, too.

He glanced up and back into a warped view of the sky, like he was seeing it through molten glass. Light unveiled it at a hollow tone, and the Wraith looked at the ghosts, and then down at him.

There was never much of an expression on that face, but he could hear the surprise in his voice.

“You can see them?”

Whatever answer he gave, Yoichi suspected, wasn’t going to help the situation much.

“Yes?”

Wraith stared at him. The ghosts still hadn’t moved, which was a surprise.

“How?”

“I … always have,” he started, uncertain if this would get him killed or if it would go as badly as it had with the Doctor. “Not - these ghosts, but my whole life. I can see the dead. Especially in a place like this, where they all … ”

Wraith looked around and nodded, slowly.

“Where they died,” he confirmed. “Where the ground and air are tainted by the horror of so many deaths. I see. You must despise it.”

“Usually,” he agreed, and then realized he was talking to someone else who could see the dead. “You can see ghosts?”

“The ones here.” The group in front of him started moving again, and Yoichi jumped, but right away he could see that they weren’t heading for him anymore. Their eyes were fixed on the Wraith. “Those who died to open the path for the monsters in this place are clear as day to me, if no one else.”

“Open the path … ? You mean - ”

“The people we killed to lead us here.” Wraith watched the ghosts close in on him dispassionately. “These are some of mine.”

Yoichi looked at them as they made their way across the grass toward the Wraith. Some of mine. There were more? But the wrecking yard was huge. There were a lot more corpses buried in the wrecks, he was sure. Had he really killed that many people?

“Why did you kill this many?” he asked without thinking, and flinched when Wraith’s blank gaze fixed on him intensely. But he didn’t raise the club. Yet, anyway.

“Through ignorance.” The ghosts got to him, and clung to him. “Through willfully choosing ignorance. I ran the crusher. As far as I cared to know, the only things that went in there were cars.”

Yoichi said nothing as he watched the crushed and battered ghosts find their way to the Wraith and hold onto him. Fingers closed around his ankles, legs, wrists and hands and arms, draping themselves over his shoulders and holding on tight. He understood without having to be told: the cars had gone into the crusher, and inside the cars were the people, still alive and too aware of what was going to happen. It was horrific.

He pushed himself to his feet and saw the ghosts waver as his headache cleared. Wraith looked at him, as if he wasn’t aware of the ghostly bodies clinging to him.

“They know it was you?”

“Yes.” The ghosts didn’t look angry, at least as far as Yoichi could tell, but they didn’t look happy, either. “They will never let me forget what I did. Not that I would have otherwise.”

And here, it wasn’t as if he could die. Yoichi shivered. This place had nothing but awful fates for everyone. It didn’t bode well for him.

He wasn’t sure what else to say, but before he could turn to leave he saw another ghost trailing not far behind Wraith. A woman who had very clearly not been crushed, but brutalized all the same: blood all over her mouth and chin, her arms sliced and cut, her skin looking like something had burrowed into it, or out of it. She was watching them both, and unlike the ghosts from the cars, her expression was clear.

Grief.

Wraith was still staring at him as he tore his eyes away from her. He considered asking, did ignorance kill her? But he’d run out of luck already. He didn’t want to push it.

“I’ll … leave,” he said, feeling like that wasn’t enough. “I was just looking for a way back to the campfire.”

“Make it quick,” said Wraith. “This place still wants blood, and yours will do just as well as anyone else’s.”

It was, and wasn’t, a threat. Yoichi watched him for another second before carefully backing away, and then walking more quickly than before toward the distant garage. But he did glance back once as he went.

Wraith was watching him go. The ghosts had already forgotten he was there, and made the distance between them shimmer.

All around him, he could feel the overpowering horror of the landscape, and knew with a sort of uneasy certainty that the feeling had already been there long before the Entity claimed the place for itself.

Chapter Text

What dragged her out of the depths of unconsciousness was a voice. Renato’s. Distant, muffled at first, but his voice, so familiar, the only familiar thing in this place …

Saying something. Saying something … upset. Angry? No. Frightened. Thalita tried to open her eyes, but her eyelids were heavy. Her whole body felt sluggish. It wouldn’t respond - not the way she wanted it to.

“No - let go - ”

Renato’s voice. Close at hand. She forced her eyes open and saw … purple light, an uneasy gloom. Bright lights off to her side, but not in her eyes. She tried to wipe the exhaustion from her eyes but - couldn’t.

Her arms were above her. She looked up. As her vision cleared, she saw … chains?

She remembered -

A figure in the forest, white and green, silver glittering in the long-lost moonlight. A hand coming for her face, something over her mouth, over her nose, making every kick heavy and every punch a struggle. And she’d seen -

Those eyes. One red and glowing. The other hazel-gray.

Skull Merchant.

It was like a bucket of ice water to the face. Thalita instantly started pulling as hard as she could on the restraints - they weren’t chains, but they were as strong as iron, and they wouldn’t give. She couldn’t haul herself up either, she discovered, because her ankles were caught the same way, hanging just above the ground. She couldn’t kick. She couldn’t fight back.

Behind her was the sound of a struggle. She tried to look over her shoulder, or at least around her arm, and that was the moment when Adriana - the Skull Merchant - dragged Renato across the ground by his hair, into the workshop Thalita was facing and up onto a pristine worktable.

He was trying to fight back, but she could tell he was as sluggish as she’d felt. At least he could say something - or at least, swear something, especially after she smashed his head against the edge of the table.

“What the fuck are you doing?!” she demanded. Adriana gave her a brief glance, but kept most of her attention on Renato, who was coming back into himself just enough to make her life a problem. But she wasn’t drugged, and she was fast, and Thalita was starting to realize she was angry, or at least residually pissed-off. She had Renato tied down with the same black restraints as were on Thalita in a matter of seconds, arms at his sides, ankles to the far corners of the workbench.

He almost got a kick in. Once he was restrained, she punched him in the stomach.

“Stop - what the fuck is this?”

“This?” Finally Adriana turned to look at her. “This is revenge.”

“What?”

“Don’t play stupid.” She brushed her hair back into place, although it was short enough that even that kind of struggle hadn’t done much to disturb it. “Revenge. You know the idea, I’m sure.”

“But - why? We didn’t do anything to you - Renato, did you - ”

“This isn’t my fault - ”

“It’s both of your faults!” Adriana snapped, smashing a fist into the worktable by Renato’s shoulder. “You - both of you - you’re the reason I’m stuck here.”

They both looked at her, in surprise and confusion. They were the -

“If you hadn’t attacked my drone with your kites, I’d still be back home. I’d still have a company. A life. Control over my own fucking fate.” There was real rage in the one eye Thalita could see. “Instead? I’m here. In this miserable place. Expected to kill a bunch of tryhards if I don’t want to get mutilated.”

Oh. It clicked into place. But Thalita wasn’t going to take responsibility for any of this - ever. And she wasn’t going to let Renato try, either, although she was pretty sure he wouldn’t at this point.

“If you hadn’t been trying to kill someone ten feet from the beach, we never would have run into you!”

“It was abandoned property. I can kill whoever I want on it!”

“No you can’t! You’re insane!”

“I’m the sanest person in this entire little universe!” She stalked away from the table, around to where Thalita was hanging. “I’m the only person with a brain around here. And I’m not going to waste it by turning into one of those degenerate morons.”

She came close. Too close. Thalita leaned her head back, but there wasn’t very far to go.

“The two of you decided to interfere. Poking your noses where they didn’t belong.” Adriana glared at her from inches away. “I bet you thought you were doing something good, didn’t you?”

“You were killing someone!”

“I was killing prey.” Her hand came up, too fast to see, and grabbed Thalita’s jaw. For once, it was devoid of the nasty blades she normally strapped to her arm. “Do you understand? I saw him the way I see you two now. A problem that I got out of my way. Except I can’t get you out of my way so easily.”

Her other hand settled on Thalita’s bare hip. The metal claws on her fingertips dug in painfully.

“I can kill you and kill you and you won’t stay dead. You’re always going to be in my way.”

“We’re not - in your way - ” Thalita cut herself off with a gasp as the claws punctured her skin. From where he was trapped, Renato tried to pull himself up.

“Thalita - !”

“You’re always going to be in my way.” Adriana’s voice was soft and deadly. She raked the claws along Thalita’s side, drawing blood as they went. “You think it’s funny. You think it’s your revenge. Well, it’s not.”

“Let go - ”

To Thalita’s surprise, she did. One sharp movement and she was stepping back, the claws coming free almost as painfully as they went in. Suddenly there was space between them.

“You can try to get out as much as you want,” she said to both of them, but her eyes were fixed on Thalita. “But you’re not going anywhere. Those ropes are made of reinforced carbon fiber. Nothing gets through them except thirty years of excessive wear and tear, which is something you’re not going to have.”

Something was wrong. Aside from the obvious - if she was going to kill them, why were they both still alive? Where were the blades? Why was Renato tied on his back and why was she tied up to face him?

Dread and terror coiled in her gut as she watched Adriana turn away and open a box on one of the nearby tables. There was the delicate clink of glass, and then a bottle, half-full of something cloudy, came into view.

“This is laudanum,” Adriana said conversationally. “It keeps people from fighting back until it’s too late. It’s what kept you down until I got back here, but I think I overdid it with you. You should have been fully awake when I was bringing your brother in.”

Thalita said nothing. Sedatives. What else was in there?

“I’ve only got a little of that. As I’ve heard, it goes a long way.”

She pulled out another bottle. Slimmer. Corked. More full than the first, and clearer.

“This,” she said, and now her tone had an edge to it, the same bright, sparkling, dangerous edge Thalita could see in her one visible eye as she turned around, “is diluted sulfuric acid.”

The terror hit the two of them in the same instant, and paralyzed them.

“When I made my drones before, I had other people around to acquire the skulls. I never asked how they did it. All I know is that I gave them the bodies, and later on they gave me the supplies.” She moved around to the head of the worktable, where they could both see the bottle much too clearly. “But I did pick up a few things.”

Her gaze moved from the bottle to Renato, jaw clenched, frozen in place.

“Like the fact that it can clean the flesh off a skull very, very neatly.”

“No,” Thalita said, voice choked by horror. The future was racing toward her in her head, clear as day and awful as a nightmare.

“It can take a while, though.” Adriana’s voice was so calm it was almost hypnotic. “Especially at this dilution. I don’t want to damage the bone, because then it’ll be useless for a drone.”

She could see Renato’s lips moving, trying to protest, trying to tell her to stop, but no words were coming out. Thalita sucked in a breath and tried to argue for both of them.

“Don’t you dare! No! No! Why?! We didn’t do this to you! We’re stuck here too!”

“I don’t care.” The rage spiked through the calm. “You got me here. That’s what matters.”

“You were killing him!”

“He deserved it!”

“Get away from him!” Thalita thrashed against the restraints, but they wouldn’t give. Just like she’d said. “Get - away!”

It came out as a scream, and so did the protests that followed as Adriana didn’t set down the glass or step away or do anything other than watch her brother with an intensity that terrified.

“No! Stop it! Don’t hurt him!”

“Don’t worry. You’re going to get your turn.” Adriana turned to glare at her again. “You’ll get to feel what it’s like to have this burn your throat out from the inside, to shut you the fuck up.”

“Don’t touch her - ”

Renato’s words barely hit the air before Adriana backhanded him, no less painful for being upside-down. It snapped the freeze out of him, and then he was fighting against the restraints, too, bucking hard. He had more leverage than Thalita; his head wasn’t pinned down.

Until Adriana grabbed him by the hair and forced him back down, fingers twisting as hard as they could to keep him still.

“No! Renato, no - no!”

“Because you were the one who decided to get right in my way, you get to go first.” She popped the cork out of the bottle with the claw on her thumb. A very faint bubbling hiss seethed through the air. “You’re going to feel every second of this.”

Renato’s words failed him. The noises Thalita could hear were pure terror. Pure desperation. She screamed at Adriana, tried to get through to her, insult her, distract her, anything to get her away from her brother, but all she saw was that arm lifting, tilting the glass, right over his face.

A few drops spilled out onto his cheek. Thalita heard the burn, and the awful sound of pain he made, more than she saw anything.

Her scream cut through the dark forest around them.

NO -

She shut her eyes. She couldn’t watch but she couldn’t stop herself from listening and she braced herself for the worst thing she knew she’d ever hear in her life, or any life, anywhere, ever.

It didn’t come.

Adriana was waiting for her to open her eyes. She knew it, somehow, in the pit of her soul, the part of her that was already scarred by the horror of what was going to happen even though it hadn’t happened yet.

In dread and terror, she opened her eyes.

The bottled was tilted, nearly far enough to pour the acid onto Renato’s face. And it was staying there, trembling slightly. Like she was - hesitating.

Thalita looked at her face, and saw that if she was hesitating, it wasn’t by choice.

Slowly, agonizingly, her arm turned away from Renato, like someone was forcing it back. Adriana yanked her hand free from Renato’s hair and grabbed at - something in the air, wrapped around it close to her own arm, and pulled, but that didn’t stop the slow, inevitable twist of the glass back toward her.

Whatever it was, she was fighting it. Something was holding her. Controlling her. Forcing her away from Renato. Forcing the bottle back. Forcing it to tilt first upward, and then the other way -

There wasn’t even time for the surprise to turn to shock before her whole body jerked and the acid splashed into her face instead.

The scream was godawful. Thalita flinched away, trying not to look, and then she remembered who it was and what she’d been about to do and forced herself to look just in time for Adriana to collapse to the floor, clawing at her face.

She tore her smoking mask off. The side that had been protected was unharmed, but the part that was exposed was burning, smoking, stinking as the acid etched its way into her. Her screaming ground down into sounds of agony, buoyed up by rage.

She snatched at something in the air. Clawed, violently, at nothing. But her claws caught something, because Thalita saw blood splatter on the steel flooring. Blood trickled down against thin air.

A memory broke out of the darkness, of trials she’d been in where one moment there’d been nothing and then there’d been -

Adriana made a wordless sound of rage and pain and scrabbled at the air.

Her head hit the floor suddenly, hard, cutting her off.

And then again.

And again.

And her skull cracked open against the steel.

And something went through what was left.

Blood, bone, and brain splattered across the ground. Thalita had to look away, and then back.

The blood had fountained up over something in the ruin of the Skull Merchant’s skull. It took her a few seconds to realize it had formed around what had to be a leg. When it moved, it left a bloody footprint on the ground.

A bell rang, hollow and familiar, making her flinch with dread. It was right in front of her. The name came back in an instant.

Wraith.

He watched her in silence; the only sound anyone could hear was the faint trickling of blood and the cracking of bone as it gave way from what was left of Adriana’s skull. Thalita tried to tell herself she didn’t hear the hissing of acid underneath it all, too.

That flat, expressionless face and those dead white eyes fixed on her for a few long seconds before he turned and pulled out his club - no, she realized, it was an axe, the bladed edge protruding from another skull, this one split by the blade. It came up over Renato, but she was too shocked to protest.

It cut the restraints of one wrist, smashing into the worktable so hard the metal top split.

Renato recoiled away from it, but the Wraith only jerked the axe free and turned back to Thalita. As her brother frantically fought the other restraints to find where the knots were, that tall, shadowy figure approached her and sliced the ropes holding her arms in a single movement.

She dropped against him and grabbed on with numb arms. To her surprise - maybe to his, too - he didn’t step away.

“Oh, god,” she finally managed. “Oh god.” She dug her fingers into the tattered remains of whatever he was wearing and realized she was crying, and probably had been for a while.

“Thalita - ” Renato managed to get his other arm free and was trying to get his legs out. “Are - you - ”

She couldn’t respond. She could barely breathe. Everything was catching up to her, and the relief of being saved was so overwhelming she could hardly believe it. And not by someone from the campfire - by a killer.

Renato climbed off the table unsteadily and dropped down next to her, fighting the restraints around her ankles. It wasn’t until she was free and Renato stood up to support her that the Wraith stepped back; almost reluctantly, she let him go, but was quick to hold onto her brother instead.

“Oh god.” Something finally clicked for her. “Your face - are you - ”

The acid had left a trail of burns along his cheekbone, but they’d fade, she knew. They’d vanish altogether in time. She almost touched them but stopped herself.

“I’ll - be fine. Later.” That was a lie. She knew when he was lying. She could see tears on his face, too, from a fear so deep it left a mark. “Later. Promise.”

“Liar.”

Then she turned and stared at the Wraith, who hadn’t moved, and who still had blood all over one leg. He was watching them; his expression was completely indecipherable.

There was a lot she could have said. Monster. Killer. She’d watched him brain Renato with a club and throw him on a hook to die.

“Thank you,” she managed, just barely above a whisper, and then, louder, “Thank you. You stopped her.”

He didn’t move, but there was the slightest suggestion of tension leaving the space between them.

“Why?” Renato asked. “I - I’m glad you did, but - why?”

Wraith’s blank face turned toward Adriana’s remains. Thalita tried not to follow the gaze.

“It wasn’t for you,” he said. “I don’t care if she kills you. I don’t care if she wants to hunt you down and gut you, or slit your throats. But this … ”

His foot nudged a piece of broken glass from the acid bottle.

“Disgusting.”

The tone of his voice changed. Thalita tightened her grip on Renato and felt his fingers dig into her arm.

“So many of them are like her. Degenerates. Venal. Worthless. We didn’t need another.”

His gaze turned back to them. Thalita made absolutely sure she didn’t back up.

“Stay out of her way. She will not take her time again. I will not always be nearby to kill her. She will not understand, and you will suffer for it.”

Thalita wanted to say that she didn’t get in her way, and neither did Renato. That the psychopath lying in a pile of skull fragments on the floor had gone out of her way to find them. But she didn’t want to argue now. She wanted to get back to safety. She wanted to be anywhere but here.

They watched the Wraith step over the corpse and to the box that rattled with glass when he picked it up. She felt Renato flinch.

“Go,” he said. “Before I have to show you a different kind of mercy.”

They hesitated, but it was Renato who broke away first, dragging Thalita with him. They walked - quickly, but still at a walk - through the butchered mannequins and past the sagging fencing that marked the Skull Merchant’s property. Together they pulled off the ropes still tied too tightly around Thalita’s wrists and left them somewhere in the grass.

Eventually the fog closed in around them. In dead silence they trekked through the dull gray, waiting for safety.

As soon as she saw the trees and the distant light of the campfire, Thalita collapsed to her knees, dragging Renato with her, and sobbed like the world was ending.

Chapter Text

Ji-Woon strolled into the empty bedroom, eyed the dusty but probably at least mostly clean bed for half a second, and then turned to drop onto the end of it, arms stretching out behind him so he could lean back and watch the shadowy figure following him.

“You said he wasn’t here.”

“He’s not.”

“So why do you keep looking around like you’re expecting him to turn a corner and stab you?”

“Because there’s a non-zero chance of that happening.” Ghost Face peered out one of the windows onto Lampkin Lane’s empty street. “And I like keeping all my guts where they belong.”

“Well, then, I wasn’t a great choice of fuckbuddies, was I?”

The mask turned to him. He grinned. The right words always did the trick with Ghost Face. The right word, or the wrong word in the right place.

“That’s not what this is.”

“No? Then what is it?” He stretched his legs out and shrugged his jacket just off his shoulders, tilting his head back to expose his throat and more of his chest than usual. “Come on, psycho boy. Photograph me like one of your French girls.”

The silence stretched between them, and Ji-Woon realized belatedly that that particular reference, already barely relevant to him, had probably gone right over Ghost Face’s head.

“What?”

“Guess that one’s too late for you, huh.”

“I’m not taking a picture of you unless you’re dying,” Ghost Face said mildly. “It’s not worth anything otherwise.”

“Excuse me? Candids of me are worth a couple hundred - ”

“You know what I mean.”

“Right. It’s not worth it because I’ll smile and pose instead of trying to smash the camera.”

“Glad you caught on.”

Ghost Face looked out a different window. Ji-Woon sighed heavily, watching him with a look halfway between a glower and boredom.

“Listen, if you’re so worried he’s gonna stick you, just let me do it. Then at least one of us is going to have some fucking fun.”

“No thanks.” Finally he turned toward Ji-Woon, who appraised him with a look. There really wasn’t much to see, given all the black leather; there wasn’t a bare inch of him, which he was pretty sure was intentional. “If anyone’s getting stabbed, it’s not going to be me.”

“Ooh, so dangerous.” Ji-Woon sneered. “We can’t exactly do this when you’ve got sixteen layers on, you know?”

Ghost Face looked at him, and then leaned in sharply.

“It’s three,” he clarified, but in a tone of voice that made Ji-Woon smirk.

It had been his idea, but Ghost Face had suggested Haddonfield after both of them vetoed the meat plant - on the one side because Amanda would probably record it, and on the other because of the smell. He’d been surprised to get an agreement at all. He wasn’t going to put it on his natural allure, because Ghost Face was apparently completely fucking immune to that kind of thing. No, it had been a whim in the middle of a fight, because blood and violence was as much an inspiration for lust as it was for music, and it turned out that Ghost Face was the same to some degree.

Near-death was exhilarating, even if the death was only temporary. And as he reached up to drag at the clasps holding Ghost Face’s coat together, he knew this would at least be worth a laugh if nothing else.

“Three too many. Get this shit off.” He yanked, and the clasp came free, but the belt was still in the way - but before he could grab it, Ghost Face had him by the throat, gloved fingers cool and firm if not tight enough to choke.

“Unlike you, I had an identity to protect. This way, nobody was going to get a blood sample off me.”

“What, that’s still a problem for you here?” Ji-Woon tilted his head back further, moving his hand back behind him for support again.

“No. But I’d rather not show off every inch just because I can.” There was a deliberate tilt of the mask downward at that, making Ji-Woon snort.

“I’m surprised you didn’t end that by calling me a slut.” The grip around his throat loosened.

“I’m surprised you didn’t try to stab me.”

“You can choke me out a little. I don’t mind.”

He could only imagine the look he was getting under that mask. Then Ghost Face let go and leaned back again, undid the belt and finally pulled his coat open. Not off - of course not, Ji-Woon thought irritably - but it did reveal the body underneath, which was lean and surprisingly normal.

Rumpled white t-shirt, black jeans. Not particularly exciting. He gave the still-covered figure a brief once-over, then raised an eyebrow.

“Did that ever get anybody going?”

“Does that matter?”

“I’m curious.” He leaned forward and reached out before Ghost Face could react, getting a hand on the shirt and tugging it up to see what was underneath. “I know some people go for grungy bullshit, but you really put that to the test.”

Ghost Face looked down at him as he ran a hand over a flat stomach, feeling the lines of abs just barely visible.

“That’s not what I wore on dates, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“No shit? So take it off. I wanna see what all your dumbshit lovers were so into.”

There was no immediate response. He looked up at the mask; it looked back at him, its expression as fixed as always.

“Do you want me to cut it off?” he asked lightly.

This time the response was a snort.

“Are you always this impatient?”

“No. I’m usually worse.” Ji-Woon yanked the t-shirt up higher, seeing skin and old scars - very old, if he was any judge - that told a story he didn’t care to read right now, and smirked. “Treasure trail. Aren’t you just adorable.”

“You have a lot more problems than anyone gives you credit for.”

He turned the smirked up at the hooded mask.

“Are you really going to keep all this shit on?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Because keeping it on makes this really fucking awkward?”

“I don’t see why. The only thing I need out isn’t exactly hard to get to like this.”

“The only thing?” Ji-Woon glanced down at the zipper on Ghost Face’s jeans derisively. “Really?”

“It’s not like you need anything else when you’re on your knees.”

Ji-Woon burst out laughing, but when Ghost Face didn’t so much as shrug a few seconds later he stopped.

“Oh. You’re serious?” He couldn’t help but snicker. “You think I’m going to blow you and that’s it?”

“Not ‘it’, but yeah, that was sort of the idea.”

“Maybe in that fucked-up imagination of yours.” Ji-Woon let go of the shirt and leaned back again, eyes gleaming in the dim bedroom light. “It’s not happening, Danny. Not that easily.”

“No? So what’ll get that?”

“For you?” Ji-Woon thought for a few seconds. “You, tied to a chair, bare-ass naked, no knives, no backup, where I choose to do it.” The grin turned up a notch. “And no mask.”

“That’s a lot of demands for a fucking blowjob,” said Ghost Face, and Ji-Woon laughed again at the slight consternation he heard in that normally casual voice.

“It’s because it’s you. If I’m going to do you a favor that big, I get to see every second of it on your face.” And he had seen that face before, twisted with rage and dragged into something resembling normalcy; seeing it twisted into helplessness, into pleasure, into that blissed-out blankness he knew would be there, would be one hell of a reward for demeaning himself to Ghost Face.

“It’s not that big a favor. You wanted to do this.”

“I wanted to fuck. Not pretend I’m some survivor shit playing a game for the hatch.” He let his head drop onto his shoulder. “Or were you going to get that mask off and return the favor?”

“It’s a possibility.”

“As if, you fucking liar,” Ji-Woon laughed, and leaned back in again to get his hands under Ghost Face’s shirt.

Gloved hands came up and shoved his jacket back; he shrugged it down, let it slip off one sleeve at a time so he didn’t have to fully get his hands off the body in front of him. Then he felt those hands, cooler than the skin at his fingertips, make their way up his sides, across his ribs, smearing the perpetual bloodstains further.

Ji-Woon hummed a pleased note and leaned in. It was impossible to reach the fucker’s neck like this, but he ducked his head and grazed his teeth along Ghost Face’s chest, fingers feeling out his belt, his zipper, starting to work at those -

Hands trailed up to his shoulders, gripped, and slammed him back down against the sheets, shoving him further up the bed.

For a second he was actually surprised, staring up into the mask above him. Ghost Face had pushed his way onto the bed and was looming over him now, an otherwise unsettling moment that was spoiled by the fact that his coat was hanging open, leaving him vulnerable to knife to the ribs.

“I thought you wanted this, too?” he asked dryly, the irritation not quite enough to overpower the heat that movement caused.

“If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here.” Ghost Face’s grip didn’t loosen. “This feels like disinterest to you?”

“It feels like a prelude to you stabbing me fifty times.” Ji-Woon smiled, thin as the edge of a blade. “With one of those knives of yours, anyway.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“I guess maybe for you.” He shifted his legs slightly; in getting on the bed Ghost Face had gotten between them, instead of trapping Ji-Woon in.

“You’re telling me you don’t get off on torturing and killing people? You?”

“I’m a professional. I had work-life separation, remember? Did you jerk off every time you had to write one of your articles?”

Ghost Face paused, but before he could respond Ji-Woon hooked his legs around the backs Ghost Face’s thighs, catching him in a hold and grabbing him as he surged up and over and rolled, flipping them before there was any chance to prevent it.

He sat back on Ghost Face’s hips and smirked. His grip was tight - and harder than he knew the man underneath him could fight. To his credit, Ghost Face didn’t immediately try to reverse them again, but the tension Ji-Woon could feel made it clear he was ready to do so the first chance he got.

“Well? Did you?”

“No.”

“Liar.” He ground down against Ghost Face and smirked, wide and wild. “Is it thinking about that or thinking about me that’s got you this hard?”

“Getting you down and imagining you bleeding to death, mostly.” Ghost Face strained upward, but Ji-Woon tightened his grip, both hands and thighs, and kept him down.

“Hot.” It wasn’t, really, but he had the feeling he knew what got Ghost Face going. “Too bad you haven’t done it yet.”

“I’ve killed you plenty of times.”

“Only by accident.” Ji-Woon risked letting go with one hand to undo the belt and zipper on Ghost Face’s jeans, and was almost surprised when he didn’t get punched in the throat. “Or I got you just as good. You’ve never managed to pull off one of your little breaking-and-entering murders on me.”

“Yet,” was the responding growl.

“Uh huh.” He flicked the belt open and paused, then let his smirk fade into something more dangerous. “Is that what you think about, when you’ve got nothing else to do? Following me into some little shithole house like this and trapping me inside? Making it so none of the windows open? All the doors are locked? Lights off, pitch black except for the moonlight, which means you get to walk in without me ever knowing?”

There was no response, but he noted the slightly more rapid rise and fall of Ghost Face’s chest - which could just be rage, but he was willing to go all in on this particular bet.

“Make me wonder where you’re coming from until I see the flash of the knife?” He pulled down the zipper slowly. “Cut me a few times, drive me upstairs into some dark corner where I still can’t get out? Watch me turn around, back down, beg you not to do it, no, please, don’t kill me - ”

He put a whine on the last few words and felt Ghost Face shudder under him, and then he reached underneath the unremarkable underwear and pulled his almost rock-hard cock out. And laughed.

“You fucking freak.” He stroked him once and felt another shudder. “You never worked a day in your life, did you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Writing those articles must have been the second best part of your day, right after making sure you got to write them.”

He felt a strain against the hand still holding Ghost Face down, but it stopped abruptly, as if he’d finally decided it wasn’t worth trying to reverse things at this point. Ji-Woon loosened his grip minutely. At least with one hand.

“And writing your music wasn’t?”

“My creative process meant I was listening to those screams most of the day. If I got off on it, I’d never get anything done.” His smile was a little more relaxed now that he knew he had at least an upper hand, if not the only one. “My deadlines were as tight as yours.”

“Like hell they were.” Suddenly there was a hand at his waist, fighting with the fastenings on his pants. “I’m pretty sure a global megastar gets to decide when they’re ready to release an album.”

“Not when you’ve got a corporation breathing down your neck you don’t.” It was almost a growl, but he didn’t tighten his grip around Ghost Face, and he didn’t fight the fingers getting his fly open, reaching in -

“You don’t wear anything under these?”

“Just say ‘slut’ under your breath like a normal person.”

- and getting his cock out in turn with a touch just warm enough that he didn’t shudder.

“So telling me how my average night went was just as good for you as it was for me, huh.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. I was already going before I started.” But he wasn’t going to argue the whole statement. “It was kind of hot. I can see why you did it like you did. I just didn’t have that luxury, you know?”

“The luxury of staying up until four in the morning crouched in the bushes memorizing someone’s routine so you know exactly when to kill them?”

“The luxury of showing off in public,” he clarified. “If I could have really displayed my kills, I would have, but someone would have seen me. Every god damned time. It was hard enough dumping the bodies.”

“Well, that’s the advantage of killing in someone else’s home.” Ghost Face ran his hand all the way along Ji-Woon, which got a hiss out of him. “No cleanup necessary if you’re careful.”

“And you were an exhibitionist. You wanted as many people as possible to see your work.”

“That’s not the right - ”

Ji-Woon abruptly let go. He knocked Ghost Face’s hand off him and caught both of them in his own, shifting up a little further to make the grip less awkward. The recently-vacated hand landed over his, but didn’t dig in or pull.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Sorry, did you want me to fuck you? It’d mean you have to take off whatever antique fucking underwear you have on all the way down, and I figured you weren’t in the mood for that.”

There was no response, but he could imagine the look on the face under the mask, which made him smirk.

“I figured I’m not going to let you fuck my ass,” Ji-Woon said, shifting his grip to get more friction. “And since I’m pretty sure you’re not going to let me fuck yours, and neither one of us is going on our knees, this is pretty much the only real option.” He thought a second and the smirk got nastier. “Let me guess: this is totally outside your mundane experiences?”

“You don’t know anything about my experiences.”

“Bet I can guess. Had to keep all that serial killer energy inside, right? Couldn’t kill anybody in bed. Too much evidence.” He stroked them both, shifting as he went to maximize the friction, the sensation, the touch. “Lights off, you on top, her maybe not faking an orgasm. Right? Was Amanda the best thing that ever happened to you?”

“Why are you so obsessed with - this?” It trailed off into a hiss.

“What the fuck do you think we’re doing right now? I wanna know. I’ll tell you all about the shit I did.”

“I don’t care about what you did before you got here.”

“Because it doesn’t involve you, right?” He slid back a little, let two fingers curl more around Ghost Face than him. “That’s all you care about. Who’s getting hot for you. You selfish little fuck.”

“You’ve got me in your hand and you’re saying I’m little?”

That made Ji-Woon laugh breathlessly. Little wasn’t the right word, but he’d seen better. For the moment, he decided not to put that information to air.

“Listen, you make this good, I’ll put you in my top ten. Tell everybody all about everything we do - ”

Ghost Face’s hand suddenly tightened around his, holding it in place, almost crushing more than just his fingers.

“ - without naming any names, of course,” he finished, voice a little tight.

The grip loosened.

“Glad to hear it.” And Ghost Face sounded smug, of course. Just a little, which was too much.

“You are a fucking hypocrite, aren’t you?” Ji-Woon moved his other hand from Ghost Face’s arm to his chest. “Start doing something. I’m not here to cater to you.”

To his surprise, Ghost Face did do something - moved the hand that had almost proved to be a problem to join his around them, and brought the other up to his chest. Gloved fingers crawled their way across his skin, feeling every rib, every inch of skin that wasn’t scarred, wasn’t tattooed - wasn’t anything except flawless perfection.

“Like it?” he asked, tracing the scars on Ghost Face’s chest in turn. “Totally perfect. Exactly the way it should be.”

“If it wasn’t for the blood, I’d think you were a mannequin,” Ghost Face said, a little dryly, which made Ji-Woon give him a sharp look.

“What?”

“You don’t look like this because you want to, right? It’s because you were made to look like this. Mass appeal.” A thumb smeared blood up to his collarbone. “The only part of this that’s really you is the blood.”

It was like a bullet through the ribs, and hearing it from Ghost Face, of all people, was even worse. Yun Jin had said the same thing a few times, usually choked out through a mouthful of blood, but of course she knew. It hurt from her, but they both understood the truth.

This was different. This was frustrating. Not enough to kill his interest, but enough that he tucked the offense and rage in the back of his head for later, when he could walk up behind Ghost Face and split him open along the spine.

“What an obnoxious little stalker you are,” he said, lightly, as if it didn’t bother him, but he knew the pause before he replied was enough to give him away. Ghost Face’s responding snicker was a tell of its own.

“Little again, huh?”

“Oh, shut the fuck up.”

He jerked forward, kept his hand still and heard Ghost Face groan at the feeling of it. It was enough to soothe the ruffled feathers, at least for now.

“It almost sounds like you’re worried.”

“Don’t even start.”

“So back on topic - ” He twisted his hand, made absolutely certain the calluses on his hands, subtle though they were, made Ghost Face shift up against him. “ - has Amanda ever gotten you on your face and railed you?”

“Railed me? Are you - ”

“She seems like the type. You know? Making all those traps, all that weird mechanical shit - why not a strap-on?”

“Is that why you keep hitting on her? You want that?”

“I mean, I’m not gonna say no if she offers, but that’s not the real reason.”

“I can’t believe you’re asking about my sex life when we’re in the middle of this,” Ghost Face snapped, but it was a weak snap, his hand trying to outdo Ji-Woon’s, the other still following the lines of blood and bones as if he was trying to find the best place to jam his knife.

“I told you. I’m curious. And it’s not like it’s - off topic,” Ji-Woon breathed, feeling heat pool in his gut and simmer in his blood. “If she has - if you like that - then maybe I should be fucking you, huh?”

“Shut up and be glad I didn’t hamstring you to get you kneeling.”

“Oh, I’m taking that as a yes.”

There was a hand at his jaw suddenly, trying to force his mouth shut; Ji-Woon fought back his immediate instinct to bite and tilted his head into it, watching that frozen mask fix on him hatefully.

“Shut up, huh?”

“Shut up.”

Ji-Woon let his smirk linger as he focused back on what they were doing - on getting his hand all the way along both of them, fingers curling, finding any little place that made the grim figure underneath him twitch or shudder while making sure he had more than enough attention on himself. And Ghost Face, despite everything he knew about the man, was returning the favor, and no less expertly.

“You do a lot of things yourself, huh?” he asked without thinking, and glanced down to see the mask tilt just a little in confusion. “Nothing. Just keep doing what you’re - oh - ”

The hand had left his jaw and found its way to his chest again - to a nipple, where even with the gloves the attention wasn’t something he was about to ignore. The leather was just a little rough from the years of overuse. Well cared for, obviously, but not perfectly sleek like something freshly-bought, and knowing what those hands had done made the touch spark hotter.

“How many?” he asked, wanting to shut his eyes and lean into the touch and knowing that was a direct line to getting stabbed.

“How many what?”

“People,” he managed, letting his hand move quicker.

“I don’t remember how many people I’ve fucked - ”

“Killed.”

“And you called me a freak?” The fingers at his chest pinched and circled; the ones around them both got tighter as they dragged along their lengths, then loosened again. “Close to fifty.”

“Fuck.” More than him, but less than most everybody else in the fog. “Every one of them you stabbed?”

“Right through the ribs,” Ghost Face said, in a dark sort of purr that Ji-Woon was never going to admit out loud made his skin tingle. “And the throat. And the gut.”

“Nice.” It was all he could say. The heat was going from a simmer to a boil.

“Sometimes they crawled away.” Under the darkness was a breathlessness that matched how Ji-Woon felt. “Left blood and guts all over the floor, trying to get help.”

“You’re disgusting. Keep going - keep - ”

“I know you’ve eviscerated people. You know what that looks like. Right? Ever seen - someone do it to themselves on accident? Trying to dive out a window? The glass gets in deeper than - steel can. Perfect cuts. And the blood on the glass is - ”

He couldn’t stop himself. Ji-Woon didn’t bother biting back the moan that crashed out of his throat when he came, hand freezing on the both of them - and saw, when his vision cleared, the mess he’d just left all the way from Ghost Face’s stomach to his mask.

Except for his own labored breathing, there was dead silence between them. He could tell without having to see his face that Ghost Face wasn’t happy about this.

“Oops,” was all Ji-Woon could manage, even as he grinned through the sudden exhaustion.

It only took a second for Ghost Face to lunge up; both hands were back on his arms, forcing him back, flipping them again except this time it nearly took them off the bed altogether. Ji-Woon just barely managed to stay on and didn’t bother trying to fight back as he was pinned down.

A hand left him to go right back to finishing the job, and he knew exactly what was going to happen next. He didn’t have the energy to stop it, but that was fine. He still felt better - more fully satisfied - than he had in a while.

Without a word Ghost Face jerked himself off until he came, and Ji-Woon listened to it the whole way - to the faint noises, bitten back even behind the mask, and the hard breathing, and the stuttered sound that dropped into silence when he finished. On Ji-Woon’s chest.

He waited until Ghost Face came back into himself and settled back to let the grin turn into a lazy smirk. Idly, he brought up a hand and traced a finger through what was left on his skin, drawing the mess over the lines of his ribs.

“Guess I win,” said Ghost Face, even though Ji-Woon could hear a fragment of actual normal human in his voice, now. It made him want to rip that mask off and see what he looked like again, on that razor’s edge of monster and person.

He could have responded with an argument, or gone directly for the dick. His knives came from the fog itself when he wanted them to, while Ghost Face’s was at the small of his back. But in the satisfied, careless aftermath, he opted to let his mouth run wild.

“You’ve got cum on your mask,” he pointed out.

The silence that descended was like he’d stabbed him in the throat. He swore he could feel the chill cut through the room.

Ghost Face climbed off him abruptly and started getting himself back together, making Ji-Woon laugh lazily and watch him without bothering to do any of the same himself. Huffy, he thought. Doesn’t like losing. Doesn’t like being embarrassed. But who does?

“Next time, you’re on your knees.” Ghost Face almost sounded normal, or at least he would have if Ji-Woon hadn’t been listening for the pissed-off undertone.

“Oh, there’s going to be a next time?” he asked, with as much excitement as his tiredness would allow.

“If I’m willing to put up with it.”

“You’re a sore loser.” He stretched and caught himself before he slid off the bed. “Next time, I’m getting that mask off and aiming for your eye.”

“As if you have any aim?”

“Better than yours.”

Ghost Face turned, doing up his belt. Ji-woon let his grin pull wide enough to show teeth.

“Don’t fuck around too long,” Ghost Face said. “Michael’s coming back eventually.”

Ji-Woon only waved him off and stayed where he was, watching that black leather stalk off into the darkness of the house until even the sounds of footsteps on the grass disappeared. Then, and only then, did it occur to him that the warning might actually be valid.

“Ah … shit.” He pushed himself up and looked down at himself. “Guess I probably should fuck off, huh.”

There was no point in cleaning off, even if this was one of the few places with actual running water. He’d clean off eventually, either by the Entity’s will snatching him to a trial or as soon as he got somewhere a little safer, whichever came first. For now, he had to get moving.

But the possibility of a next time, even if it needed a fight to happen, made him smile in the darkness.

Chapter Text

There was always something new to be learned from the survivors, but from time to time things got … tricky.

It wasn’t bad. Just annoying, sometimes. Inconvenient. Frustrating. Enough to piss him off a little. Or a lot.

In fact Danny was on the edge of fucking furious, but he knew better than to show it.

It had been nothing but civilians at the start, with one or two notable exceptions who didn’t really make that much of a difference. Bill was old. Tapp was focused on all the wrong things. Ash didn’t take him seriously, ever, usually to his own detriment. All the rest were at best barely fighters; outside trials nobody could find him, or at least find him before he got what he wanted.

But then Nemesis brought a few actual threats. Leon was easy enough to dismiss, but Jill and Chris had broken bones before. Not without being repaid twice over, but it was still an offense.

And now there were even more - Carlos in particular, a man who never took off the kevlar vest, watched the shadows and Danny was certain he’d been seen more than once. And where Ada wasn’t a threat to him directly, she’d slipped away from him before, and then suddenly everyone was looking for him.

He could handle other killers being stronger than him; despite everything, he knew that genocidal maniacs and people who were the living embodiment of a slaughterhouse could probably outdo him in sheer mindless violence most days of the week. But survivors doing the same thing wasn’t allowed. He wouldn’t allow it.

Sometimes he ended up being a joke to them, anyway, and that was worse than the violence. Even from the start people had made the wrong association, asked him what his favorite scary movie was - as if he could ever pick - and eventually he found out what they meant. In some ways it had been flattering, but the laughter ruined anything that might have been worthwhile.

Maybe, he thought as he rubbed the place where Sheva had kicked him so hard he was almost sure he’d gotten a fracture, it was time to take a break. They were getting complacent. They needed to forget about him for a while. Focus on something else, someone else, and fail to remember just how dangerous he really was. Then he could come back in full force, making sure they knew what the fuck he could do to them. And it would cut down on the danger, and the laughter. It had before.

Yes … that sounded like a good idea. He could leave them for a little while, and everything would go back to where it should be. In the meantime, he could remind other people why they shouldn’t fuck with him.

Because there were others out there. Not just wanderers and corpses and husks - other campfires, with other prey. The Entity lived on widespread fine dining opportunities, and occasionally she’d let him into the metaphorical kitchen.

He got a spare camera and a handful of offerings and headed out into the fog, away from the places he knew too well.

There were a lot of disadvantages to not having a territory of his own, but over time, he’d learned there were incredible advantages to it, too.

But while he could tell when he’d moved moved from one part of the fog to another, this time, he never made it that far.

Still within the boundaries of his original darkness, he saw - something in the shadows among the trees. It was a very distant forest he was in. Not part of the one around the campfire, but similar enough; from time to time he thought maybe there’d been a campfire here at some point, and if he looked hard enough he’d find it burned out and ashen. So far he hadn’t had any luck.

Or at least, luck for that, because closer to he realized the something he was seeing was a woman digging through a pile of abandoned metal.

He couldn’t recognize her from behind. Unfamiliar clothes and hair, although for all he knew this was one of the usual suspects having found something new, or had it gifted to them by the monster in the sky. At the same time, she was oddly well-provisioned. A bag like a backpack at her side and a knife, neatly buttoned into a leather sheath, was at her other hip.

Danny pulled the fog around him and stalked closer, making sure his footsteps fell without a sound and even the normal rustle of leather was softened by slow movements. If it was a usual suspect, he might be able to get some information, or just leave a reminder of why he was someone they needed to fear. And if not …

Where would a survivor get a knife like that, even this far out?

He pulled his own knife out, but kept the edge turned away.

A little closer and he could smell something certain - like she’d been cooking and the spices had stuck to her clothes. Faint like an old memory, but he had a very good nose, although defining what he could smell wasn’t as easy.

He paused maybe two feet away from her and saw her hands go still after a few moments.

But of course, a survivor would expect it.

“Aren’t you a little far out for safety?”

Suspicious or not, she jumped, and turned so sharply her jacket caught on the loose metal. He saw her hand scrambling for the knife and raised his own.

“Not so fast.”

No, he didn’t recognize her. She was older, though he wasn’t going to use the word old by any means. Middle aged, maybe. Tired, although that was a given around here.

But as he looked at her face, something was … familiar.

He couldn’t place it. That was the problem. It bothered him immediately. He knew he’d never seen her before, but somehow, still, he swore he’d known her. A family member of a victim back in the world, maybe? And yet that seemed wrong, too.

She was watching him apprehensively, her hand still close to the knife at her side but unwilling to grab it while his was still visible. There was gray in her otherwise auburn hair - and, yes, auburn was the right word, not brown - and the sharpness of her face, the angle of her brow … it made something itch in his head. Something so familiar that he couldn’t get grasp.

“I don’t think I know you,” he said, to try and push the edge of recognition away.

“I don’t think many people would,” she replied.

“An interesting response.” The straps of his coat curled loosely at his back, but this far from his usual habitat, the Entity’s grasp was a little more distant than usual. “A sign of low self-esteem, or are you trying to suggest you’re very good at flying under the radar?”

She stared at him blankly, despite the apprehension.

“I’m trying to keep the man with the knife from stabbing me to death,” she clarified.

“Well, that can be difficult.” Danny twisted the knife around, so the bladed edge was toward her. She watched it more warily than someone used to dying would. So not a survivor having wandered in from somewhere else. Another perpetual wanderer like certain tattooed old men, then, maybe. “Or maybe not. I’m not in the worst mood ever.”

“That’s very comforting.”

“Do you have a name?” He edged the knife toward her face; she flinched, just slightly. “You could lie, because there’s no way I’ll ever know the actual truth, but it feels like one of the worse ideas you could have right now.”

She bit her lip in thought - and that looked familiar, too, in a way that almost made him angry. Why did he know her without knowing her? Would her name answer the question -

“Yasmine,” was the eventual reply, and it sounded unwilling enough that he was willing to bet it was the real thing.

“Yasmine,” he repeated. “Nice to meet you.”

“Do I get a name?”

“You can call me Ghost Face. I’m sure you can tell that being forthright and honest about my identity isn’t my best skill.”

“Yes, I can.” She kept watching him intently, as if waiting for the knife to flash forward. “You’re a regular around here?”

“As regular as anyone is.” He shifted his grip on the knife - subtly, but so it was in a better grasp to stab rather than slash. “That’s an interesting question, though.”

“Is it?”

“A regular in a place like this?” Danny crept in a little closer. “There’s not many questions someone might ask running into a masked stranger in this kind of nightmare, which tells me - ”

Her hand snatched at her own knife; buttoned in as it was, she couldn’t get it out before Danny had his at her throat, tilting her head up. He was close enough that he could see the fear in her eyes, but behind that was anger - anger at being stopped, he figured, but maybe it was something else … ?

“Not so fast.”

He nudged the knife up - and her with it.

“As I was saying,” he continued as she slowly stood up, “it tells me you know more about this place than the average wanderer. That backpack and the knife say something similar. You’re not just some poor soul randomly snatched off the street and dropped in here for the slaughter, are you?”

“That’s quite the jump in logic,” she said, her voice tight with tension as the knife pressed none too gently against her throat.

“I’ve been here for a while. I know when people don’t know what they’re getting into, and … when they do.” He reached out and undid the fastenings on her knife’s sheath, pulling it out despite her fingers grazing his hand. “That’s a sharp blade. You were expecting danger.”

“I know when there’s danger.” Her eyes were fixed on him. Danny laughed lightly and pulled his own knife back, although she didn’t look any more relaxed for the fact.

“Yes, I tend to give that impression.” Her knife wasn’t exactly new, but the blade had been sharpened to a razor’s edge, as nasty as anything he had. It didn’t look damaged, though, so he doubted she’d had much occasion to use it. “So … Yasmine. Why don’t you tell me what you’re doing here? Before someone who’s not as nice as I am decides to ask instead.”

She glared at him and glanced around the forest behind him. Looking for his suggested other possibility - or maybe for help. But despite a few lingering glances, he saw when she gave up, and she folded her arms across her chest maybe out of habit and maybe to protect her heart.

“I’m looking for someone.”

He tilted his head in the way that pissed off everybody, but it only made her narrow her eyes.

“Go on.”

“They went missing. I’m trying to find them and bring them home.”

“‘Them’?” he asked. “You’re being very cagey.”

“You have a knife. Two knives,” she corrected.

“Fair as that is, I’d like a little more detail.” He tested her knife; it wasn’t the type with a hinge, so there was no way to shut it. “Two knives should really encourage that, don’t you think?”

“No. It doesn’t.”

“Then you must not have much of an imagination, if you can’t picture what I can do with two knives.”

She was looking for someone. A survivor? Someone she’d lost? Of course, the idea that people would come looking was one he’d entertained from time to time, but it seemed like a suicide mission; nobody ever got out of this place, so why bother going in? Élodie had spent her whole life looking for a way in to find her parents, and now she was stuck. Even Vittorio, wanderer in every corner of darkness, hadn’t found an escape.

Nobody would be stupid enough to come looking unless they wanted to die. Right?

“Be a little more elaborate, if you would,” he suggested.

There was some internal struggle, but she caved. He knew she would.

“My daughter,” she said.

“And her name?”

“No. That’s too far.”

“You know, I might be able to help you, too.”

“You? You’ve got a mask and a knife and you’ve already threatened me more than once,” she snapped. “I can tell just by looking at you that the only ‘help’ you’ll give is putting one of those knives in my throat once I tell you what you want to hear.”

“Are you so certain? I don’t usually go for the throat, you know.” He leaned in a little closer, lifting the knife. “That’s too fast. Generally, I’m aiming for the ribs.”

He could see fear. Fear of him. Of what he could do. Of what he was going to do. But there was something else there, too.

“Either way, you’re just a monster. A killer. In this place.”

“Then you do know what I’m capable of,” he said.

And that’s when things might have gotten bad for Yasmine Kassir, if Sam Park hadn’t stepped out of the darkness and delivered a left hook so hard it nearly dislocated Danny’s jaw.

It didn’t take long for him to come to. The blow had been out of nowhere and hurt like hell, but it hadn’t knocked him out, just stunned him. Not many people could deliver a punch like that on him when he wasn’t already half dead.

He shook his head and looked up and saw Jake, or what Jake would look like in maybe twenty or thirty years.

It was a shock, straight down to the center of what was left of his soul. Danny stared at the graying, dark-eyed man who was focused on a journal and realized that while small things were different, little details betrayed by age, this was - this wasn’t Jake, but it was someone who knew him, who had to know him. Who must have -

Raised him. Loved him. Hated him, if his research was right, and disowned him, and now was here, in this place.

The lights lit up instantly in his head, and he realized that this was his father.

As he stared, the man in question realized he was being watched and looked back. In the darkness, when he’d delivered the punch, all Danny had seen was a blur of gray and brown. Now the details were all so clear. And so was the solemn look that he knew was almost certainly hiding a well of rage. It had been one hell of a punch, after all.

Danny glanced around and realized that he was in a little clearing, a manmade campfire with other people in it. He saw Yasmine, and now, with the clarity of seeing a man who had to be Jake’s father, he realized that the hair and the sharpness and the hard glint in her eyes and the way she bit her lip, all those little tells - they reminded him of Zarina, and yes, he could see it, this was a woman who looked liked Zarina but not exactly. Or, rather, Zarina looked like her. Partly like her.

Her mother.

There were a few others. A nervous-looking woman with dark hair. An older woman, and this one was actually old, watching him from a distance. Another dark-haired woman organizing and trying to encourage the old woman to help her with no real success.

For the first time in years, possibly more years than he could even remember, Danny was completely speechless, blindsided by a revelation he’d never expected.

The man who had to be Jake’s father walked over to him and knelt down in front of him. Danny, who had already tested the ropes tying his arms behind him, knew better than to try anything stupid. He was only getting out of this if he used his brain. His knife was missing, and while death wasn’t going to be the worst option here, his desperate burning urge to know was taking up his entire world. Even the rage of being punched out by a normal person was crushed under wanting the information only these people could provide.

“We know what you are,” said the man. “Exactly what you are. What your purpose here is and what you do for the thing that runs this place. So you’re going to answer my questions, and I’ll kill you quickly.”

“That’s quite the offer,” Danny managed after taking five full seconds to get a vice grip on his vocal cords.

“It’s the only one you’re going to get.” The stoicism he could see was so familiar. How often had he looked Jake in the eyes, seen that flat dullness - but never from this direction, where Jake was the one about to gut him. And there wasn’t as much dullness in this gaze … “Answers for a quick death is going to be merciful compared to what else will happen.”

“Do tell.”

“Is he awake? Is he back?” The nervous-looking woman was suddenly rushing toward them, almost knocking Jake’s father aside. She grabbed Danny by the shoulders hard, much harder than he expected, and shook him. “You know where he is, don’t you? Tell me. Tell me! Where’s Dwight? Where the hell is Dwight?”

Dwight? But now he could match that nervous energy, and yes, that was the same kind he saw in Dwight, whenever things were falling apart, which was usually when he was around. The same hair color, too. The same sort of terrified intensity, although here it came out awas violence instead of running. Fight, instead of flight.

“Elaine, calm down - ”

“How can I calm down? He knows! He has to know! He knows where he is and I can’t let him - ”

Yasmnie was there, pulling Elaine away, trying to pry her fingers off Danny’s shoulders. Jake’s father -

“Sam, help me with this.”

- Sam. Sam Park. Yes. That was familiar. He knew that name. Jake was notoriously reticent about his life and anything in it but once, so long ago, he’d heard it, stolen it from a vulnerable moment.

Sam Park. Elaine Fairfield. Yasmine Kassir. And the others …

“Let me go! He has to know something!”

“I’m going to find out.” With extreme reluctance, Elaine backed off, helped by Yasmine. Sam watched them for a second before turning back to Danny. “That’s the big question. We’re looking for people. They were taken here and now we’re taking them back.”

He paused, then stood up and went back to the journal. Danny kept the mask fixed on him but let his eyes move around the clearing. Elaine’s borderline murderous energy, Yasmine’s attempting-to-be-calming presence … and the old woman, watching him evenly, as if she was waiting for an opportunity to talk to him alone, or maybe just cave his skull in.

Sam came back with something in his hand. He turned them toward Danny.

They were photographs.

“Look at these, very carefully,” he said flatly. “And tell me if you recognize any of them.”

He stared, very carefully. Because it wasn’t just photos of Jake and Zarina and Dwight (and what photographs, from their lives before; Jake looked civilized if awkward and out of place, and Zarina was working at a desk and clearly not expecting the picture, and Dwight looked awkward but actually happy in a photo with his mother taken, given the youth present in both of them, some years ago) - there was a picture of Yui, her hair still black, in a garage with a motorcycle, grease smeared on her face. There was a picture of Haddie with a young man, and while she looked as surly as ever he was smiling, and maybe that was her stepbrother. One of Jane smiling in her dressing room, with a scribbled autograph and message in the corner where he was sure, absolutely dead certain, he saw the words to the best dad ever. One of Kate on horseback, grass in her hair, dirt on her face, looking flushed with pride and he thought he could see someone else on the other side, reaching up to help her down, or maybe just keep her balanced.

Lives. The lives he had stolen the details of for ages, picked away tiny details one by one and built for himself. Right here, in those photographs. Just looking at them made his fingers burn with the urge to snatch.

“Well?” said Sam.

Danny stared at the photographs.

Most of him was ready to give in to the urge roaring up out of the darkness inside him and say yes, yes, I know them, I know them all. To tell them he knew all of them, and not just them, but other people, too. That he knew where they were and how they could never be saved, because the Entity didn’t give up its food so easily while it still had metaphorical marrow to suck out of the bones. He wanted to tell them what he’d done to all of them, every awful lurid detail, and watch the pain, watch the agony, the rage, the desperation to kill him and get revenge twist on their faces.

He could relive his interviews one more time, knowing that he was the cause of all their pain and that there was nothing they could do about it. His mouth felt dry with the anticipation. He could hurt them in a way they could never heal.

But there was another part of him that knew what would happen next if he did.

There would be pain, and not just for them. From the looks he was getting, he suspected he’d end up on the wrong end of his own knife, and probably several others. Beaten bloody and not just once or twice. They’d torture him to get him to talk. Anyone willing to walk into this place wasn’t fucking around, generally, and he’d made it clear what his role in this place was. It would practically be a benevolent act, making him regret being alive.

And while he might be able to bank on the Entity snatching him back for a trial, the fact that they were here and existing outside its purview - because otherwise they would have been picked up and condemned by now, wouldn’t they? - meant that they had some way of sneaking past its perpetually watchful eye. Maybe it would come find him, and maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe anyone stupid enough to get caught by humans wandering in the darkness deserved whatever they got.

For once, he was caught in an agony of indecision. He wanted these people to hurt so badly they never recovered - but he didn’t want the same thing to happen to him.

And even if they didn’t know, he would.

“No,” he said eventually, his voice pitched to a perfect uneasy confusion like he’d used whenever the police had started asking him questions, “I don’t know them. Any of them.”

The disappointment he saw flicker across Sam’s face, and stick to several of the others, was like a shot of adrenaline. Danny carefully kept it under control.

“You’re sure?” He pushed the photographs closer, as if that would make a difference. “What about names? Jake? Dwight? Zarina? Do those ring any bells?”

“You’ve never met Yui?” said the old woman suddenly (and yes that was her grandmother, the grandmother who supported her when her father wouldn’t, he could recognize the grim look in her eyes now because every time Yui glared at him from the other side of a pallet she looked just like that).

“No,” he confirmed, despite so much in him wanting to say otherwise. He wanted to see what the old woman would do when she knew that he’d once slit open her granddaughter’s torso and watched her stagger, blood and guts dripping out of her, toward freedom and never get there. “The names aren’t familiar, either.”

“Are you sure?” demanded Elaine.

“I know this isn’t going to do me any favors,” he said, trying to keep his voice dry, “but I remember every detail about every person I’ve ever killed, even here. It’s kind of a hobby.”

“You mean an obsession,” said Yasmine. He turned the mask toward her.

“You could say that.”

The mood had turned dark, but not in a murderous way. The disappointment was like a thunderstorm and he knew he’d weathered the worst, at least so far. They all clearly bought the lie, even if it hurt to tell.

Sam stood up abruptly and went back to the journal, slotting the photographs back in place and slamming it shut. The last woman, who hadn’t said anything to Danny directly, put a hand over his and leaned in, quietly whispering something; Sam leaned his head against her shoulder, and in that moment Danny realized that must have been Jake’s mother. Both of them, here to find the son they’d lost even for years before he’d ended up here.

The regret must have been eating them both up inside. And now it would keep going. Forever, or at least until the Entity got its claws into them.

As the others started to pack up, Danny watched as Sam picked up his knife and headed back over.

“Any final threats?” he asked.

“Does a piece of advice work?”

“It won’t save you.”

“I didn’t think it would.” He paused, waiting to see if he’d get stabbed regardless, but he was getting a moment’s reprieve. “You might try looking … somewhere else, I guess is the only way to put it.”

“Somewhere else?” Sam echoed derisively.

“There’s other places around here,” he said. “Other … pockets in the dimension where people get trapped. They don’t all overlap. Sometimes you can cross from one to the other.”

The silence around him was deafening. But if he could get them to wander away from where they wanted to be, their hope perpetual and brighter with every step until they were a beacon for the Entity …

“You’re saying we might be in the wrong universe altogether?”

“It’s not impossible to move around. Especially in a place like this. I was on my way over to another one when you found me.”

“How do we know he’s telling the truth?” Elaine asked. “This could be the right place. He could be trying to run us away. He might know exactly where we should be!”

“If that was the case, wouldn’t it be nastier if I told you?” He was running up against the razor’s edge here, taking a risk that might not pay off.

“You could just be trying to save your skin,” said Yui’s grandmother.

“From what? You? This place can do worse than you could possibly imagine. None of you are more of a threat than the thing that controls everything here.”

The tension creaked like a wire on the edge of snapping - but Sam only shook his head, dismissing it all out of hand.

“Someone like you wouldn’t feel the need to lie just to save your skin,” he said, “and you wouldn’t hide that kind of misery for anything.” He brought up the knife and glared at Danny, their eyes meeting despite the mask. “Pray to the thing you worship that I never see you again.”

“Don’t worry. I doubt we ever will.”

For a second Sam hesitated, and then he slit Danny’s throat with, if not practiced ease, then more ease than a fortune 500 CEO had any right to have. Or maybe not.

As he felt the blood escape the newly gaping wound in his throat, the knife landed in his lap. It was a reasonably quick death, his rapidly dying brain figured, although maybe not one he should be gloating over.

“Hey!” said a voice as he started to fade. “He’s got a camera!”

Although maybe he could gloat over the fact that he was smart enough to bring a backup camera and not his normal affair, he though distantly, because this one would be blank, while the other was certain to have at least a few pictures of Dwight scattered among the dead.

When he came back, all the rage that should have filled him over being killed by an everyday person was missing. All he felt was energy - sheer, powerful, almost uncontrollable energy.

He knew something, now. Something nobody else had any clue about. And it was more valuable than almost anything else he’d learned here, at least with regards to the survivors. Their families were looking for them, just like they’d always secretly hoped. And now he’d turned them in the wrong direction.

Of course, telling them would be a miserable idea, almost as bad as admitting what he already knew to the searchers. So it wasn’t likely to happen. But he’d know, and that was more than good enough. He knew who was here and who was looking. He could spend his time wondering how people would react. Anger? Grief? Sheer, unadulterated misery over knowing they were so close and yet so far?

Danny took a few minutes to get a grip on himself before he vibrated out of his skin. He knew, he knew, he knew and one day it would all pay off. When someone was at their last moments, their real last moments, he could tell them. They’d disappear into the bottom of the nightmare knowing for one second that they might have had a way out. The ultimate loss. It would make the loss that much sweeter to the Entity, he was certain.

And in the end, there really was no escape. Those wanderers were just stuck here now, the same as anyone else. One day, they’d be found. Whether it was the Entity who did it or someone like him - or maybe actually him - didn’t matter. They’d die, and either fade into the Void or join some campfire in the eternal game. Another soul to be consumed.

He took in one deep breath and slowly let it out, then stood up and headed back toward the meat plant. He didn’t need to go wandering anymore. Oh, no.

There was plenty still to do here, now.

Chapter Text

There weren’t many things worse than being cornered by a killer as the last person alive in a trial. Being caught outside one, maybe, but that didn’t happen so much these days, he’d heard.

There were probably worse killers to be cornered by than the Trickster - the Doctor, maybe, or the Trapper after a really bad trial - but that wasn’t much comfort to Renato now, watching that cruel, lazy smile curl across that perfect, bloodstreaked face.

He’d tried to hide in a little nook in one of the walls, far off in a corner, but he’d been found anyway. Everything hurt and that was hard to hide, and Ji-Woon had very good hearing.

He was crouched in front of Renato, bat over one shoulder. There was nowhere to run. Nothing he could do except hope he bled out faster than the knives could get to him. But his injuries were more painful than serious.

“Your sister’s a bitch,” Ji-Woon said conversationally.

Renato didn’t reply. What was the point? Arguing would make what was coming worse, if it was possible to make it worse.

“That’s why I like hurting her,” he continued, his eyes never leaving Renato’s face. “Because she deserves it. Maybe if she learned not to talk shit every time she saw me, she’d have an easier time here. At least when I’m around.”

He paused, then reached out with his empty hand. Renato flinched but there was no knife, no immediate danger. No. Ji-Woon’s fingers grazed the side of his face and caught a curl, limp and damp with blood and sweat by now.

“But when she’s screaming, there’s a focus. She’s pissed off. At me, at the Entity, at the world … I can hear that.” He curled the hair around his finger. “You, on the other hand … you’re just in pain.”

The smile, unfriendly and cruel but not what he’d call cold, got wider.

“I like hurting her because she deserves it, but you scream prettier.”

Renato could feel the bottom falling out of his world, his gut clenching in dread. He wasn’t bleeding enough. He wasn’t dying fast enough.

“If only I could have gotten you in one of my studios … ”

“Please don’t,” he tried, but Ji-Woon only tugged on the hair caught around his finger.

“Shh. Don’t waste your breath.”

“Please.”

The hand close to his face caught his jaw, held his head still. Ji-Woon’s eyes were like a second sun, blazing yellow with obscene delight.

“Don’t worry. This isn’t about your sister. It’s all about you.”

His nails dug in. Renato made a noise - just a little yelp, something he’d normally never do, but it was hard to focus on anything but the fact that his world was falling apart.

Ji-Woon’s smile turned feral.

He’d heard it said that when something really, really godawful happened here, they didn’t remember it. Either in a trial or outside of it. Their best guess was that the Entity didn’t want to discourage its killers from doing their work, but didn’t want the survivors’ minds to shatter too fast, either, and so it did - something, and all they could remember was fog.

Pressing his arms against his chest to make sure all his ribs were back in place, Renato wondered just how much worse things had to get for that, because everything was still bright and fresh in his mind now, even if all the wounds were healed and it was like nothing had ever happened.

Every cut. Every stab. Every laugh. The look in those eyes, on that face -

He pushed himself up and looked toward the campfire, where he knew people were waiting. Where he knew the response to what happened would be that sucks, sit down, just wait for the next one, might be better than that.

It didn’t make sense.

It wasn’t fair.

Chapter Text

The hammock rocked with every swell that hit the ship. It shouldn’t have, he knew that much. They were designed to counteract the movement, the way the ship went up and down or side to side, but for some reason his didn’t work that way.

It meant he couldn’t sleep. Everyone else could, apparently, and their snores and breathing and sleep-mumbling were a little cacophony that kept him awake just as much as the swaying of the so-called bed he was expected to use. He could sleep better on bare ground than this.

Tarhos dropped out of the hammock and headed for the upper deck before the rage could overtake him. Maybe if he glared at the ocean for a time, it would subside for long enough that he could try and rest. More likely he’d finally have a chance to throw up over the side without anyone watching. The stale tack and fetid meat they’d eaten earlier had been seething in his stomach ever since, but he’d be damned if anyone saw him bent over the railing like the rest of the Duke’s pathetic party.

Up in the air the wind was cooler, which helped some, but he wasn’t alone. A pair of sailors were repairing something nearby; they nodded to him, an acknowledgment he irritably returned. Not far away he knew the navigator would be at the helm, also watching him. So much for a moment alone.

But then he noticed the Duke further down the deck, perched on a barrel. He’d expected the man to be asleep or in some deep conversation with the captain, like he had been not long after getting on the ship; to see him now was a surprise.

He considered going back down to the hammock and trying to get some rest, but decided against it. Spending any time with the Duke didn’t appeal, but going back to the stuffy heat and frustration below decks didn’t either. Besides, he was a little curious about what the man was doing up here at all.

“Ah! Sir Kovács,” Vittorio said as he approached, only glancing back once to make sure that was, in fact, who was approaching. “Not heeding the call of Morpheus?”

“No,” he replied, and leaned heavily on the railing despite himself. “I can’t say travel by sea suits me.”

“Nor I,” said the Duke. “The waves are only soothing when you can feel the air and the salt on your skin.”

“As you say,” Tarhos grumbled.

“And a hammock certainly doesn’t suit a man not used to it,” he continued. “I feel crushed instead of cradled. Hard to sleep when you wonder if you’re about to drop to the floor. Of course, aging doesn’t help out there, either. I’m lucky to rest more than a few hours a night even with a comfortable bed.”

Tarhos said nothing and stared at the waves. This was why he didn’t want to talk to the Duke. Anything relatable he might have said was surrounded by blathering idiocy.

For a few long seconds they were both silent; when the seconds continued, Tarhos realized the Duke wasn’t just out here waiting for someone to pester with words, and the curiosity crept back in. He wasn’t interested in the hobbies of the aristocracy, but so far, despite his disdain for the man, Vittorio had proved himself at least slightly unlike most nobility.

He leaned forward a little and saw the open scroll on the Duke’s lap, covered in sketches. Vittorio was looking up, then back down to draw another set of lines with a piece of charcoal. Tarhos glanced up and only saw the endless night sky.

Don’t ask, he told himself. He’ll never shut up and you’ll regret it. It’ll be a waste of your time. But more of a waste than lying in a rocking net, waiting for dawn, feeling sickness roil in your gut?

“What are you seeing in the skies, your grace?” he managed with slightly less vitriol than intended but slightly more than was probably permitted.

“The constellations.” If he took any offense to the tone, Vittorio didn’t show it. “You know of them, I’m certain?”

“I was told about them once.”

“Then you should recognize them. There - look.” He pointed, and Tarhos reluctantly followed his hand up to the sky. “The belt and bow of Orion, the river Eridanus, the sea-beast Cetus … and there, Taurus - the great bull. See how you can make them out?”

Tarhos stared up and saw the stars, bright against the nearly-black navy of the sky, a span of paler light somewhere beyond them.

“Of course,” he said, but Vittorio picked up on the doubt in his voice.

“You have to look. You have to let the patterns reveal themselves. Here. Look at what I’ve drawn, and look to them again. The three bright lights lined up as if a belt - start with those. That’s where Orion is most easily identified. Then you can see the shoulders, the arm, and the bow drawn, ready to hunt.”

Tarhos looked at the rough sketch and tried to see a match in the sky above, but there wasn’t much to be seen - until it was there, right in front of him. And then his eyes followed the pattern that suddenly was there when before all it had been was specks of light.

He didn’t say anything, but Vittorio took his silence as a confession.

“Good. And now, just below, the river. So large it twists almost down to the horizon.”

“That could be all of them.”

“Yes, but this is marked by the brightest of the celestial bodies.” The hand came up again, pointing out where the Duke could almost match where Tarhos’s gaze landed. “There - and there - and there - down to the sea.”

It was foolish, but - he could almost see it.

“Named for a river that perhaps one day I shall see,” Vittorio continued. “And Cetus, a monster that hunted on perhaps the very seas we sail now.”

“If it lived on these seas, wouldn’t we already be drowned?”

“It’s only romance, Sir Kovács. That we might live in a world with such great beasts still in it, instead of simply remembering their stories.”

There were already great beasts in the world, Tarhos thought sourly - real ones, too. But he didn’t expect nobility to grasp the idea. It was their duty to live with their heads in the air, or in the past, while men like him dealt with the reality of the world. So long as he was being properly paid, anyway.

“It always makes me a somber, thinking that the skies we see now are the same ones the greatest thinkers of the past saw,” the Duke continued, more softly than before. “They saw these stars, saw shapes and patterns and gave them forms and names, and now we, too, watch them and see those same shapes. We chase what they knew. But perhaps they were chasing knowledge and regret of their own?”

Tarhos glanced over at Vittorio, who was watching the distant sky almost forlornly. His hands were still, the sketches abandoned for the moment; the fingers of one hand were stained black with charcoal dust.

“You think they chased the same relic you seek now,” he ventured.

Vittorio abruptly snapped out of whatever memory he was lost in and looked back down at his sketches - the hunter with his bow, the coiling river, the beast, the raging bull - and almost smiled.

“Chased it, or perhaps made it,” he said. “Or, more likely, thought it to be the work of gods and so refused to risk punishment by seeking it.”

“If what I remember is right, that rarely stopped anyone in those old tales.”

“Oh, you’ve heard the myths of ancient Greece?”

“Only as moral parables of the carnage wrought by the worship of false idols and craven fools.”

“A pity. There’s some very valuable ideas in some of those stories.” Vittorio drew another few lines on the hunter. “Perhaps I could tell you some of the ones you might have missed?”

“I don’t think that’s - ”

“It might serve as a better distraction from the misery of the sea,” he said, and then added, “and from the miserable food.”

The silence stretched a moment too long.

“It’s hardly miserable.”

“Don’t be a fool. I had the same thing. It took everything I had not to send back into the sea. I’m amazed you’ve kept it down without so much as a comment.”

Despite everything, Tarhos felt a faint flush of embarrassment run hotly down his spine. It was the first time in years, and the infuriating thing was that he wasn’t even sure what he was embarrassed about.

“Of course, your constitution is almost certainly stronger than mine. But if you need to vomit, I won’t speak of it.”

“I’ve had worse.”

“Not on the sea, I’d wager.” He watched the Duke’s stained fingers linger over the drawing of the hunter.

“My duty is to serve, your grace. Not complain.”

“And so far you’ve done so admirably.” Tarhos tried to hear some kind of mockery in that, the disdain the landed rich always leveled at him, but there was nothing. “Once we disembark, we shouldn’t have to cross the sea again. Our difficulties will be in traveling through Aragon and Castile into Portugal. Of course, the return might not be ideal, but provided we don’t end up in chains somewhere, we should be able to be back before winter sets in again.”

“As you say, your grace.”

Vittorio turned toward him again, just slightly, and this time it was with a smile.

“You don’t need to use so much formality. Duke Toscano will be fine. Or perhaps even just Vittorio?”

“I wouldn’t dare to show you such disrespect, your grace.”

“Nonsense. We’ll be traveling for some time, and you’re clearly a sight more intelligent than most of the men accompanying us. There’s no need to stand on such formality, at least privately.”

A sight more intelligent. Tarhos said nothing, surprised by that comment more than by the Duke’s apparent disinterest in the respect his rank his owed. Some of that had to be a joke. No man would ever request just his name if he had a title to go with it. Even he had killed people for sneeringly dropping the Sir while addressing him.

But his intellect - nobody had ever assumed he was more than a tool to be commanded, at least not to his face.

As his thoughts stumbled, Vittorio rolled up the scroll and tucked away the charcoal, grimacing at the stain it left behind.

“Perhaps one day I can have a quill that simply inks itself,” he said idly, then slid off the barrel and nodded at Tarhos. “Take your time here. The air really does clear the foulness of the lower decks. And I doubt anyone will be watching once I leave.”

Tarhos said nothing as the Duke left, listening to his footsteps until they disappeared, swallowed up by the waves against the ship, the creaking of the rigging, and the wind around them. He realized that their conversation had served as a distraction from the frustration and sickness, and that even now, left alone, he didn’t feel the urge to heave over the railing quite as much, at least until the ship hit a larger swell.

He didn’t vomit, and looked up at the sky again, seeing patterns where there had once just been specks of light.

Lying flat on his back in the grass, Vittorio watched the stars above him where they weren’t obscured by trees. It was easiest by the pond, even if it put him in danger from those roaming in the darkness. Too close to the campfire and smoke obscured the sight; too far out, and he’d be seeing another sky.

Over what must have been centuries he’d tried to find constellations in these stars, because the ones he knew were long gone. He’d find patterns and give names and try to recognize them between the beast’s trials, but then the fog would change and he’d never see them again. Still, he kept it up. It was one of the many ways he stayed sane.

Mikaela was with him this time, less focused on constellations than he was because of the burden the place put on her. But she was trying to see what he was pointing out anyway, because it was a good distraction.

“If you look at that cluster, right over there - ” He pointed to where a few stars were closer together than the rest. “ - and follow it down to the trees, you can follow several in a curve. Almost like a snake, or perhaps a spirit.”

There was silence, and then she made a doubtful noise.

“You could see anything in these stars,” she said.

“Yes, and that’s why you have to try and see the same ones. So that you don’t just see anything - you see what you know is there.”

“Pattern recognition?”

“In a positive way, yes.”

“All I can see are skulls,” she said, a little weakly.

Vittorio tried not to sigh. He could see a lot of those, too, but he tried to stay away from it.

“Well … you’ve certainly made them less of a threat than they used to be, so that might not be so bad.”

“I guess.”

Her reticence was understandable, unfortunately. He tried to see her expression, but she’d angled herself away from him, so all he could see was her hair.

Vittorio looked back at the sky and tried not to see the things that showed up every time he saw a sky like this one. Skulls and screaming faces. Men in armor with battered swords. Memories.

The beast couldn’t have known what to put up there, because that was too small of a detail for it to target. But he wasn’t going to doubt that one day he might see his old familiar constellations for one bright moment. One single spectacular instant of wondering if he was free, or in a place he once knew.

Or just alongside someone who had recognized them with him, once, before a blade pierced his heart one final time.

Chapter Text

She was pale, and thin, and wore black - not just black, but shades of black and gray, her platinum blonde hair highlighted with a pinkish sort of purple, a way of standing out in the shadows even while the rest of her blended in. It struck him, in a way. It was familiar. It was a lot like him.

She struck him in a few ways. With pallets, mostly, but more than that she wasn’t afraid. Not just of him - of anybody, or so he’d heard. She stared him down without a grimace. She criticized Ji-Woon’s fashion sense. She tried to steal a Billy puppet off one of Amanda’s boxes and take it out of the trial with her. She tried to feed the crows.

And she knew magic. He’d seen her salt circle in the basement, the little runes scratched into the filth on the floor unfamiliar even to him. Seeing her and Mikaela run out of the basement after several generators went off at once had led him to think something was going on, and he’d been right.

And, now, she’d found him. Deliberately, on her own, out in the middle of the forest. Of course, he’d been following her for a while, but now he suspected she’d gone out alone specifically because she thought he’d find her. They must have told her not to do that because he was out there, and now she was doing it for that exact reason.

It was intriguing. Some people had done that before to try and kill him, but they’d never succeeded. All Sable was doing was smiling faintly into the shadows right where he was.

He let himself fade in, and watched her smile get a little wider.

“I thought you’d be out here.”

He didn’t respond right away, instead taking in all the details - the way her hands were clasped behind her back, the way she was standing with her feet firmly planted, like she intended to attack. She had sneakers on, which meant she had halfway decent traction even on the dirt.

She might attack, he thought. But her expression and voice and the lack of tension in the air told him that she might not.

“I’m always out here,” he said eventually. He didn’t have his knife out. All the better to present the image of slightly less of a threat. “Watching all of you. Especially the new arrivals.”

“I know. They told me to look out for you.” The word that came to mind when watching her was coy, he thought. She had to be planning something, but he wasn’t sure what just yet. “They said you would listen in on every conversation and write down every detail. That you’d stalk me until you had a whole book just about me, all things you shouldn’t know. Just to scare me.”

“A whole book is a little much, but that’s the gist of it.” She was still smiling. Overconfident, too. “It’s what I do best, right after killing.”

“And you are pretty good at that,” she agreed.

“That’s a first, coming from one of you.”

“Really? I’d think somebody would admire the way you do that. It’s so personal. And the pictures are a nasty little touch.”

Flattery wasn’t something he got a lot of, at least when it was outright like this; he took insults and hatred and condemnation as a compliment, but it was rare that someone, anyone, had ever seemed to actually like what he’d done. It was suspicious. The only other people who seemed to appreciate his work were Amanda and Ji-Woon, who’d tried to kill him on a regular basis, and occasionally some others, like Adriana, who framed it as a begrudging acknowledgment of being almost their equal.

But it was encouraging, anyway. Suspicious, but he’d take it.

“You’re interested in murder?”

“I’m interested in a lot of things other people don’t like.” She was moving toward him, hands still behind her back. “Dark places like this. Dark magic. People with … unusual personalities.”

“Then you’re in the right place.” He cocked his head as she got closer. “I heard you came here by choice.”

“Partly by choice,” she agreed. “I wouldn’t have thought about it if Mikaela hadn’t disappeared first. I wasn’t going to let her come here alone and have all the fun.”

“I don’t think she finds this place fun.”

“No, she never did like gore as much as I did.” The closer she got, the more he wondered if he should be reaching for his knife. “But now I’m here. Choice or no choice, fate or chance … I’m here.”

Her smile was almost … friendly by now. He knew it had to be a lie, but he wanted to find out for sure.

“And calling out to lifelong serial killers.”

“So? I read a lot about people like you. It’s fascinating. You’re fascinating.” She took another few steps forward, a little quicker. “They said you're a - ”

There was a branch in her path, not far from where he was; with her eyes fixed on him she didn’t see it, and her speed meant she tripped abruptly. Right onto him.

He couldn’t avoid it in time. Her hands flew out as she fell, one flat on his chest and the other fisted against his side; they landed, her on top of him, and while she wasn’t heavy it was still an unexpected hit.

She looked up at him. There was a second of embarrassment before she smiled again.

“Sorry.”

“You should watch your step.” She had a knee on either side of him and her eyes were on his mask. “Some places around here are dangerous to walk through unaware.”

Her smile quirked up a little. As he watched her, Danny thought: this had to be deliberate. Had to be. The fall had told him she didn’t have a weapon; even the hand pressed against his side, balled into a fist as it was, hadn’t had any kind of knife or tool in it when she fell; he’d seen that. And she was pressed against him without any sort of disgust or tension. Survivors had pinned him before and they’d clearly hated every second of it, or at least been ready to kill him at the first possible chance. There was none of that here.

“Oh yeah?” He felt the hand close to his side start moving up. “Tell me about them.”

She was going to grab at his mask. That wasn’t new. He relaxed a little, and let his own hands move from the ground up closer to her.

“I’m sure your new friends have already told you all about them.”

“But you probably know more. Don’t you stalk everybody?” He could see her hand moving now, just at the corner of his eye; it only stuttered for a second when one of his hands slid over her hip.

“Everybody I can.”

“Just because?”

“Some of that. Some of wanting to know.” Her fisted hand was almost at his chest. “But I also like keeping other people’s secrets.”

“Like where not to step.”

“Yeah.” He watched her hand more than her face, because she wouldn’t be able to tell. “And how all those magic spells work - ”

Sable’s hand shot up. He jerked his head down, so that her fingers would hit the flat part of the mask, blocking her from grabbing the edge and yanking right away. It would only stop her for a second, but a second was all he needed to grab her wrist and twist it so hard she’d have to give up or let him break it. And then they could continue their conversation a little less cordially.

Except she didn’t try to grab.

Sable’s hand twisted and her fingers opened as it came up and instead of snatching she drove a handful of nails into the eyehole of his mask. They tore through the soft fabric that let him see and buried themselves in his eye, half blinding him, wiping out every thought in his brain.

He bucked, throwing her off. She let go of the nails and rolled away, getting to her feet as he clawed at his mask. At his face. At the place where there was metal in his head and he couldn’t get it out.

Through the pain he heard something.

“That sounds like it hurts.”

Danny dropped his bloody hand to the ground and forced himself up. Through the haze of blood and agony and rage he could see her, his depth perception crippled but that had never really mattered.

“You fucking bitch,” he snarled. His knife was in his hand without him having to think about it.

“Aw, are you mad? Did I upset you?” She wasn’t afraid. He had the knife in his hand she was smirking at him, almost laughing. “You deserve it.”

“You’re dead.”

“Like that makes a difference?” Now the look on her face was hard. Sharp. Cold. The smirk was cruel. “That’s for Mikaela. For everything you’ve done to her.”

“I’m going to do worse.”

“You were already going to. You were always going to.” Sable sneered at him. “I bet if I’d played nice a little longer you would have tried to fuck me.”

“I’m going to choke you with her guts,” he hissed.

“You do that and I’ll do worse.” Her response was a hiss of its own. “I know magic. Real magic. Black magic. Spells that’ll turn you inside out.”

“I’ll make you wish that’s all I did.” He reached up and managed to pull one slippery nail out, dropping it in the dirt between them. “I’ll break your legs. Break your arms. Make you watch while I make her beg me to kill you both - ”

Her face flickered; he saw the uncertainty, the fear, and it would have made him feel better if trying to get a second nail out with shaking fingers hadn’t sent pain shooting through his skull like a lightning bolt. He threw it down and took a step toward her.

“I know this place,” he managed. She wasn’t moving back. Not even when he took another, more certain step toward her. “Better than you. It loves me. It knows me. You can’t use it against me.”

“I’m going to.” He saw blood on her hand. His blood. His hands trembled with the urge to rip it off her body. “This place is going to work on my terms, even if it kills me.”

“It will.” He raised his knife as the pain ebbed into a constant thing he could use. “It starts here.”

She ran before he lunged, her hair flashing in the darkness as he chased her. Eventually she reached safety, and he knew, because he felt the pull to stay away at the back of his mind even through the unending haze of agony.

But she couldn’t stay there forever.

She wouldn’t.

Chapter Text

The thing on the screen moved awkwardly, like it wasn’t used to using only two legs. Or maybe because the two legs it had were so twisted and deformed that it couldn’t use them normally. Whatever the reason, it staggered, limped, and toddled across the courtyard until something caught its attention, at which point the head whipped around, the body dropped to all fours, and it rushed out of sight.

Birkin watched it, then reversed the tape and watched it again.

“Any thoughts?” Wesker asked.

“I think if it is a B.O.W., then whoever made it was an idiot.”

“Aside from the obvious.”

“I’m not sure what else to tell you. It looks like a … a cryptid,” Birkin said, sneering, as if speaking the word was offensive to a man based in logic and science. “Or someone’s stupid idea of one. You said this place can bring nightmares to life? Then that’s probably what it is.”

“That’s what I thought, but it produces a toxin. I was able to get a sample.” Wesker pointed to another screen, where the thing was bent backward almost in half, something protruding from its neck and something else halfway through the air. The whole frozen frame was blurry, but Birkin could tell a projectile when he saw it.

Without him having to ask, Wesker pulled up the compound breakdown on the main terminal screen. Birkin gave it a glance.

“It’s just another neurotoxin.”

“I’ve seen it in action. It’s a hallucinogen.”

“Obviously, but - ”

“You can tell it’s been altered. Someone made this. Created it. It’s not naturally occurring, which would be the case even for a nightmare.”

Birkin frowned at the composition. Yes, it looked like someone had altered it right down at the base, although that looked pretty badly done, too. But that didn’t explain much of anything.

“You think this is some half-assed Umbrella B.O.W. that ended up here along with you and the Nemesis?”

“No. I think this is someone else’s attempt at creating a bioweapon.” Wesker’s attention was fixed back on the video screens, shifting through recordings until he found one where it was in the police department, staring at the hidden door to the lab. “And I want to know what they were trying to do.”

“Scare people?” Birkin watched the screen and felt slightly uneasy when the recording switched to another angle, at which point the thing staring at the door snapped its head around to face the new camera so fast it should have broken its own spine. “Not everyone has the drive and directive we did. They were probably just seeing what they could do.”

“You’re saying you’re not interested in finding out what it is?”

“It’d be a nice distraction, but how exactly are you planning on going about getting enough samples when it can move like that?”

“We’ll capture it.”

“I hate to remind you of the fact that we normally had other people to do that.” Birkin looked at the screen where it was scuttling again, faster than almost anything he’d ever seen. “Is HUNK going to be an option?”

“No. He’s not interested in taking orders anymore.”

“Are you joking? Isn’t he an Umbrella employee?”

“Apparently, that doesn’t concern him.”

“Then what about that woman who keeps buying computer parts off you?”

“She won’t help. Not after that disaster with the cyborg.”

“The one where you let it kill her, you mean.”

“It wasn’t intentional. She was careless.”

“So you’re going to get it yourself?”

“I’m going to try.”

Birkin eyed Wesker uneasily. He wasn’t a coward by any means, but he did have a sense of self-preservation that he’d started to realize Wesker had apparently lost at some point in the ten years between their deaths.

He’d started to realize a lot of things about the man he’d long considered his only real friend and worthwhile colleague. In particular, he was pretty certain Wesker had gone insane at some point. It was something he’d tactfully failed to mention up to now. Obviously there was some room for that kind of thing for people like them - genius looked like insanity to a lot of braindead idiots - but the sight of Uroboros and the intention behind it had given even him pause.

It was why he looked back at the screens with a sense of dread that was unfamiliar. He’d never been worried about his projects breaking out and killing him, only with people stealing his work.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“You’re not going to help?” Wesker sounded surprised.

“No. I’m not.” The eyeless thing on the screen had something in the back of his head trying to forget what it was seeing.

“You aren’t afraid of this, are you?” And now he almost sounded amused.

“Actually, Albert, I am, just a little.” He turned to look at Wesker with a flat expression. “This place doesn’t make any sense. There’s no rationality here that we didn’t create ourselves. If this is someone’s stupid idea of a bioweapon, then yes, I do want to see what they did and how it came together and what we can do with it, but I also know that we had a sizeable security detail responsible for capturing and maintaining these kinds of things. Doing it ourselves is - suicide, quite frankly.”

“Things have changed,” Wesker said, more calmly than Birkin expected. “You’re still human, but I’m not. I’ve gotten more powerful. You know that. You’ve seen Uroboros. There’s nothing here that can compete with it. We can find out what this is, and use it as another stepping stone to getting out of here. And I will be the one to drag it back here so we can do that.”

As Birkin struggled to find a response that wasn’t along the lines of when was the last time you had a psychiatric evaluation, Albert?, a voice cut into the silence, coming from the darkness of the corner of the room, up near the ceiling.

“You and what army?”

Both of them turned, just slightly, to stare into the shadows.

One second there was nothing. Then there was movement, and suddenly the darkness was giving way, and all Birkin saw was hollow eyes and teeth.

Chapter Text

For the most part, Vecna didn’t care about the other monsters in the realm.

Few of them were worth his time. Most of them left him alone, uninterested in anything about him, which irked him from time to time but not enough to try and make an impression on them. Some tried to get his attention, and were duly dealt with.

He got along well enough with the man who spent his time not far from the tower, in that they rarely trespassed on each other’s territory and only had mild conversations. Back before, he might have tried to recruit Tarhos, because there was a festering evil in him that had incredible potential. The man grasped the nature of evil itself more wholly than most men Vecna had ever met. He killed not for power or money or even to earn a reputation for unthinkable brutality, but because he wanted to, and because he could, and because that was how he believed the world should be: littered with corpses.

Of the others that might have been worth paying attention to, most didn’t talk.

But his reputation had preceded him, evidently. The bards had told everyone at their campfire as much about him as they could, which was only the things he wanted people to know. That wasn’t a surprise, but what was surprising was the fact that so few of their new companions seemed to care.

He’d taught them quickly enough that he should be feared, although the lesson wasn’t sinking in very well. When death was only temporary, it seemed, some things were harder to learn than others.

And so the stories about him had reached even the other killers that he didn’t care for, or didn’t know the names of, or didn’t know existed. Which led to uninvited visitors. He’d heard this was normal.

He sensed the presence before it bothered introducing itself. Normally he would have snatched it up with a spell and flung it into the pit, but he reconsidered when what he sensed wasn’t the petty malice of a human or the dull bloodthirst of an everyday cutthroat.

Instead, Vecna turned, and saw - something.

Not a person. A simulacrum of a person. Human enough to deceive, far enough from it to disturb. He looked at it appraisingly, because he could see the evil, sense the vile nature of its very being.

He would have guessed at what it was, but this place was far enough from familiar that he knew he’d be wrong, whatever he thought.

It stood on twisted legs. Not hiding, and not attacking, even if the axe in its hand shook with every twitch and jitter.

“And you are?” he asked, after a few seconds of silence.

The thing’s head jerked to the side with a crunch of bone.

“I.”

It spoke in several voices. Human enough, but still wrong. Stolen, perhaps.

“I. The call in the darkness. I. The nameless legend. I. The fear in silence.”

It shuddered and jerked. He heard ribs crackle as it moved.

“Caged.”

Vecna eyed the thing carefully. It spoke without moving its mouth, which was stretched wide, every tooth bared. That was just a decoy, he could tell. The voice came from somewhere else. So did the gaze leveled on him.

It was watching him with its neck. He could see movement there, under the skin.

“And you come to me for … ?”

“Freedom.”

He almost laughed.

“You have an endless opportunity to slaughter at will and you consider it something to be freed from?”

“Stolen. Imprisoned.”

The head jerked up, then back. More clearly watching him. Testing the air.

“Starving.”

“As are most of your kin.” But Vecna considered the opportunities here. No, he wasn’t going to free this thing from anything - at least, not yet. He could study it, and see what it was, and create something like it; the terror this thing could cause might be worth the inevitable struggle. Or he could use it to find out more about this place; if it didn’t want to be here, then it must know something more about the realm, if only to find a way out.

At the very least, it might serve as a halfway decent guard dog. But it seemed to have enough intelligence to likely refuse the offer.

But there were always other uses. Maybe the hunger, the unbridled rage, could be harnessed.

“I have no intention of leaving yet. So no, I will not free you.”

“Then suffer.”

“You couldn’t kill me even outside this realm’s perpetuity.”

“All things die.”

“I do not.”

“All things die.”

The repetition annoyed him. But now he could see something slithering out of slits on the neck.

That was the true attack, he realized. The axe was just there to frighten. Maybe to cripple. Then it would strike. He wondered if whatever was ready to escape that flesh prison was its true form, and if he could tear it open to see just what it was. Another specimen for his collection.

Magic seethed around him, ready to snatch. And that must have tipped it off, because it abruptly bent itself in half and launched toward a wall, scuttling up until it was on the ceiling.

The head twisted around to look at him. He glowered back, unperturbed.

“That which lives in darkness will in the darkness lie.”

Tentacles split the neck open, twisting and snapping. A threat, or perhaps a warning.

“I’ll be in touch.”

And then it was gone, scrambling through the top of the doorway and vanishing into the darkness.

Vecna watched it leave. The sense of evil it left behind was darker than what he felt from most of the other monsters here. Something much older, although not older than him - and not more powerful.

Whatever it was, he’d find out. It would come back and they would … speak. It clearly knew he had ways to leave the realm and wanted them for itself. Which meant he could use it - if not now, then later, when it got desperate.

The idea that it might get the better of him was laughable. He’d crushed greater ancient darknesses than it could ever dream of being.

Outside the tower, it crawled into the eclipsed light and peered around. The place was dead in every sense of the word. Nothing grew here. Nothing lived here. Nothing had, even before the eclipse. Before the place was here at all.

It crouched just outside the broken archway and did nothing for a while. An observer might think it was sleeping, or relaxing, or waiting for prey.

Then it stood abruptly, and turned to look at a looming shape in the fog. Massive and spiraling, just outside both the ruined village and the abandoned tower. Pointed roofs and arches were briefly visible.

It stood still a little while longer, and then it staggered toward the fog.

Chapter Text

He was out trying to find a way to a series of decrepit houses Sable swore were out in the fog somewhere when he stumbled across the castle.

It shouldn’t have been possible to stumble across something like that, but he did. Came out into a little clearing and saw the entryway, and then looked up, and up, toward the towers and spires that loomed over the forest. They didn’t block out the moon only because it was on his side of the clearing.

It was the biggest building he’d ever seen in his life. Renato stared, dumbfounded, at the sheer size of it, and at the fact that it had apparently appeared here without a sound. There were bats swarming around the upper towers, but down where he was, at ground level, there was nothing but the open doors.

Beyond them he could see a massive hall, high-ceilinged and arched. It was lit with torches, and there was a huge staircase at the far end. Compared to the forest around him, it almost looked inviting. The doors were open and the torchlight was warm, if distant.

He looked at that, and at the arches and spires, and at the bats, and at the fact that in this light it looked like it was made of black stone turned grayish-white in the bright moonlight.

It reminded him of those stupid fairy tales he heard once about the kids who got lost in the woods and found a gingerbread house. It had never made sense to him, or even to Thalita, who’d found it in a desperate attempt to find some story that would make him shut up and go to sleep one night when their parents were busy working. Now he thought he got it.

The open doors were an invitation, the way a house made of sweets would be. Hello, children. I’m friendly. Come inside. And all the while, bats swarmed above it and fog curled around the foundations.

He gave it one more long look, then turned away and headed into the woods.

He wasn’t stupid.

Some time later, he ran across it by accident again. This time, he was being chased.

He burst out of the trees at full speed because for all the heavy leather, Ghost Face was fast, and right now he wanted a kill. It was another instance of something that seemed like a good idea at the time turning out to be one of the worse decisions he could have made.

And right there just ahead of him was the castle again, in a totally different place - probably a totally different place - than before. Renato slowed down, staring up at it, seeing the open doors and the luring threat and knowing something bad was going to happen if he went in there -

But behind him was another bad thing, and one he knew from personal experience would be a special kind of nightmare if it caught him. Between the fear of the unknown and the fear of the absolutely, definitely known, he picked the better chance of survival.

Renato picked up speed again. As he did, he realized the doors ahead of him were closing. Slowly, but inevitably.

He’d be caught out here with an angry Ghost Face -

Frantically he pushed himself, the way he used to when he was still in school. He could hear footsteps following too close behind him. And the doors were still closing, but he knew that if he went just a little bit faster -

He threw himself across the threshold and hit the rug on the other side, which didn’t do much to soften the hard stone floor underneath it. As he looked up he saw the doors just about to close, and Ghost Face sliding to a halt just beyond them, his knife upraised.

They shut with a finality that cut through his terror.

Then, aside from his breathing and pounding heartbeat, there was silence.

It took him a few minutes to get to his feet and look around. There were no handles on the inside of the doors; he wasn’t going back out the way he came in. But it didn’t look like there were many other doors around here at all. The ceiling was up high, arched and with all sorts of architecture he couldn’t name keeping it up there. Pillars lined the entryway until it opened up into a massive atrium.

There were other halls off to his sides, and the huge stairway leading up. It split and reconnected behind a wall. Above him he could see walkways, and doors, and high, high windows he’d never be able to look out of.

He knew so many of the other survivors would run up that stairwell right away. They’d go exploring, trying to find something useful. Weapons or tools or food, information, valuables - anything they could get their hands on, either to use for themselves, or to trade, or to try and use as blackmail. Sable would already be trying to find the basement. Élodie would be hunting down the nearest library with Haddie right behind her. Even Vittorio would probably be looking for the master of this place, if only to try and talk his way out.

Renato knew who lived here. Or at least, he’d been told who lived here. They’d seen the castle floating just outside trials, and grounded outside some of the places in the fog. It moved as much as the fog itself did. And there had been trials with its owner already, although he hadn’t had any yet.

His only comfort there was that people didn’t seem as traumatized as usual when they came back from them, yet. It wasn’t like that thing that looked like a human gone wrong. Some of them had even said he was polite.

Still. He was a killer. And Renato was in his territory, even if he didn’t intend to be. The sooner he got out of here, the better. He headed down one of the halls.

Probably an hour later, he’d found nothing. Every door led to a room - storerooms, mostly, or bedrooms, or libraries or laboratories or places to store food or just empty rooms or, in one notable moment of horror, a room of nothing but chains and metal and blood, although he hadn’t seen any bodies before he slammed the door shut. There were plenty of paths and twisting staircases but there were no ways out. No back doors. No emergency exits. Not even a window he could break.

His only other options were to go down one long, dark staircase into what had to be a basement, which he refused to do, or going upstairs, where he would probably be caught. Maybe he’d find a window up there, he thought. High enough to avoid being easily broken into by someone outside, and he might even survive the drop if he rolled when he landed.

It was his only option unless he wanted to wait by the front door to be found or be taken into a trial, so he headed up.

The halls beyond that were darker than the others. There were paintings on the walls, but even with the torchlight, he could barely see who or what they were of. The gold frames glinted in the firelight, casting little reflections in the darkness.

Somehow, the further down the hall he went, the darker it seemed to get, and the distant doors didn’t seem to get any closer. He’d passed a few halls. Maybe, he thought, he should turn back, try one of those, see if they led anywhere but another empty room, and …

He stopped walking.

There was someone behind him.

There was no shadow cast ahead of him, and no sound of footsteps or breathing nearby, but every instinct in him was on high alert, telling him beyond a shadow of a doubt that someone was right there, right behind him. The hairs on the back of his neck were on end. Fear was prickling down his spine.

“You are trespassing,” said a voice.

It was deep, and dark, and just edged with a threat. Other people would have used different words to describe it, but he wasn’t them. Just because he didn’t hear any immediate anger there didn’t mean he wasn’t in instant, life-threatening danger.

“I’m trying to leave,” he said, his voice steadier than he’d expected. “I can’t find another door.”

“There isn’t one. People who enter my domain do so through the main gate. Traditionally, they do not leave alive.”

The prickles of fear turned into something crawling. Renato tried to keep his breathing steady, and didn’t turn around, or run, no matter how much he wanted to.

“Then how do you - ”

“If I couldn’t traverse my own castle by other means, I wouldn’t be here.”

“I didn’t mean to trespass. I was being chased.”

“I know. By one of the more obnoxious denizens of this place.” The disdain there was almost promising. “It does you some credit, especially given that when you had the chance to trespass on your own terms, you decided not to.”

Renato didn’t respond. He wanted to say I know a trap when I see one, but fear kept him quiet. Thalita would have been shocked.

“As such, your death will be quite painless.”

“You could just let me leave,” he managed through clenched teeth.

“No.” It was final. Absolute. His heart beat hard against his ribcage. “I have a reputation to uphold. And a perpetual thirst to satisfy.”

There was the slightest touch near his neck. A hand, tucking his hair back away from his throat.

Vampires weren’t supposed to be real.

“Is it fear, making your heart pound like that?”

“What else would it be?”

“Ask your friend with the silver hair.”

Sable again. Renato clenched his hands into fists and for a brief second, he felt truly ready to run -

But then there were fingers on his chin, the hand curling around from the other side, holding his head in place. He tried to move, just slightly, and found the grip firm enough to hold him still.

That couldn’t be right. Even if the strength was that impressive, he should at least still have been able to jerk his head some.

Unless it wasn’t just fear holding him in place.

“The less you struggle, the quicker this will be.”

“I’m not going to stand here and let you kill me.”

“You don’t have much of a choice.”

His head was pulled back and to the side. Not hard or far, but with a certainty that kept him from being able to stop it, and then he could feel the presence by the bared side of his throat. There was no breath against his skin, except when there were words.

“If it’s any reassurance,” said Dracula, master of the castle, dark lord of all things in shadows, “that reprehensible ghost will be next to go.”

There was no time to respond before he bit down.

The pain was sharp, and just enough to break Renato out of whatever force had been holding him still - whether that was really all his own fear or something else, he couldn’t tell. He tried ripping himself free and stumbling ahead, but there was already an arm clamped around him, the grip on his jaw suddenly too tight, and even as he fought he knew he wasn’t getting out of this.

The pain didn’t last long. The bite was just to break the skin. Just to open the vein, or artery - whichever one was on that side of his neck. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t any residual pain, or any fresh pain building up as all the blood in him was forcibly drained out. It was just more - sedated. Background pain. Something slow.

Instead of knives or weapons, just a constant pulse as his heart tried to keep up with the loss, and started losing.

He still tried to fight but it was clear he wasn’t going anywhere. The grip on him got gentler as he got weaker. It felt like an insult but there was nothing to do. No one to call to for help. No one to intervene. It wasn’t his fault and he was still dying here.

The world swam and faded. He felt colder than he ever had here before. His fingertips and toes went numb even as the rest of him went limp, held too firmly against the brick wall of a monster behind him. The only reason he was still upright was because of the arm around his chest, pinning him in place.

Sound went in and out. He couldn’t feel when Dracula was finished, but he could tell when he was hauled up in his arms, a limp nearly-corpse that wouldn’t make it another two minutes.

He could almost hear what was being said.

“At least your blood is mostly still pure.” Torchlight glimmered at the edges of his vision, but he tried to hold onto every word. “Some of the others - this place has tainted them beyond reason. Blood like ashes. Fouler than drinking from a corpse.”

Tainted beyond reason. Renato tried to nail that phrase to the front of his skull. It kept trying to slip away, along with his consciousness.

“I suppose you, too, will eventually taste the same. A pity. But I’m certain there will be replacements. An endless flow of fresh meat.”

How long until then … ? He tried to make a sound.

“Try to stay out of the way before then. I have no interest in turning down a meal if I don’t have to.”

Darkness closed in. The chill washed over him, and he faded out.

Chapter Text

There were several libraries in the fog - probably a thousand, but she’d only found so many.

There was the one in the Trapper’s house, a dilapidated ruin of a room where half the books were falling apart and the other half were almost unreadable. She’d ransacked it before, both with and without its owner’s permission, and always gotten the feeling that she was one or two books away from the answers she wanted.

There was the Artist’s tower, where the books were sometimes there and sometimes not and rarely ever there twice. They were even harder to read, because the whole place was unstable; if they had words at all, they ran and slipped away from her even as she stared at them. Even so, there’d been information in them, clues that hinted at what this whole place was and could be.

There were half-ruined places in the distant parts of the fog, pieces of what she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt was the hidden, mysterious tower that everyone seemed to have heard of but no one seemed to have found. There were little libraries in some of the houses in other people’s territories, and stashes of books here and there, and all kinds of strange information in the few places that might have been medical, once upon a time.

But she’d never run into something like this - something right in front of her eyes that absolutely, for certain, held the answers she was seeking.

They wouldn’t say what this place was. She knew that much as she stared at the shelves lit by torchfire and stellar light from above. But they would tell her secrets: spells and curses, ways to find things that were lost and travel to places left behind. They would tell her what she wanted. Give her what she needed.

A way to find people. And then a way home.

Élodie tried not to rush through this frantically as if she didn’t have any time. Her time was limited, obviously, but she could come back; the owner of the sanctum couldn’t always be here. The titles of the books were embossed in gold even if they were faded, so she could mostly read them. Bestiaries and summoning books. Histories. Religious texts, even. It would take her ages to get through them all.

The books on the worktable looked like they were alchemical; the one open had diagrams she could hardly understand, and the writing was indecipherable. Some were probably medical, or at least based in biology. Where did she start? How did she even try to start?

She went back to the shelves, but that was when something caught her eye: a crack in the crumbling wall glowed gold. She tried to peer through it. There were more shelves on the other side. And something else.

It wasn’t hard to find her way around to there, given that all the doors had disintegrated well before this place ever got here, and she realized as soon as she saw it that she was looking at a treasure room.

Of course, she thought grimly. Every ruin had its treasure. Every forbidden place had a reason to ignore the warnings. And looking around, she felt a twinge of desperation. Anything in here must have been worth a fortune. Back in the world, what would Shah have paid for even a fraction of this? How much information could he have gotten her with it?

But that was the past, when the world at least tried to make sense. She pushed the thought away and started looking around.

Gold - the reason the room gleamed so brightly - and jewels, jewelry and goblets and all the other things someone might think of when the word treasure came to mind. Paintings, too, with the faces distorted beyond recognition, or so gruesome she only sneered and moved on. Weapons that made her fingers itch to see. More books, fewer than in the main sanctum, but by that right they must have been more powerful.

And one on a pedestal, lit by candles, embossed in gold and bone, seething with a power that even she could feel.

Aestri and Baemar had spoken at length about who had followed them into this place, but always in whispers, and they never said his name, as if they were afraid he’d appear at the campfire no matter how much the rest of them assured them this was the one safe place in all the fog. The Whispered One. The Undying King. The Lord of the Rotted Tower. A monster so powerful that even this place could barely keep him chained; she’d seen the mark at the back of his neck, a sign that the Entity might have overreached for once.

They told them all about him, about his hand and eye, and about his book, both transcribed and written by his hand about all the most evil things the world they’d come from had ever known. A book, in fact, of vile darkness. A valuable artifact. One that was sitting right in front of her now.

Élodie reached out for it, but stopped with her fingers a few inches away. This wasn’t what she needed, she told herself. This wouldn’t answer any questions, except the ones she never wanted answers to. She could take the chance that the other books might have come from here, slipped into the trove unintentionally when the Entity ripped it away, or maybe transformed, or maybe influenced by the darkness of the fog, but this one - this wasn’t it.

She turned away sharply to stop the allure from curling around her brain any more, and went back to the rest of the books.

Histories, biographies, spellbooks that started out promising but ended up disappointing, the minutes to meetings that disgusted her, even a few books she slammed shut and shoved back on the shelf out of embarrassment - there was so much to try and get through. She eventually had three books open on the floor in front of her, ones that looked promising and had to be, because she swore she could recognize some of the circles and spells.

Sable might actually have been useful here for once, she thought grimly. Frustrating and obnoxious and a hundred times worse than Mikaela could ever dream of being, this was, unfortunately, the sort of thing she specialized in.

She didn’t know how long she’d been down there by the time the hairs raised on the back of her neck, but apparently it was too long, because before she could stand up a spectral hand had closed around her throat.

It jerked her off her feet and left her dangling, just on the edge of choking. She scrabbled at the insubstantial fingers as she heard the rustle of cloth behind her, followed by a slight, disappointed sigh.

“Even here, I can’t be free from an endless stream of trespassers,” said Vecna.

She was pulled aside and he drifted past her. A bizarre conflict of elegance and horror, desiccated and dressed in gold and finery. He didn’t look at her as he made a slight gesture with one hand, lifting the books off the floor by magic alone.

“A treatise on the arcane,” he said dully, as the books closed to reveal the covers she hadn’t been able to read. “Studies of advanced conjuration. Divining the wills of the gods.” The books floated back to the shelf, neatly slotting themselves into place again. “Bold choices for an interloper.”

There was nothing to grab and no way to respond. She watched, feeling helpless, as he turned to look at the book on the pedestal. His book.

“But not so bold as to be instantly fatal.” He looked over the bindings. “You weren’t foolish enough to open this, I see. Tell me why.”

The grip didn’t loosen any, but she could breathe better; that was the problem with magic, Élodie thought irritably, even as the panic tried to consume her.

“It - isn’t - what I need,” she managed.

“Then you aren’t here simply to ransack the place for valuables, or to spite me, or because those fool bards encouraged you for their own entertainment.” He made another gesture, and the book lifted from its spot to disappear somewhere inside his hollowed ribcage. “What is it you seek, then?”

She hesitated. Why answer? What was the point? He didn’t need to know, and she didn’t want him to know. None of the other killers had ever asked, even Trapper. They just assumed she wouldn’t find it.

But her silence went on too long. He turned, finally, and looked at her, eyes glowing in the dim light, his face cold and impassive and just skeletal enough to make her squirm. The evil aura that radiated off the book infused every inch of him, and she could feel it, taste it, as he came closer.

“They must have told you what I’m capable of,” he said, in a voice like a death rattle.

“A way out,” she croaked.

That made him frown, as if he’d been expecting something else.

“That? A simple matter. For me, at least.” The hand around her throat tugged her higher. “You are condemned, I believe. Why try to use my knowledge to escape?”

“Magic - got me here. It can get - me - out.”

“What kind?”

“I don’t know - ”

She was choking again. The frown had turned into a scowl.

“And so you came here to find out.”

For a long moment she was certain he was about to kill her. The look on his face said nothing else. But then it smoothed out into … consideration, she recognized.

“I know all magic there is to know,” he said, “but this place is new. Strange and unfamiliar. The creature that holds sway here is unlike most things I’ve seen. Powerful, yet stupid. And you say magic brought you here. Its magic, is my guess.”

Élodie didn’t respond, only partly because she couldn’t. He was clearly on a train of thought of his own without any interest in interruptions.

“Tell me what you did.”

“Why - should I?”

“Because I could kill you in an instant - or not.”

There weren’t very many threats in the fog that held water, but she could read the intention behind that one. Still, she wasn’t about to just comply.

“You wouldn’t understand,” she wheezed.

His scowl deepened. She was dragged in, and found herself inches from the withered face of a corpse that was still, somehow, a living person.

“Enlighten me,” he hissed.

The fear crawled through her again, but Élodie grit her teeth and tried to look as grim and aloof as she could under the circumstances. There was absolutely no way he could understand the reasons behind the magic she’d done, the circumstances, the desperation -

But that probably wasn’t what mattered to him, even if they were the only reasons she’d been able to do it at all.

The silence between them should have dragged on, but then his glare shifted into something even more worrying. Less angry. More …

“Very well.” He gestured, and suddenly she was being dragged through the halls behind him as he left the hidden sanctum. “I should have expected resistance, especially in a place where death holds so little power.”

He was taking her up, and then down again, through a broken, dimly-lit tunnel that led to -

“I do always enjoy a distraction from tedium,” Vecna said, almost lightly, as the grip on her throat flung her bodily into the chair at the center of the torture chamber.

It was lined with spikes. She yelped, but didn’t have time to throw herself off it before the straps tightened themselves around her wrists and ankles. The metal was sharp enough to pierce but dull enough not to slice. It was meant to hurt slowly, more and more as the minutes - or hours, or days - went on. Slowly digging in deeper and deeper.

She tried to stay tense enough to keep off them, but the sound of metal on metal drew her attention.

He was pulling a long, curved knife free from its place on the weapon rack nearby, examining it with the care she might give a particularly rare artifact.

“Death has no real sway here,” he repeated, “but I have to say that in my time, I’ve been surprised by what a mortal can live through.”

He turned. Her gaze dropped from the knife to the rest of the weapon rack, where she could see an array of things that she had to call implements rather than weapons only because of her experience with seeing them used on other people.

“I expect you to answer me long before you run out of breath to scream with,” Vecna said, and she swore that for a second, she almost saw him smile.

Chapter Text

Jeff was collapsed against a wall, clutching a stab wound in his side. He was finished; all that was left was for one final knife blow, or maybe one final hook. But Danny had other plans.

He loomed over him, smirk palpable even under the mask. He lifted his knife. He hadn’t personally killed this one before. Killing someone with his own two hands for the first time was a thrill, and always had been. Even here, where people just came back.

“Nice to meet you,” he said, lightly. “I’m your worst nightmare.”

For a few seconds Jeff just stared at him, expression blank and uncomprehending. Then he frowned.

“You don’t look like my dad.”

It was like walking into a wall.

“What?”

“You,” Jeff repeated, “don’t look like my dad. A zombie version of him, crawling out of the grave to come back and remind me of what I fucked up.”

Danny paused, staring down at him, but his internal gyroscope wasn’t thrown off that easily.

“Obviously not.” He shifted the knife again. “I’m your other worst nightmare.”

“Oh.” Jeff looked him up and down, then frowned again. “You don’t look like thousands of spiders hiding inside a freakish flesh suit.”

“What - ” He stopped himself from saying something stupid. This hadn’t gone wrong before. “No, idiot. I’m the nightmare where someone creeps out of the shadows and stabs you to death before you can do anything to stop them.”

“Oh.”

He watched as Jeff’s expression cleared, and then turned into another frown, this one almost confused.

“I’ve never had that nightmare before - ”

“There’s a first time for everything,” Danny snarled.

Jeff told the campfire about it later, which made David laugh so hard he almost choked.

“What happened after that?” Dwight asked.

“He stabbed me. About ten or twenty times.” Jeff patted his chest where the knife had gone in but, as ever, left no reminders now. “I guess he didn’t think it was as funny as I did.”

“He’s got a fucked up sense of humor,” Nea said. “Of course he wouldn’t get a real joke.”

“He is a real joke,” Feng Min shot in, which got a few unamused laughs.

“Well, at least we know one thing he doesn’t like now,” Dwight added. “It might help defuse a situation.”

“Or just end it early so he doesn’t have time to gloat.”

“I wish that wasn’t the only other option.”

Chapter Text

The blow hit him across the mouth. His head snapped to the side, blood splattering on the floor. Nothing broke, and this time he didn’t lose any teeth, but the inside of his cheek was shredded raw at this point and only getting worse.

“You know how much worse this can get. You can talk or brace yourself for that.”

Jordan spat out a string of blood and spit and glared at the hooded figures in front of him.

“You were about to send me to hell,” he rasped. “I’m not sure how much worse you think you can do.”

“Much worse.” The lead figure - notably, not the one hitting him - only sounded slightly annoyed. “You shouldn’t be glad she was taken. All she was going to do was kill you. Maybe send you into a Bleed. Now, you’re at our mercy.”

“And I’ve done nothing but make you mad lately.” He smiled thinly. It probably didn’t look very threatening coming from a bleeding man tied to a chair. “So because she couldn’t hurry up and kill me, you sent her there instead?”

“That wasn’t our decision.”

“I don’t believe you. Not after what you did to Haddie.”

“For the last time, we didn’t have anything to do with your sister’s disappearance.” The figure sighed. “Believe me, if we had, we would have done a lot more than just shove her into a Bleed. You would have seen it happen, and then you would have been next.”

There was a long second of stillness. The figure beating him glanced back at the one talking, who nodded. They turned back to him and flipped whatever it was they were hitting him with around and jammed the handle, as hard as they could, right into his crotch.

Jordan choked and lurched forward. Instinct had him fighting and at the same time unable to move as the explosion of pain rocked through him and then started to get worse under the pressure.

“The two of you were a thorn in our side for too long. When she disappeared, I thought that was the end of it, but no. You wouldn’t give up.” Jordan jerked at the bindings that wouldn’t give way, only half-hearing the words. “I never thought the biggest threat we ever had to deal with would be a pair of internet sensations.”

“There’s - more to - it than - stop - ”

“You’re a problem and now you’re out of time.” The pressure ground down harder one more time and then released, but he only had a second of relief before the weapon came back around again and smashed him in the face again, this time in the other direction. “I know you have resources. I know you have connections. I could pay to find out what those are but this is cheaper, easier, and frankly more enjoyable.”

This time he lost a tooth. On top of the ache still radiating through him, talking felt impossible.

“Let’s start with the easy way. You have parents. How much danger do you want to put them in?”

He was still in pain, but the sheer audacity of the threat cut through that and made his thoughts clear again. Jordan snorted.

“They’re already in danger. You would have killed them by now if you - wanted to. And then I’d have nobody left. Wouldn’t stop me. Try again.”

“Your uncle’s still part of this.”

“Are you kidding me? He’s not part of this.” Jordan glared up at the lead figure. He wished he could see something, even just a hint of a face, but there was nothing except heavy robes with deep hoods. “You know what he said when you proved that video was a fake? You know what he told me? That he was glad. That it meant I wasn’t being taken seriously. That I could stop doing this.” He could feel another tooth was loose in his mouth every time his tongue brushed it. “He doesn’t know anything. Killing him isn’t going to do anything for you or me.”

It was partly the truth, and he knew the fury in his face sold it. His uncle had given up on them years ago even as he followed them from place to place, holding onto the money from the podcasts. He’d regret what had happened now - Jordan was his last resource - but he wouldn’t stick around.

Although that didn’t mean knowing he was dead wouldn’t destroy Jordan.

“So you’re saying I have to go the hard way.” The hooded figure shrugged. “That’s fine.”

He said something in a language Jordan couldn’t quite understand. The figure who’d been hitting him nodded and then belted him across the face again, punched him in the stomach hard enough to almost make him throw up, and when he curled forward to try to protect himself a hand grabbed his hair and yanked his head back so hard he heard a vertebrae pop.

“We are the most powerful organization in the world,” said the leader. “Over the Imperiatti and any organized crime by a factor of thousands. We employ people from every corner of the planet, and some from past that. I have sadists and serial killers on hand. Former soldiers who’ve seen the worst humanity has to offer. Government agents whose only job was to get information out of reticent targets like you. Outright lunatics who belong on the other side of a Bleed. I have more ways to make you talk than I can count, and if I need to, I’ll put you through every single one.”

He opened his mouth to say something, but it was still too hard to draw the breath to do so. So what? he wanted to ask.

“And after that, if you somehow manage to get through all that without giving me what I want, I have to get rid of you. I won’t kill you. That would be too merciful. That’s what’s waiting for you if you do talk.”

The figure moved in a little closer. There was still nothing to see, although Jordan tried.

“I could have you blinded and deafened and leave you to wander one of our labyrinths. Hand you over to the sadists as a chew toy. Give you to our soldiers as a punching bag and target practice. Put you in a Bleed, and believe me when I say there’s no guarantee you’ll end up where your sister did. Of course, that might kill you, but it’ll be much worse than anything we can do.”
His head was twisted back farther. Every muscle in his neck strained against the grip.

“I can let our researchers use you as a test subject. Run poisons and parasites they’ve lifted from that place through you and see what happens. Vivisect you daily to make sure nothing fatal is growing inside. See what diseases you can live through.” The figure moved to the side, just slightly into his view. “Or I could have someone get you addicted to the worst kinds of drugs and sell you to whoever will pay. You’re a little old to get a good price, but there’s always someone out there willing to take on fresh meat.”

It was still too hard to speak, and harder still when his head was pulled back further. It dragged a groan of pain out of him as he tried not to wonder how much longer it would be before his neck broke.

“And nobody will ever know. Nobody will ever find you. For all her failings, Cain knew how to be discreet. She left nothing behind and no trails to follow. Your family will wonder for the rest of their lives what happened, and after a while, they’ll start to hope that you’re just dead.”

Finally he was let go. His chin hit his chest too hard, but he barely noticed it.

“Think about it.” In his peripheral vision he saw other shrouded figures moving toward the door. “There’s no way out of here. Your choices are limited, but death is an escape here. You could solve a lot of problems for both of us by doing the right thing.”

There were a hundred insults and cutting remarks on his tongue, but none of them escaped. Jordan stared at the floor and tried to catch his breath instead of thinking.

Then a heel slammed into his ankle so hard it snapped. Stunned and distracted and already in pain, it was enough to shatter his fragile concentration and he screamed, fresh pain shooting up through his leg, leaving him choking on bile.

There were no more comments. The door slammed, and he was left alone - truly alone - for the first time since he’d woken up. He tried to steady out his breathing and focus. Do the techniques Haddie taught him way back in the day to keep his center and stay calm.

But after a while, in the silence of the room, he couldn’t quite fight back an agonized sob.

Somewhere else, Haddie approached Taurie where she was crouched by the pond. She glared up miserably, smearing her already-smeared too-heavy eye makeup with her knuckles as she swiped at her eyes.

They stared at each other for a long few moments, the only noise around them a slight rustle of wind in leaves.

“We need to talk,” Haddie finally said, both hands curling into fists.

Chapter Text

The sword had gone all the way through her stomach into the ground underneath her, impaling her and pinning her in place. It was an agony unlike any she’d ever thought she’d experience. The sword wasn’t particularly sharp, and the human body, fragile as it might be, was less giving than expected. There was a lot of muscle to get through.

He’d managed it with very little difficulty and was watching her now, one hand on the hilt of the blade. She couldn’t see his face through the helmet, so she couldn’t tell if he was gloating, or smug, or thoughtful, or regretful, although she doubted the last one. Not someone here. Not someone like this.

After a few seconds of listening to her struggle against the pain he knelt down and tilted her head back by the chin. The armor and mail were cold, but maybe that was just the contrast against the hot blood pooling underneath her.

“So the beast has marked you,” he said, and this was thoughtful, considering, interested. “It knows you. And you, in turn, know it.”

Taurie tried to say something, but there was blood in her throat. She tried not to choke on it as he tilted her head to the side, then leaned back slightly - without letting go - to look at the emblem emblazoned on her clothes.

“But this is more than just knowing.” The helmet turned back toward her face. “You’re part of something.”

It wasn’t an accusation. It was a statement. Even through the frantic panic she knew that he knew about this place, more than most of the others. He was killing her but it was because he wanted to, because it was demanded of him, not just because he saw the mark and got angry, so angry.

Others had. Her head stretched back, throat bared, demands snarled at her to explain. She couldn’t explain. She wouldn’t. It had been hard enough explaining it to her own side.

He loomed over her, fingers firm on her chin.

“Tell me what you know, girl.”

Her hands scrabbled at the filthy blade uselessly.

“That I serve - without question,” she choked out, feeling blood trail out the corner of her mouth.

“Even while it consumes you? Rips the marrow from your bones like a delicacy?”

“It - is a test,” she babbled. “Or - or - a way to prove - myself - or - a promise - ”

He watched her as she trailed off, partly because she was running out of explanations and partly because there was too much blood in her throat now. She choked on it until he let her chin go and she could turn her head.

“You’re a madwoman,” he said as she coughed out the blood, watching it sink into the dirt and stain it black. “But madness is normal here. And you have an understanding the others lack.”

He grabbed the blade and jerked it free. It hurt almost as much coming out as it did going in. The only reason she didn’t scream was because half the breath in her lungs had been replaced with blood.

“We should speak.” He leaned down and picked her up by the throat. “When it grants you your life again, find me. We’ll see how far your understanding goes.”

She couldn’t respond. The pain was overwhelming. Her mouth was full of blood.

“Anyone so blessed will know how to find me,” he added.

But later, in the darkness of the forest, she thought she didn’t want to. The killers who knew that she knew too much were terrifying and dangerous. But the ones who actually knew about the place, not just about her, were a real threat. A hint that this was where she was meant to be.

It made her want to be sick, except there was nothing left to throw up except blood and bile.

Chapter Text

They could hear the noises coming from the basement under the shack, creeping up the staircase like a poisonous gas. The whimpers and sobs and quiet cries and moans of pain, real pain, and even though they’d died down by now that didn’t make them any less like a knife to the ear.

The two of them hovered by the entrance to the shack, staring down into the dark, reddish depths. It felt metaphorical, and might have been, if they weren’t pretty sure they were already in hell.

“We have to help him,” Dwight said, but warily, like he wanted someone to tell him it was impossible.

“What can we do?” Claudette dug her fingers into the splintering wood. “If he’s that badly hurt, we can’t do anything for him.”

“We’ve survived some pretty bad stuff already.” His chest ached at the thought of it. Not just his shoulder, either. “I think … I think if we get him out, we can patch him up.”

“Will he want that?”

Dwight didn’t answer. He knew what he had to do next. Meg was already gone, and they needed a third person to get this finished. Jake was good with generators. He’d learned a lot from him already.

“He’d do it for us,” he said, and this time Claudette didn’t reply. She also didn’t move into the shack. He didn’t blame her. He sure as hell didn’t want to go down there, but someone had to.

Of course, he thought to himself as he slowly, carefully stepped onto the broken floorboards, would Jake do it for one of them? He’d called himself a survivalist, and in the past he’d left when the chances of two getting out instead of one weren’t in anyone’s favor. In a situation like this, with one person dead, one person hurt, and the killer somewhere they didn’t know, he’d probably leave them down there. Finish a generator. Draw the killer’s attention, and then let the last person help. That might be smarter, but he was already here.

“He’s not on hook,” Claudette whispered suddenly.

Dwight paused. She was right. And that was suspicious, but at the same time, that wasn’t altogether unusual, either. Leaving someone who’d done a little too much damage to bleed out was more painful than putting them on a hook, even if it was also more risky. But maybe that risk was negated down there.

He nodded and kept going. He tried to focus on what he was going to do once he got down there, but his brain kept throwing doubts at him like caltrops in the road down the stairs.

Why wasn’t Jake coming up? He could crawl up the stairs, couldn’t he? Maybe he was that badly injured. Maybe the pain had finally overcome even him.

Then why wasn’t he trying to tell them to leave? Even if he was on the verge of death, he could tell them to back off. Dwight could see a hint of him, some second sight, lying still on the floor just past the place where the stairs turned. Maybe the pain was too much again. Maybe his jaw was broken. Maybe he was blind and couldn’t tell they were coming. There were a lot of reasons.

But where was the killer?

Dwight paused on the landing. The next set of stairs was much shorter, and turned into the basement. He could see a hand with fingers curled against the filthy floor.

He listened as hard as he could, but only heard the misery nearby. So the killer had to be somewhere else.

Down the last few steps and he could see Jake fully. One knee had been mutilated beyond repair. The other foot and ankle were mauled, the leg of his pants nothing but bloody tatters, like he’d stepped in a trap and been pulled out without it ever opening. No wonder he was in that much pain.

He was still breathing. Dwight could see the stuttering rise and fall of his back. It didn’t seem like a salvageable situation, but maybe if he just got his hands under Jake’s shoulders, he could pull him up the stairs, get him to Claudette, wrap up the worst of things and maybe just … leave him somewhere near a gate so they could find him on the way back. The crows might get him eventually, but if the pain wasn’t as bad, maybe he could move enough to keep them away.

It was the only plan he could come up with. Cautiously, he stepped forward and kneeled down just close enough to try and grab Jake without going any further into the room.

“Hey,” he whispered. “I’m going to - try and get you upstairs.”

Jake turned his head away from the floor and looked at Dwight. There was blood on his face, and who only knew what else, but he still had both eyes. For a few seconds he looked like he was trying to focus, and then he looked to the side.

Not away, Dwight realized too quickly. He wasn’t looking away out of shame or pain or even relief that someone had come to get him. He was looking at something. Something just past the wall that blocked the room from the second, shorter set of stairs.

He looked over into the red-tinted darkness, and saw, as his vision adjusted to the dim light, that it wasn’t just darkness, but in fact was a figure, and there was leather, and iron, and bone, and breathing so slow and steady he couldn’t hear it over the horror of the basement, and a huge, huge cleaver that was already covered in two other people’s blood.

As the seconds dragged like years, he remembered that sometimes even the best hunters decided to use bait -

Claudette ran when the screaming started. She didn’t come back, even after it had stopped. Even after the hatch sprang open ten feet away from where the bodies were.

Chapter Text

The tower loomed too close nearby. Vittorio stared up at it, wondering why he was here again. What purpose had drawn him to this place so soon after a trial.

He knew that often they ended up in strange places after the beast finished feeding, but if it wasn’t near the campfire, then there was usually - although not always - some darker desire afoot. If he’d been under the eclipse not too far away, he’d have assumed Tarhos had asked for the boon of killing him personally again. But he was by the tower instead. The tower that housed something - someone - even he had started to fear.

If he was here, it was for a reason. At the very least he could attempt another interrogation in the guise of conversation.

It was a grim tower, one that got bloodier as he descended deeper into its depths. He followed torchlight until it faded in favor of purplish starlight. Slowly he made his way down the stairs until he was standing at one of the entrances to the sanctum of a scholar, and magic-user, and monster, able to see the line of bookshelves leading to a desk that he suspected was rarely used these days.

Vecna himself was at another table, where something small and bloody was pinned down by nails rather than magic. He half-turned to see who had the audacity to encroach on his work but only smiled thinly when he saw Vittorio.

“Wanderer,” he said. “A surprise to see you again. Enter, if you wish.”

Despite his misgivings, he stepped inside. The light above him was marvelous and stunning, but he didn’t look up.

“To what do I owe this unexpected visit?”

“The beast left me on your doorstep.” He kept his tone light. Amicable. Not familiar or friendly, but not the same grim tone he mostly reserved for Tarhos these days. There was no point in stirring more animosity now.

“As it does.” Vecna pulled something out of his subject with an unpleasant squelching noise. “I made no offerings, if you were wondering.”

“I didn’t think you ever would have.”

“And you would be right,” he said, with an edge of ice to his words, “if it wasn’t consistently so necessary to get anything of worth out of it.”

Vittorio didn’t reply. He moved further into the room, focusing on the stacks of books left by the shelves rather than trying to see what Vecna was working on, or even so much as glancing up toward the fascinating mobile of the heavens to see if it had changed at all.

“But I suppose every beast, as you call it, must be fed.” Another uncomfortable noise suggested something else was being pulled free. At least there were no sounds of pain. “Humiliating as the idea that I must do it might be.”

He glanced over toward the desk. The twisting red symbol at the back of Vecna’s skull burned as bright as ever. A binding even he was unfamiliar with, but Haddie knew it, and she had told him: negation. Restriction. It had been discomforting to learn.

“As you’ve told me, you allowed it to bring you here,” he pointed out, making Vecna hiss out something like a laugh. “You don’t precisely have anyone to blame for this but yourself.”

“Curiosity is a curse.” Bony fingers flicked away something red and stringy. “But the promise of power is more than worth the inconvenience I’m being put to.”

“The inconvenience of being permitted to slaughter at will?”

“I could always slaughter at will. I’m quite certain I told you that.” A spark of magic flared, lighting the wall behind the table briefly. “In fact it was a regular occurrence. The inconvenience is the matter of how.”

“Your restriction.”

Vecna finally turned, his eyes fixing on Vittorio with a dangerous intensity.

“Yes.”

The idea of having Vecna’s full attention - Vecna, the Lich, the Whispered One, the Undying King - had been so unthinkable for Aestri she’d been paralyzed by the idea. She’d told them, and then mostly just Vittorio, about what he was: a being so powerful he was nearly a god, who sought godhood itself, with an army that had slaughtered thousands or even millions over countless centuries. But even with his overwhelming threat, he himself was a distant figure; the idea of coming face to face with him directly, and having him know any one person individually, seemed ridiculous. He had greater things that called his attention. Threats from heaven and hell alike.

For him to be fixated on a single point - a single person - was a source of constant dread for her, and for Baemar, and Vittorio had sympathized for a time because of course having the attention of any of the monsters was never a good thing. Until the day he finally met Vecna, and understood the weight of their fear.

Vecna may have been bound by this place, but the only thing it could truly bind was his magic. His intellect was uninhibited - and so was his cruelty.

“It doesn’t seem like much of a roadblock most of the time.”

“You don’t need to flatter me, Wanderer. I already find you much less intolerable than nearly all your allies.”

He hadn’t meant for it to be a compliment, but it was too late to take it back now. Vittorio turned his attention back to the books.

“You would, of course, be even more tolerable if you spoke the secrets of this place,” Vecna continued, moving past him to the desk at the far end of the sanctum. “As I have asked.”

“You’ve had enough from me already. If you want more secrets, you’ll have to trade fairly.”

“Ah, yes. The barter economy. Barbaric and pitiful.” Books levitated up from the ground around the desk and stacked themselves more neatly on its surface. “I find squeezing the answers from unwilling throats to be much more satisfying.”

“And how much success do you get from that?”

“Not nearly as much as I’d like,” Vecna said, but mildly. “It seems that the lack of fear of death makes it harder to loosen tongues in this place. Of course, it also means if I squeeze a little too hard, I’ve lost nothing but a time.”

Vittorio sighed. He couldn’t help it. He knew these things happened, knew that undeserved torture and death were the way of the fog, but he hated hearing about it - especially in such vulgar, nearly delighted terms.

“Restrain your grief. Your allies aren’t the only ones who find themselves at my mercy.”

“You find such secrets in the other monsters.”

“Yes.” Vecna picked up a knife that looked familiar, although it clearly wasn’t his. “Did you know there’s one here who considers himself a master of secrets?”

“I think I know who you mean.”

“His very existence is an offense.” He turned the knife over in his hands, upper lip pulled back in a sneer. “A petty, pathetic creature filled with petty, pathetic knowledge. And so easily killed, too.”

“And has he given you any of his petty, pathetic secrets?”

Vecna’s gaze leveled at him again, less amused this time.

“He will,” was the slightly snarled response. “In time.”

The book under his hand pulled itself out and toward the desk. Vittorio let it go; it hadn’t been of any particular interest to him in the first place.

“Does Tarhos come here to trade knowledge with you, willingly or otherwise?”

“Him? Rarely.” Vecna set down the knife but didn’t look away. “I admire the darkness he drags with him, but his knowledge pales in comparison to yours, despite having been chasing you for so long. He’s a man of base and carnal needs, with no desire to seek greater truths - not, I think, that I need to tell you that.”

Vittorio stiffened, and automatically turned away - and almost looked up, but didn’t. He focused instead on the words. So Tarhos had been here, and had spoken, and had given Vecna an idea of himself that wasn’t wholly true.

He’d always had a cunning mind, even as the violence overwhelmed it. Under other circumstances, Vittorio might have tried to rub it in, but Vecna was already enough of a threat. The less he knew, the better.

“I’ll take that to mean you know more than I thought,” he said instead of the thousand other things that could have escaped.

“Oh, yes. I know much about your travels together. And much about your travels in this place, with him trailing after you like a hungry dog.”

There was a pause, a longer silence as Vittorio fixed his eyes on the reflections of light on the stone floor. Then he heard a quiet laugh.

“I thought you were very impressed with the ceiling here,” Vecna said, the ice replaced with something like real amusement. “And yet for the life of you, you won’t look at it.”

“You didn’t have to hang it up,” Vittorio managed.

“Please,” was the smug response. “How else could I read it all at once?”

The memory burned.

In his first trial with Vecna, Vittorio had torn most of his shirt off to serve as bandages. It was a normal thing for him, common, because the beast loved to leave him without the simplest tools to survive trials, but it had backfired spectacularly when Vecna saw him - or, more accurately, saw his tattoos.

He’d plied him with promises, strangely honeyed words for a monster of his caliber: I’ll spare you, spare them all, bear the insufferable burden of this place in your stead, if you find me in my tower and speak with me, show me, unveil the secrets this place has burned into your skin -

At the time, that had seemed like a better option than being torn to pieces like everyone else had been when facing him so far. True to his word, Vecna let them all go free, and so Vittorio, not wanting to find out what would happen if he changed his mind, went to the tower and entered the sanctum. They’d spoken for a time, and then Vecna had peeled every inch of skin off his body.

It had been expertly done, which told him more about the man than he ever wanted to know, and it had been done without anything to remedy the pain. He hadn’t even killed him first, leaving him paralyzed as agony pierced him to the bone. Vittorio had been skinned before, but never completely.

And now that skin - or rather, those skins, both halves, front and back - hung above the sanctum’s entrance, out of sight when someone entered and in full view when they turned around. The glow in the tattoos had died down without a living body to draw from, but they were still there. Still legible. Still the whole reason his skin was there at all.

It was impossible to keep his eyes off them permanently, but he managed to tear his gaze away just in time to hear Vecna approaching behind him.

“They’re not entirely complete.”

“Oh yes they are,” Vittorio growled, feeling fear and offense fight in his gut.

“There’s a few edges I sliced too sharply. Corners I left uncut.” He could feel the undead presence at his shoulder, but it didn’t touch him. Vecna never touched anyone if he could help it, he’d noticed. “Your scalp gave me trouble.”

“What you missed is useless to you. They don’t cover me wholly. You don’t need more.”

“And what if that miserable little thief comes back to take them for himself? I might need a second set.”

“You wouldn’t let him do something so audacious.”

“No,” Vecna said, after a moment’s hesitation, “I wouldn’t. But I wouldn’t put it past him to try.”

“Unless you intend to let everyone go in every trial you have ever again, you won’t have me giving you that chance again.”

“Is that your price?”

“It’s the start of it.”

There was silence again, and then another laugh, this one less amused than before.

“I don’t need your permission to do as I like, even here,” Vecna said. “You know that very well. But for now, you may have the leeway to walk away unscathed.”

“Your generosity is astounding.” He couldn’t help it; the words slipped out before he could stop them, shaken by the sight of his own damned skin as he was.

“Don’t be petty.” The presence moved away from him. “It doesn’t suit you. You know the way out, I’m sure. If you find any rats, take them with you.”

Vittorio didn’t hesitate. He made his way, maybe a little too quickly, out of the sanctum, having to pass under the grisly trophy as he did so. He knew what Vecna meant by rats and tried to keep an eye out, but he didn’t see anyone. Hopefully, anyone he knew would be smart enough to leave after he did.

Chapter Text

“I’ll protect you,” he said, as they headed into the trial.

Orela, at least six years and several jobs older than him, gave him a look. Renato went slightly red.

“I mean - I can help you. Since you don’t … since you haven’t been through many of these before.”

“Thank you,” she said, meaning it but not entirely able to keep herself from sounding dubious.

“They get weird about new people.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

He wasn’t the first one to warn her about that; weird seemed to cover everything from minor curiosity to full-blown obsession to even worse things. Her imagination filled in the gaps. None of it was pleasant.

“But I guess … you’re a doctor?”

“A paramedic.”

“Then you probably know how to handle pressure. Better than me.” They started on a generator, which should have been completely alien to her but somehow wasn’t. “Everybody does.”

She looked over at him. His expression was drawn. Not dark, but … morose, if she had to pick a word.

“You wouldn’t still be here if you couldn’t handle it,” she tried to reassure him, not knowing if that was even how it worked.

“I can handle it. I just - ” He clenched his jaw. “I feel like … everybody else knows how to survive. Everyone who’s gotten here after me. Even Sable knows how to deal with this like it’s nothing. But sometimes it’s like I’m still the newest person here.”

“It takes time to figure something like this out,” she said, unsure if that was true, especially given how simple it all seemed. Live. Struggle. Die or survive by the skin of your teeth. Repeat. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life for a long time.”

“I don’t want this to be my life.” He jammed his arm into the generator up to the shoulder and fought with something deep inside it, which made her want to drag him away with everything she had. “But if I can help other new people here, keep them from getting killed - then maybe I won’t feel like that as much.”

He pulled out a stray shard of metal and threw it aside. Orela watched as it vanished into the grass trailing black smoke edged with orange.

“Maybe I can actually help someone.”

That was what stuck with her, especially later on, when she was hiding in a locker against all her better instincts because it was just the two of them left. Renato had almost forced her into it, and now she watched through the crack as a tall, grandiose man with silver hair dragged him up off the ground by his hair and sank long fangs into his neck.

She watched, her heart pounding, her hands fisted, her muscles tense, every part of her screaming to get out there and help him, as he fought back. But he lost pallor and his struggles slowed and after much too short a time she knew without a doubt that he was dead, or at least so far gone even she couldn’t help him.

The killer dropped him unceremoniously and wiped a trail of blood from his mouth. Then he looked around, red eyes fixing on every dark corner and hidden place.

“I know you’re here,” he said.

Orela kept her breathing steady. She didn’t panic. She never had. There was no reason to. Pain was temporary, and here, so was death. Even if she was the only one left alive - even if she had been specifically warned against letting this happen if she could help it - she knew there was no reason to lose control.

Although there were several reasons to be afraid enough for that to happen.

“I may not hear your heartbeat or sense your living pulse, but I can smell your blood.” He was floating, she noticed. Like the ground wasn’t good enough for him. It was something to keep in mind. “Fresh blood. Pure. Untainted by the perpetual ills this place infects you with.”

He was coming closer. She braced one arm against the locker door, the way Jane had taught her.

“Show yourself,” he said, half a command, half a request. “Your death will be swift, and far kinder than this place’s master would grant.”

Orela looked at Renato, his body as still as any corpse she’d ever seen. He’d died for her. Hoping he could do something worthwhile.

“Now,” came the harsher growl, and a hand reached for the locker.

She showed herself by ramming the locker door open, smashing it into his hand and more satisfyingly into his chest and face. He erupted into smoke and shrieking bats, but she was already on the move.

They’d told her there was one more way out. Somewhere, there was a hole in the ground that would free her. A backdoor out of the current nightmare into one a little more palatable. She’d been confused by it, and asked them why it was there at all, if the whole point was for them to die.

The ones who’d been there - not very many at the time - shrugged, or looked away, or smirked a little. Except for a woman with an elaborate sleeve tattoo and gold-blonde hair that curled at the ends, who smiled sadly instead.

That’s not the point, she’d said, not really. But Orela was pulled away before she could ask for a better answer, and when she got back the woman was gone.

Whatever the reason was, it was out there. And she had to find it first. That was the other thing they’d told her about it: she could escape through it, but they could close it, too. It was just a hatch. It had a lock on it. Move fast.

She could move fast. Behind her, she heard a howl and a pattering of feet - no, not feet. Paws. She didn’t bother risking a glance back. He could change forms; she’d seen it happen. There were bitemarks on her arms and calves from where he’d caught her earlier.

Around trees, around boxes, around fallen metal and through inexplicable windows and gaps. She ran until her lungs burned, dodging every snarling lunge filled with razor teeth. As long as she stayed calm and focused, he’d have a hell of a time catching her.

And then -

The noise caught her attention at the same time he did. A wolf’s jaws could grip a lot harder than a human hand, and these ones were closed over her forearm. Pain interrupted her focus but years of emergency training took over. She separated herself, just for a few seconds: animal bite. Rabies. Infection. Get it to let go first. Treat the wound second.

She hauled back. He had to go with her, because paws didn’t grip the ground as well as feet and he refused to let go. It let her slam a pallet down on his skull. Again he was all smoke and rage for a few seconds, but it was enough -

Just enough for her to rush over the pallet, getting splinters in her legs as she went, and run for the black smoke and distant howl of freedom and safety, or at least the illusion of both.

The pain followed her through the hatch, but by the time her feet found the ground again, it was just a memory.

Chapter Text

The six of them stared up at the front of the restaurant, where the bright sign welcoming them in showed no damage of years of neglect or its travel into the fog.

The rest of the frontage was a little less pristine, but that didn’t matter; the doors were open, the lights were on, and the inside looked inviting, or at least brightly colored. Meg, Nea, Feng Min, Yui, Mikaela, and Sable considered it all in silence, debating what to do next.

“There has to be better pizza in there,” Meg said eventually.

“We’re zero for zero on good pizza so far. Just because it’s a pizzeria doesn’t guarantee anything here,” Nea pointed out.

“Then it should at least have some variety, right? Something a little less awful?”

“Or something way, way worse.”

“I mean, we’re never going to know unless we look.”

Nothing stormed out the doors to attack them. Nothing rushed up behind them with a knife or axe or twisted appendage, ready to kill. The place just creaked and emanated tinny music from inside. There weren’t even any screams.

“Well, I’m going in,” Sable announced. “I want to see if it lives up to what I remember.”

“You’ve been here before?”

“No, but I went to a birthday party at a Chuck E. Cheese as a kid, and two of the other kids started crying when they saw the mascots.” She smirked. “Never went back, but maybe this’ll be just as bad for you guys.”

“I’m not afraid of mascots,” Yui grumbled.

“Was Mikaela one of the two kids?” Feng Min asked.

“No! I don’t even remember that.”

“I don’t think you were invited.”

Sable headed in, and the others, eventually, followed.

It was dirty, falling apart, and about what they’d expected, but that didn’t change anyone’s mind. They poked around the front desk and the main party area, examining the fallen tables and the still, silent animatronics onstage. Then Nea found the kitchen.

There was, as expected, pizza. They examined whatever they could find.

“Fingernails and eyeballs,” announced Meg as she opened a box. “Looks like that’s a staple here.”

“Any olives?”

“No.”

“Then it goes in the maybe pile. I’ve got … ” Yui carefully opened a box of her own, and grimaced. “Ears. And no cheese. Just ears in sauce.”

“Oh, I bet that’d be okay if we found some garlic dip.”

“You’d eat sauce that touched random ears?”

“Hey, if I don’t know where they’ve been - ”

Feng Min pantomimed retching. Nea flipped her the bird and pulled out two boxes from an oven caked from edge to edge with unidentifiable black gunk.

“This is … more eyeballs, and the other one is - ew.” She shut it and tossed it back in the oven. “Wouldn’t even try to get Dwight to eat that.”

“What was it?”

“I don’t know and I don’t want to find out.”

Sable climbed up onto a counter and pulled open a cabinet. Two pans fell out, clattering to the floor more loudly than expected; everyone flinched and waited, but no retribution came roaring in.

“Be a little more careful, maybe?”

“Like whatever’s here hasn’t already heard us insulting its pizza.” She pulled a box off the top shelf and handed it down to Mikaela. “Let’s see what was hiding all the way up here.”

Mikaela opened it and stared.

“It looks like … cheese.”

“Just cheese?” Meg leaned in.

“Yeah. Just cheese. The crust is a little … soggy-looking, but I don’t see anything weird poking out on top.”

The others gathered around closer. There was edible pizza, and there was normal pizza. They’d found plenty they could eat as long as they picked out or off the worst bits, but just a pizza was completely new.

“Must be something underneath. A medkit says bone fragments.”

“I’ll bet it’s spiders. Dead spiders, all squished and oozing.”

“For a medkit?”

“Sure, but I don’t have a good one.”

Cautiously, she picked up an edge of the cheese and lifted it. It came up in one solid piece, like wax.

“White sauce,” she announced.

Four faces turned sour.

“Spiders would have been better,” Feng Min grumbled.

“What’s wrong with white sauce?” Yui demanded.

“Everything? What’s even the point? Just eat bread.”

“It can’t just be that.” Sable swiped a finger through the stuff and rubbed it against her thumb. “Doesn’t smell like alfredo to me.”

“Doesn’t smell like pizza at all around here, but I’m still going to eat some of these.”

“Well, what does it smell like, then?”

“Mm … not sure.” She wiped her fingers off on the countertop. “But it didn’t feel like sauce, either. Better not take your chances.”

“I’m going to,” Yui said, setting the box on top of the fingernail-and-eyeball pizza box. “Anything else?”

One or two more pizzas passed the almost-acceptable test, and were added to the pile. Other than that, everything was too rotten or outright disgusting to take with them.

“I’m taking this.” Mikaela pulled a frying pan down from where it was hanging over the stove. “It could be nice to have another weapon at the fire.”

“How’s a frying pan going to help?”

“Ever been hit in the face with one?”

Nea paused, thinking. Then she smirked.

“Good thinking. I’d love to see certain people get the wrong end of that.”

“Should we go back, then?” Meg asked. “Before anything finds us.”

“No way! I want to look at the arcade!” Feng Min leaned out the kitchen door, listening to something in the near distance. “Let’s look around. If something was going to find us, we’d already be dead.”

“I want to see where they maintain those animatronics,” Sable said. “I bet there’s some really creepy stuff there.”

“So we’re trading all of us getting out alive for poking around where we don’t belong?” Meg said with a sigh.

“I thought that was the whole point?” Feng Min gave her a flat look. “Come on. You started this group. You know how it goes.”

“Nea started it.”

“With you,” Nea pointed out.

“Still - ”

“Go back if you want, but I’m staying for a while. I have got to see what made it here.” Feng Ming vanished into the pizzeria proper.

So they split up. Meg followed Feng Min. Sable pulled a slightly less enthused Mikaela along with her as she went looking for nightmares. Yui and Nea picked through the kitchen for any more possible goods, and then followed suit into the pizzeria, looking at the partial decay uncertainly.

“This place gives me the creeps,” Yui said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She kicked a balloon under a table. “I’m used to things being weird and fucked up, but this is … a kid’s party place. Right?”

“Something like that. I never went to one.” Nea looked around and grimaced at the silent animatronics on stage. “Can’t really imagine having fun here, even if I was eight.”

“So it’s weird that it’s here. Did people die here? Who dies in a place like this?”

Nea started to respond, then paused. She looked around at the bright walls and patterned linoleum floors, the fading posters and abandoned presents and toys. There were decrepit, fleshy holes in the walls and ceiling, although those probably hadn’t been there before, and blood on the floor, which might have been.

“Accidents happen?” she suggested.

“I don’t think this place would be here if there was an accident.”

In the arcade, Meg stared blankly into the ball pit while Feng Min moved from machine to machine, trying to get them to work.

“Broken, broken … ooh, Joro-Gumo! I loved that one!” She tapped the start button frantically, then moved on when there was no response. “Looks like this one works, but … ”

She fished around in the return slot, then started looking around on the floor.

“Hey, Meg, do you have any coins?”

“Do I … what? No. Why would I?” Meg turned back and saw her crouched on the floor, trying to dig through the dust, dirt, and filth without actually touching it.

“I don’t know. Had some in your pocket when you got here? Damn it. I need something to get this started.”

“Do you really think they’d work even if you found something?”

“No idea, but I want to try.”

Meg watched her scramble for a few more seconds before her attention was dragged back to the ball pit. It was the sort of thing she might have liked to climb into, back before, but there were … things in there. Not even the idea of things. Actual things.

“Do you think we should have asked someone what came with this place before we got here?” she said.

“Yeah, probably.” Feng Ming stood up and brushed dirt off her hands. “Nothing. Not even a fake one.” She turned to see what Meg was looking at. “You gonna jump in?”

“There’s a leg in there.”

They both peered in. It was hard to tell from where they were if it was an actual leg, or something pulled off a mannequin; for once, there wasn’t any blood.

For a few seconds, they were both silent. Then Feng Min leaned toward Meg.

“ … so, you gonna jump in?”

“No!”

Sable and Mikaela detoured up to the animatronics briefly. They were cold and still and silent; all the electricity that might have powered them was clearly dead. The two of them headed backstage, where there was nothing, and then found the mechanical room, which was more than nothing.

“I knew there was something back here,” Sable said gleefully, rushing to the endoskeleton in the middle of the room. “Look at this. It’s strapped down. Why bother if it’s just a thing?”

“Maybe the repairs make it jump?” Mikaela stared up at the replacement parts lining the shelves on the walls, particularly the heads. “I think these are watching us.”

“I hope they are.” Sable ran her fingertips across the exposed metal and wiring, nicking herself on some of the razors. “I bet something’s recording us.”

“Why? What would be the point?” Mikaela lifted the frying pan as if ready to hit something that rolled off the shelves with malicious intent.

“Fun? Creep factor? Psychosis? Who knows.”

She looked up along the shelves, and down to the tables and workbenches where metal things were being repaired, or maybe built. Something about the room was upsetting her. It was all just metal, not flesh; this didn’t look like some horrible torture dungeon, but it had the same feel to it. And the same smell, too, like something had died in here and was still rotting away.

She turned to look at the walls over the door, and then to the other side of the room where there were stacks of chemicals and an old computer, and then faced the other exit.

“You know, I’m sure some of the razors on this thing would make great weapons.”

She tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come out.

“Or just a part of it. Imagine if we could get an entire arm off and shove it up Ghost Face’s ass.”

Her lips moved silently. She tried to get a grip.

“Maybe we could get a couple ribs off.”

“Sable,” she finally managed.

“Think it’s not enough?”

“Sable!”

“What? It’s just a hunk of metal.”

“Sable - there’s something here!”

Sable turned to look at her, and saw the rictus of terror on her face, and turned to see what she was staring at.

There was another animatronic in the room, half hidden in the shadows by the far door. It was standing upright, watching them, its eyes glowing dully. It was rusted, broken, and in terrible repair. The sight of it made Sable’s eyes light up.

“Oh my god, that’s disgusting,” she said brightly, and immediately closed in on it. “And it’s working? This is so sick.”

“I had to see who was trespassing on my fucking property,” it said in a voice that sounded just human enough to be real, and turned its head.

That should have been enough to terrify anyone, but both girls had a sixth sense, and Sable wasn’t about to be put off by something like this. She just grinned and got a little closer even as Mikaela tightened her grip around the handle of the frying pan.

“Well, it’s a pizzeria, isn’t it? And we’re hungry.” She looked it over. “So are you some kind of sentient robot, or is that suit possessed?”

“Second one.”

“Cool. Can you possess the other ones out on the stage?”

“Not a chance.”

“Why not?” Sable crossed her arms and leaned back on a heel. “If that’s possessed, then you’re a ghost, and if you’re a ghost then you probably died here, and I thought ghosts haunted the places they died.”

It - or given the voice, more accurately he - tilted his head. For a second he looked between the two girls, then focused his attention back on the closer target.

“Well, that’s not wrong. Because, you see … ”

He reached up and pried open the mask’s metal mouth far beyond how far it should have been able to stretch, making sure they could both see what lay beneath.

“I’m still in here.”

Mikaela froze up. Sable did too, just for a few seconds, and then leaned in with a widening grin.

“That,” she said, “is the coolest, most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen in my - ”

The screaming drew the others as soon as it started, although Nea and Yui shared a glance of what the hell did we expect before rushing backstage.

Mikaela was crawling to the door, blood bubbling out of her mouth and trailing out of her gut as she went; the frying pan was bent backward as she tried to drag it along with her. Sable was flailing wildly as the rotten animatronic forced her down onto the almost-human pile of razors and wires strapped to the chair, but she wasn’t having any success. Blood was already starting to pool under them both.

“Oh, fuck this,” said Nea. The rabbit head looked up at them.

“Great, an audience,” he said dryly. “Six of you’s a few too many for this room. Mind waiting outside until I’m done here?”

Feng Min grabbed a wrench off the table and hurled it at him. It bounced off the metal of the mask and clattered away into a corner.

The dimly glowing eyes fixed on her. Somehow, despite falling apart like he was, they could tell he was glaring.

“Any other tricks you want to try before I open your ribcage like a tin of sardines?”

There were times to be heroic, and then there were times to run like hell. Yui yanked the frying pan out of Mikaela’s no-longer-resisting hand, and the four of them ran back into the pizzeria, headed for the doors.

“Get the pizza!”

“Fuck the pizza, we’re gonna get turned into pulled pork!”

“I didn’t come all the way out here to not bring them back - ”

Nea detoured to the kitchen and snatched up the pile of boxes, getting back to the rest just in time to avoid a fire axe smashing into the floor six inches from her heels. Only Meg looked back, seeing the hulking rabbit looming in a doorway. His eyes glowed. So did the axe.

They bolted into the night, heading for the bridges that led into the fog and hoping that they’d get somewhere far, far away from the island.

A possessed robot was bad, and clearly dangerous, but this was one place where everything else they could find was a hell of a lot worse.

“You could have asked what was there before you left, you know,” Haddie said acidly once everyone got back to the campfire.

“Didn’t think about that until it was a little too late.” Feng Min delicately flicked fingernail fragments off her slice of pizza and into the fire. “Look, we got pizza and we had a 66% survival rate. That has to count for something.”

“And a frying pan,” Mikaela said, holding onto it like grim death.

“You’re all still morons.”

Despite the deaths, the mood around the campfire wasn’t too grim. There was nobody new to share their misery or come up with a new idea or two, but having regular access to pizza and vending machines in a place that wasn’t the junkyard was helping morale a little bit.

“Look, that’s what we do. Stupid shit.” Yui was trying to pull out a piece of her pizza that as yet nobody else wanted to try. “Even when it doesn’t work out, it works out. And now we know he’s not totally impossible to handle. Plus, he has a lot of stuff. Stuff I’m sure we could all use.”

“I’m not getting turned into a protein shake outside a trial just to get a can of off-brand cola and a couple screwdrivers.”

“Your loss.”

Sable watched the arguments and pizza-sharing in silence, her spine still echoing with pain from getting sliced apart on the endoskeleton. Of course, it didn’t really bother her, she told herself. She hadn’t run away. She hadn’t stopped smirking until the blades got to her skin. He hadn’t been too happy about that, or at least she hoped he hadn’t been.

But now she wanted to know more, if only to forget about walking in blind. She’d seen the lacerated, desiccated body inside the suit. Seen the hollow face and mouth with missing teeth. A man had died in there, and was stuck in there forever. She wanted the how. She wanted the why.

And one day she’d get it. As soon as the idea of metal skeletons with razors strapped to them stopped making her skin want to crawl off her body. It wouldn’t take long. It never did.

Chapter Text

Eventually, the Talon left her on his doorstep.

She fell from its claws back into the nightmare of reality, and when she realized where she stiffened. The ruined town around her - buildings burned, fences trampled, dead animals and corpses littered across the lifeless ground - told her exactly what to fear. He had finally made enough sacrifices. He had finally been heard.

Taurie turned and moved swiftly away from the village. She didn’t run - that would draw attention. The crows watched her with beady eyes and one wrong move would send them flying, alerting anyone who could see them of where she was heading. There would be a way out of here; there always was, eventually. The fog was infinite but the pieces within it weren’t.

She had never known dread before this place. Fear, yes. Anxiety, of course. But true dread, true bone-breaking, soul-crushing, absolute terror had never been a thing. Even when she made her way through Bleeds, the fear had been something she could handle; she was serving the Talon, doing the work she was meant to do, and so she’d never been truly frightened of what might happen. Being in the Talon’s fog, being part of it, was another world completely.

The Druanee made everything in her want to curl up and die, and she knew she wasn’t alone in that. But Tarhos terrified her in a different way. He wanted more than to just kill and consume her. He saw her life as more than just one more morsel for the Talon. And she didn’t know why.

There was a castle somewhere around here, and it was relatively safe, or at least it should have been. At the very least she could hide there until she was called again. But as the horizon got clearer she realized she was headed straight for the ruined tower, which wasn’t a place she wanted to be, either. Vecna frightened her to her core but it was clear what he wanted: all her knowledge and secrets, for no reason other than to have them.

She stopped anyway. His tortures were known by now. There had to be a way out of here that didn’t involve dealing with him, either.

Dread prickled through her as she headed away from both the tower and the village. She wished she could wonder why it had left her here, of all places. She wished she could be confused and uncertain, because that would temper the fear. She wished she could get on her knees and pray for a way out, and follow the fog to something that looked like safety.

But there hadn’t been any answers to her prayers yet. There hadn’t been any in the world before, but that was normal. Here, it should have heard. Here, it probably did.

She was jerked out of her mired thoughts by a building looming up too close and realized it was the burned-out inn. That stopped her dead. She’d walked away from there, hadn’t she? Both times she’d turned, it should have been at her back. And yet here it was. She’d gone the wrong way, or looped around, or …

Or -

Something would be after her soon if it wasn’t already. She didn’t want to think about what. She had to hide. Taurie ducked into another building, some little hut for haybales that had split open long ago. If she stayed out of sight, she could outlast this. It was about the only thing she could hold onto.

Carefully, she moved from building to wall to building, creeping away from the inn. Tarhos didn’t stay there regularly, but it was a beacon, a place of false safety among death and destruction. Those unlucky enough to end up here headed that way to look for weapons or a place to hide, and after a while, he always found them. Him or one of his guards. She wouldn’t be so foolish.

There were bodies everywhere she went. Not too many, but always at least one to be seen, sprawled or collapsed or hanging, eyes grayed and glazed, blood soaking their clothes. The remnants of some ancient slaughter, she wondered, or more recent than that? Their clothes suggested the former. Stolen from the world the same moment he had been.

In a collapsing barn she passed another body, this one sitting on a crate, back up against the wall. Vittorio hadn’t told her what happened to condemn the two of them here, and she hadn’t asked. She didn’t want to know. They were more ancient than she’d expected to find here, especially in one piece. That the fog hadn’t consumed them both by now was a shock. People like that - should she know their names? Would they have been in the ancient books or scrolls? Something like the two of them should have bled from this place to -

She stopped as something occurred to her. Her eyes were dragged back to what she’d just passed. There was a body on that crate, but it wasn’t a corpse.

It was Tarhos.

He wasn’t wearing his armor.

He lunged at her, but she was already running; she had finely-honed instincts for survival and they’d kicked in even when her brain froze. A hand snatched at her and caught the hood of her long vest, dragging her back, but she pushed her arms back and let the whole thing slide off, freeing her and letting her bolt into the permanent twilight cast by the eclipse.

She had to run. She had to escape. She had one goal now, every inch of her gathered in one place with one intention. Blood and terror deafened her but didn’t blind her. She dodged over mud puddles and dead animals, avoided fences, dodged through half-broken walls. She wouldn’t be tripped up. She wouldn’t be caught. And she didn’t look behind her, in case he was already at her back.

She didn’t look around, either. Didn’t think for even a second that he might be doing anything other than chasing her down. It meant she didn’t expect one of his guards to loom up in a doorway suddenly, but why wouldn’t they?

The ghosts of his loyal soldiers, given half-form to serve him here and now. The Talon rewarded loyalty and cruelty.

The one in front of her snarled and swiped down with his knife. She was already moving again, throwing herself over a partially collapsed wall that scraped at her exposed stomach as she went. It hurt, but it didn't draw blood and it was something small. She could ignore it. She could keep running, and did, hearing frustration from the following guard trying to stay on her heels.

She juked around corners and over walls, focused on escaping the immediate threat that she knew intended to turn her around. It meant she didn’t expect Tarhos to be on the other side of the next building she rounded, and crashed straight into him. He was massive even without the armor. It was like hitting a brick wall.

Taurie stumbled back, but by then it was too late. He closed in and backhanded her hard enough that it nearly concussed her. She could feel her thoughts rattle in her skull as she staggered, trying not to fall. But balance didn’t matter. She couldn’t see where she was stepping, tripped over herself, and fell anyway.

He was on her before she could scramble away. A knee on either side of her hips, trying to cage her in. He leaned in and she fought back: fists flying at his face, fingers clawing at his eyes, doing anything she could to drive him back. But he didn’t flinch. Only snatched up her wrists as they came close to his face, stopping her from tearing at him. He crushed both in one hand and leaned over to pin them against the ground over her head.

It left him with one free hand and her with nothing. She stilled, glaring at him with all the ferocity she could muster up under the dread that threatened to swallow her.

Tarhos watched her intently.

He wasn’t young, but he wasn’t old, either. One eye was pitch black; the other was a milky blue, cut through by the scars that ravaged half of his face. That should have meant he was half-blind but she had the feeling he could see out of it anyway. His face was pale and narrow, his nose showing a history of breaks that had been badly set. There were other scars. There was a scattering of orange light along the left side of his face by his hairline. His hair hung loose and lank by his face and over his shoulders.

And he stank. Medieval bathing habits and a lifetime in plated armor made that a guarantee. Normally the armor cut down the worst of it, but without it, this close, it was almost overwhelming. She tried not to breathe too deeply.

“So,” he said, in a voice that made her blood go cold, “you finally came.”

“I did not and you know it,” she hissed. Fear wanted to consume her, and she couldn’t let it. Anger had to keep her alive.

“This would have been simpler if you had. I might have been cordial. You might have had a way out.”

“Might.”

“The only guarantee I make is that I bring death with me wherever I go.”

She couldn’t read his expression. It was cold, and focused, and he wasn’t smiling but he wasn’t obviously angry, either. She wished, now, that she’d asked Vittorio about him, or at least listened when he tried to talk. What he knew might have helped.

Or maybe it would have just made things worse.

His hand caught her chin and forced her head back against the ground. He’d done this before. He was looking at the marks on her neck, ones he knew by sight. But now his shifted his grip and ran his thumb over one of them, feeling it for the first time.

“A scar,” he said, thoughtfully. “Brand and cut. I thought perhaps faded ink. But no.” He pressed down over a spot where one mark crossed an artery. “You had great devotion to submit to something like this.”

A hundred replies came to mind, venom spit from between her teeth, but she kept her jaw clenched shut. The less he knew, the better. He could consider and theorize and question as much as he liked; she wouldn’t give him an answer.

“Imagine that someone so devoted to a cause that they would be burned with its mark where it couldn’t be hidden, who spent their whole life in service, who knew the depths to which the world could sink and persisted anyway, could do all that … and still become meat for the grinding.” His hand opened to wrap around her throat. Her heartbeat pulsed under his fingers. “Truly, the beast knows nothing of loyalty.”

“You wouldn’t know,” she spat through grit teeth, infuriated and stung. “This is no more than a test. Giving me the chance to further prove my devotion.”

“You don’t really believe that.” His grip tightened. “I felt your heart skip a beat when I spoke. You live in fear of having failed.”

“I - did not - fail.”

“Then why are you here?” He raised a heavy brow, just slightly.

It was bait. She knew it. Get her to tell him about the rituals and then delve deeper, right to the core of all she knew. She wanted to argue, but she couldn’t. Not if she was going to win this.

“You can try to undermine me all you like,” she hissed. “But you will never know the secrets of this place, or of the Talon. No matter what you do.”

“I don’t want your secrets.”

Taurie stared at him. He loosened the grip around her throat but didn’t really let go.

“I know this place. I know the beast. Perhaps not in the same way you do, but in a way of my own. I’ve wandered this would-be-Hell for centuries and seen what it is. I have no need of your whispered knowledge or so-called holy writ. I know it all, already.”

He pressed his thumb down against her stuttering pulse again. She saw the hint of a smirk pull at the edge of his mouth.

“Secrets are his demand,” he continued, and she knew who he meant immediately. “If I wanted those, I could turn you over to him. He’d rip everything you know from your flesh and bones. I’ve seen him work. He has a brutality even I can admire.”

“Then - ” She fumbled with her words, feeling the callused, scarred palm around her throat much too clearly. “Then why am I here? Why do you constantly demand I come find you?”

“I told you.” He squeezed again. “To grasp the depth of your understanding.”

How was that any different from secrets? She twisted under him, tried to get some leverage to slip out from under him even if she couldn’t free her hands. He tightened his grip, this time hard enough to choke.

“Perhaps you need some encouragement,” he said, and instantly she was filled with dread, but he only kept talking. “When I first arrived here, I thought this place was Hell. Then, for a time, I believed it was Heaven. That God had finally granted me a reward for doing His will.”

His grip loosened just enough to let her breathe. She tried to focus on that, instead of on the lunacy pouring from his mouth.

“The old man found such an idea distasteful. He was surprised I even still believed. But why wouldn’t I? Heresy and blasphemy were always his stock in trade. Not mine. I was in paradise, allowed to slaughter at will. To spread death and despair to my heart’s content. Would God have allowed such a thing if He truly despised my actions?”

Christian theology had always passed her by. She was aware of it, because she’d been taught about most religions in her life if only to keep her aware of what other people thought was true and how to undermine them, or at least get around them. But to hear it from a man like Tarhos as if he actually believed, or had, once, was unsettling.

She tried to let it flow past her. She needed to get away. Already her wrists were burning with the pain of his grip.

“But I know now that isn't the truth. This may be a sort of paradise, but it isn't the Kingdom of God.” Tarhos glanced at the rotten world around them, then fixed his eyes back on her. “The despair in this place is hardly all my doing. What souls I darken were already fading. What stain I leave behind is not only my work.”

His fingers squeezed tighter again, both around her throat and around her wrists. Taurie squirmed under him, trying to find any way to get him to let go.

“God does not reward my actions. As I always thought.” His mismatched eyes pierced through her. “And if that is so, then it is because this the kingdom of a different god. With different disciples and devotions. In which case, I ask you ... why is one of its most devoted adherents condemned to die in her own personal vision of Heaven?”

She couldn't breathe. Because of that, she couldn't answer. It was a blessing in vision-darkening disguise, one she didn't realize until he unclenched and she sucked in a ragged breath. He gave her a few seconds to recuperate before his thumb jammed into the underside of her chin again.

“I know you know.”

“I – don't – know,” she wheezed.

“Then guess.”

“Why is this – any of your concern?”

“It's not just my concern.” A short, ragged nail scraped down her chin and then his whole hand moved off her throat, following the lines of the scar down to her collarbones. “It's much more than that.”

Liar, she didn't say, because the less she acknowledged his insanity, the better. But his fingers were following the lines of her collarbones to the collar of her shirt, down over that to where her bared stomach still stung from the earlier scrape.

“What I understand is deeper than many. You understand even more than I. And yet, you die by my hand.” She felt him brush the barely-injury. The sting made her grimace. “The beast understands gratitude. It understands loyalty. And yet.”

His eyes left her face at the same time that his hand pushed its way up under her shirt.

Something ran frantic and frigid up from her stomach to her throat at that, but it was a panic she could control. If anything, it gave her more focus. Beast. Human. Petty creature. Base desires and wretched hunger. Pathetic. He played at being something above them all, but in the end, he was – and always had been – no more than a man.

“I have trouble believing that a beast of this caliber is as petty and small-minded as the God I was once taught to worship,” he said, his cold, callused hand cupping a breast none too gently, “or that it would be so hypocritical.”

There were a few moments of silence where neither one of them spoke before he looked back at her. She saw – a flicker of surprise when he met her eyes again and only saw a flat, dark glare watching him in return.

“You've had plenty of opportunities before now if this is what you sought,” she said, speaking clearly for once. “But you chose to execute me instead.”

His hand went still as he watched her. She could tell he was expecting something else. Fear. Anger. Bargaining. Not disbelief. Not acceptance. But her satisfaction over that fact was brief, because his fingers were moving again much too soon, blunted nails dragging over her skin where a lack of scars and higher sensitivity would make it hurt the most.

“Fortunate for me that this - ” She almost bit through her lip as he pinched hard, leaving a nipple instantly pulsing with pain “ - isn't the only thing I seek, then.”

He leaned in closer. She turned her head away, even if there was only so far she could go.

“I can take much worse from you than this,” he growled.

“Then do it,” she hissed. “My understanding is beyond you.”

She expected more violence but didn't get it. Now it was her turn to be caught off-guard as Tarhos laughed, a quiet and frightening noise this close.

“I have eternity to find out. Nothing is beyond me.” Scarred fingers skimmed over her ribs, down over her stomach, to her waist. She felt him pull at the fastenings of her pants and tried to slow the frantic pulse of her heart. “Did you fail? Is that why you refuse to speak? Because if the words are said out loud, if you hear them from your own throat, then they become true?”

She stared into the foggy distance, at the dead things in her vision. She'd be one of them soon. At least the Talon wouldn't have a hand in it. It meant she'd only know silence and stillness before the cycle started again.

“Was it so great that your fellow devotees threw you to the beast's mercy?” His hand worked its way under her clothes and between her legs. She tried to lock her thighs together to keep him back, but it was impossible. “Does the shame tear at you, knowing your devotion was flawed?”

The words stung more than his movements. His breath on her neck and his fingers trying to work at her should have been more pressing, but they were part of a fear she could corral and block out, push away and move past. They weren't new. They weren't the problem. It was her already-frayed soul that was the problem as his words stopped being lunacy and started being razor-tipped barbs.

“When you kneel before your god, do you ever hear its - ”

“Tarhos.”

If she hadn't been so pinned down, Taurie would have jumped. She tried to turn her head without getting any closer to his face, and saw, out of the corner of her eye, a figure at the edge of the fog.

Vittorio.

As close as she was to Tarhos, she could see his expression shift. For one second there was a dark, terrible rage; then it flattened out into simple anger, borderline annoyance, as he turned his own head to see the man who'd interrupted him.

“Your appetites have not changed, I see,” Vittorio said, colder than she'd ever heard him.

“Should they have?” Tarhos's own voice had gone cold, the darkness in it frigid and tinged with ice. His words were clipped. Pointed. “I would have thought you'd know better by now.”

“Let her go.”

“As if you have any right to make demands.”

Taurie stared at Vittorio. She could feel the anger over her – the hand stilled on her, the grip around her wrists tense and tight – and knew something was about to go very wrong. She didn't know why he was here, or why he was staying here, or why he was just standing there. Even he had to be able to throw a rock.

“I suppose not, ever since you tore up our contract,” was the dry response, and then Vittorio sighed. “Then let me take her place. As I have before.”

If she'd thought her words would have any effect, she would have screamed something vulgar at him.

“As before?” Tarhos echoed, his eyes locked on the former duke.

“I'm certain you recall,” Vittorio said, and this time there was an edge of bitterness to it. “My body, my pain, in place of hers.”

“No.”

Vittorio didn't respond. He didn't react, either, although Taurie could tell it was because for a moment he was frozen.

“No?” It was almost shaken, but he recovered quickly. “You've never refused the chance to torment me before.”

“This is not as before,” Tarhos said, his fury tightly controlled. “This does not involve you. So no. You won't take her place.”

He withdrew his hand and set it on her hip, gripping tight enough to bruise. It hurt, but just from looking at him she could tell it was an afterthought. Something automatic. He wasn't focusing on her anymore – at least, not completely.

“Denying yourself the chance to make me pay is unlike you.”

“I'm denying myself nothing.” It was almost a growl. “You have a choice here. You can try to fight me, ignoring your centuries of pacifist idiocy to try and save a girl who'd watch you bleed out with satisfaction, or you can stand there and watch what I do to her.”

Now Vittorio's expression was verging on horror, almost panic. Like he'd never expected this. She couldn't believe that. They hated each other – how had this never come up before? Or maybe it had, and all those memories were still there. She pulled against the grip around her wrists again, and found it as tight as ever – but this time it didn't tighten in response to her attempt to free herself.

“Or you could walk away and have to live with knowing what you left her to.” Fingers dug into her hip hard. Another automatic movement. “Forgiveness might not be so easy to earn. Even from within.”

“You wouldn't - ”

“You know I would.”

“You can't.”

“Are you going to stop me?”

They were focused on each other. Focused on the hatred that had been burning since they'd known each other in the world before. Taurie shifted, and managed to get a little leverage for her legs, and bent a knee, and rammed it as hard as she could up into Tarhos's groin.

A problem that didn't exist while wearing fifty pounds of plate and mail was suddenly bright and sharp and, most of all, distracting. She felt him freeze. More importantly, she felt his grip around her wrists go slack.

Taurie ripped her arms free and started to scramble away. Tarhos was recovering fast, but suddenly Vittorio was there, grabbing her arm and pulling her out of range. Fingers grazed her heel as she was dragged free.

Tarhos tried and failed to get to his feet. They both watched as he pushed himself halfway up and grimaced, but the glare he fixed them with should have turned them both into ash.

“This isn't over,” he said, slightly strained.

“It is over,” Vittorio snapped.

“It's never over, you old fool.” Under his hand Taurie saw orange light flicker. His sword was starting to materialize, called by his rage. “There is never an escape.”

“Let's go,” she hissed, grabbing Vittorio by the arm and dragging him away. For once, he came with her without question, probably realizing the severity of the situation. Tarhos was his monster, after all.

The fog closed in on them sooner than she expected, and for the first time in a while she felt something like relief. The Talon rewarded cruelty, but it didn't cater to failure. Tarhos had fought and sacrificed and suffered, and it had gotten him what he wanted: her, in his grip. And then he'd lost her. He'd have to earn her all over again.

“I'm sorry,” Vittorio said abruptly.

“For what?”

“I should have done something. Something more.” His face was a picture of – regret, maybe. “I almost let my own distaste for violence lead to something awful.”

“I don't care.”

“I can only beg forgiveness - ”

“I didn't expect you to do anything,” she said, more loudly than she should have, but he didn't sound like he'd been listening to her. Now he stared at her, shocked.

“You didn't?”

“I don't get help. I never have. I wouldn't have expected it from you or anyone else or even - ” Not even the Talon would have intervened. It left her there in the first place.

Does the shame tear at you? Knowing your devotion was flawed?

The fog cleared, and she stopped. Vittorio did too. For once he didn't speak; silence surrounded them. Even the chatter from the not-so-distant campfire didn't reach them.

“Forget it ever happened,” she said, trying to keep her voice steely instead of dull. Unfortunately, he was a halfway decent listener.

“I won't,” he said, “or rather, I can't. And you have my word that I'll do everything I can to stop something like that from ever happening again.”

She gave him a flat look, because she knew better than to think anyone here could control the wims of a god. He almost smiled, as if he was reading her mind.

“They aren't the only ones who can earn favor from it. I know that, if nothing else.”

Maybe that was true. But if any one of them could earn a boon, it wouldn't be protection; at best it would be the chance to escape, like Tarhos had been given a chance to take what he wanted from her. Only a chance. If they weren't smart enough, if they were too slow, if it slipped through their fingers, then there wouldn't be another.

“Maybe,” was all she said. She was exhausted; she didn't have the strength to argue.

“It's true. Now let's get back. It's not safe out here.”

It's not safe anywhere, she thought, and knew that was true. Her wrists hurt and her throat burned. People would see the red marks and ask questions. Or worse, they'd guess for themselves. But better them than the rest of the nightmares, watching them from the darkness too close by.

She followed Vittorio back to the campfire. There should have been some sensation of being watched, a prickle in the back of her head that said the Talon was above, observing, judging, displeased or satisfied or something else –

But there wasn't.