Chapter Text
there is a person
standing
not too far away from you
all alone
in this darkness that has been consuming you
for maybe a minute at least
you dont dare walk toward them
theyre turned away from you
theyre tall and slender
and pale
the air around them is cold
and they are naked
the only thing covering them
is a crumpled paper bag over
their head
you dont know if they know you are here
you want to turn and run but
you cant
move your
feet
you are terrified
shrouded in darkness this person
turns their head
and looks back
at you
through the large teal
eye
drawn on the front of their bag
you suck in a sharp breath of air
and feel your throat close up
you can see their ribs
trying to stab through their skin
and their stomach
caving in
like theyve been
wasting away
rotting
and suddenly
they are
right before you
upon you
breathing against their bag
they extend
a long
boney
hand
to your face
and theey
caress your cheek
run a finger down your neck
and you feel their smile
they want to eat you
they want to strip you
and rip you open
digg their nails into your neck
theyre
digging their
nai
ls into y
our nec
k and
youre eys clo
se and
you can
t movee
and
and
an
d a
nd
aand
a
ha
haa
haa
hee
hee
hoo
hoo
And you wake up in cold sweat.
You're panting out loud, and you realize you were holding your breath as you slept. This isn't the first time. You drop your sheets, which have been balled up in your fists until now, and drop your head, sighing. You've never dreamt so vividly about him before.
Before you get up to wash all this grime off of your body, you check under your blankets. Third time since the accident you've wet your sheets. Great.
Your name is Dave Strider, and you are pretty sure you're the only high schooler who still wets the bed.
You'd help it if you could, but you aren't exactly in total control of your bladder when you're having these nightmares. Bro says it's just part of the PTSD. He doesn't know about the bed wetting. And he never will.
You strip your bed of its sheets and run to the pantry where you can throw these disgusting things in the wash. It doesn't look like Bro's gotten up yet, so you're safe for another day. When you return to your room, you shut your door as quietly as you can, then slam your back against it. You slide down to the floor where you cover your face in your hands.
You kept it together for maybe three minutes. Now you just sit there with your knees to your chest and you shake, thinking about your most recent nightmare. So motherfucking uncool.
Bro doesn't usually let you get away with allowing your mind to tap into your fear and indulge it like this. Even in the privacy of your room. Bro's been really different since the accident. He's let you get away with pretty much everything. After all, you were there. You saw them. You witnessed them in their final moments.
You let yourself go for only another moment before you force yourself to stand. You're stronger than this. You don't need a moment for yourself to recover from these nightmares, there is nothing to recover from.
Just another nightmare about Cal.
He's never actually told you his name, he's never said anything to you, but you know that's who he is. You can feel it in your brain as that eye stares back at you. You can taste the name on your lips when you're sucking in the dead air around the both of you.
He terrifies you.
You think the freakiest part about it might be the eye his bag sports on the front. The eye itself doesn't really mean anything to you, but you have vague memories of it in the back of your mind. Like deja vu or something. You think you remember back in kindergarten they used to hand out brown paper bags every few months, and some crayons, and you'd spend part of the day drawing things on the bags for the people at the nearby hospital. They'd give the patients their pills or lunches in the bags or something. It was just a thing some of the surrounding schools did as an act of kindness to the people in there.
Once you were just so fed up with coloring the stupid things you think you just scribbled a large eye on one. You haven't thought about it until now. It probably has nothing to do with that memory, but that's the only eye you can remember having a resemblance to it.
You've told Bro you've been having nightmares, but never told him about Cal. You don't know what he would think if he knew you dreamt of naked, lanky figures haunting you. He might laugh in your face like he used to. He doesn't really have all that much reason to laugh anymore.
Once you're done thinking to yourself, you go to your bathroom to shower. Showering used to be really relaxing for you; more of a pastime than actually getting yourself clean. You loathe it now. You hate doing anything that involves taking your clothes off. You used to think you looked like the shit because you were so pale, thanks to the fact that you hardly leave your room, but now you think you just look like shit. You're disgusted with yourself.
You hate how when you look at yourself in the mirror you feel the image of Cal in the back of your mind. You've never seen his face, or his hair, or anything above his neck for that matter, and you don't want to. You're afraid you might see yourself. You wish you could drag yourself outside to tan for once, but you don't want to leave your bedroom.
Before you step into your shower, you run your hand over the scar on your hip. Your fingers ghost over the little rise in your skin, the pinker tissue pressing back against you. The scar is fresh, and it's deep. Bro told you that you were going to have to get used to seeing it. It wasn't going to fade because it was so deep. Just another reminder of them.
You don't wash yourself in the shower. You just stand there, breathing heavily as the water washes over you. You have to go back to school. Bro won't let you stay home anymore. You begged him plenty of times; he didn't even fight back. He just turned his head, and told you he was sorry. You wished he'd given you a sarcastic remark, or had told you to man up and get over it like before. He wasn't even trying anymore.
Neither of you were ready to go back to society yet. But that’s life.
Bro had always taught you to be strong ever since you were little. You were a part of the Strider family. That meant no crying, no weakness, and no mourning. He was more a parent to you than your parents. You two had made a promise that you'd never live in the past when the other died. You'd never look back.
You two had never realized how different it was saying it than actually doing it.
You get out of the shower before you allow yourself anymore time to hate yourself. You put on a T-shirt and some jeans before exiting your room. Bro is sitting at the table already, sipping coffee. You've never seen him drinking coffee before. Your breakfast is already made and waiting for you at your seat. You can’t remember the last time you sat down and ate in the kitchen together as a family. You hardly consider this a family.
You and Bro don't usually talk now, but when he sees you walk into the kitchen he speaks up.
"Ready for your first day back?" He knows you aren't.
"Ready for your first day at work?" You respond. He's never had to have a job before. There are too many changes in your life right now. You hate it.
He says nothing in return, just goes back to sipping his coffee. You pick up your plate, shoving your dry toast in your mouth before dumping the rest of your breakfast in front of him. You expect him to point out how anime you are this morning as you head for the door, but instead he says, "I made you a lunch."
You think you might gag, but you return to the kitchen to get it anyway. This'll be the first time you aren't buying your lunch in three years.
There it is, sitting on the counter, all nice and packaged in a little brown paper bag. You stand very still as you eye it from across the kitchen. Bro says nothing, but you know he's staring at you from behind his mug and his shades. Eventually you force yourself to go over to it and grab the fucking thing so you can leave. John is probably already waiting for you in your lobby.
As you walk toward the elevator after leaving your apartment, you throw the lunch out the hall window. You don't bother watching it as it plummets.
Just as you thought, your best friend is standing by the door in your lobby by the time you get down to the first floor, waiting quite anxiously for you. He's the only one who knows about Cal.
"John," you say, trying to get his attention without having to scream out his name. He looks over and spots you, then picks up his bag. "You ready?"
It's his first day back at school too. "Yeah, dude, let's go already. I think I fell asleep standing up while waiting for you."
You instantly forget about Cal.
You both leave the building, heading for the bus stop. Of all the people you know, John has changed the least since the accident. Maybe it was because he was there with you. He's the only one who knows you don't want to deal with being haunted by it forever. It's over. Nothing more to say. Let's go already.
"How's Bro been taking it?" He asks as you approach the bus stop. It was quiet until then.
"Like a champ. Went out and got a job, going to that today. Gonna make mad amounts of money. Nothing can possibly go wrong." You stop once you reach the corner. The bus should come any minute unless you've missed it.
He's quiet for a while as you wait together. "What about you?"
You don't glance over at him. You show no signs of weakness whatsoever. "I told you, I'm over it. I didn't even know them that well. They were just kind of there, and now they're gone."
"Yeah, but you know if it was my dad..." He trails off as the bus pulls up in front of you. You both get on and head to an empty seat together. The bus is full of high school students, but no one talks to you. No one says anything as you get on, actually. They begin talking again once the two of you are sitting.
"Just be glad it wasn't," you say to him once the bus starts rolling.
You know from the look on his face that he still feels bad about the situation. "You saw them die, right in front of you though. I saw them die. Two months ago. Doesn't that bother you?"
John doesn't understand. You don't mourn. "It's a Strider thing."
He shuts up after that. He at least understands that much.
John instead just lifts up his shirt enough to show you the scar running all the way across his abdomen. The one he got while sitting next to you in the backseat of your car two months ago. Sometimes you forget he was there too. Sometimes you forget he's just as traumatized as you.
You put your arm around him in a mediocre attempt at pacifying him. It sort of works. He leans his head against your shoulder. "I'm sorry," he whispers. "I know you don't like talking about it."
You don't think anyone would like talking about how their parents died in a car accident while they sat in the backseat. Talk about how they both were mutilated and bled to death while you were able to walk away from the wreckage with just a cut on your hip along with your best friend.
You really have no idea what you would do if John had also died with them. Your parents were busy workers and didn't have much time for you or your brother, so they were distant. You have hardly any good memories of them when you think about it. John on the other hand, is your life, and you love him. Without him you'd surely go insane.
"They're staring at us," John whispers, lifting his head from your shoulder. His eyebrows are knitted together. He obviously doesn't like this.
You go ahead and look over one of his shoulders. Some people are glancing over at you from time to time. You ignore them, sitting back up against your seat. You expected this much when you came back to school. You haven't been in contact with anyone but John since the car accident, except your long distance friends, so everyone else probably assumes you're still too jarred to be talked to. John isn't like that. Almost instantly after the accident you stopped talking about it all together with him and went back to being normal friends.
It's almost like nothing happened.
"So, about our conversation last night," John speaks up again, bringing up your most recent pesterings. You two have just recently gotten into the science of temporal displacement and other topics. He's kind of your big idea buddy along with your best friend. Talking about these kinds of things like if there were a zombie apocalypse or sudden global flooding are kind of your thing. It helps calm you down. "You said it could be possible to send objects through space using this device, by appearification?"
Everyone around you seems to leave you two alone at this point as you really get into it. "Not just that, transmaterialization. Supposedly top secret, hush hush, government agencies are working on a device that could be used to send objects through space. And not just that, spacetime."
John raises an eyebrow. "Time travel?" He's not a very big believer of that one. Sure, ghosts, aliens, and whatever the hell he associates with those categories, but he's pretty educated on the no side of debating time travel. "Not possible."
"Time travel is totally possible."
"No, if time travel were possible, then there'd be people from the present in the past, who would disrupt the natural flow of time, thus bringing about the destruction of the universe. It's impossible." He usually gets really into it like this when you bring the theory up.
Your eyes are too tired to roll. "You're obsessed, bro."
The rest of the ride to school you cover quite a few other topics on your agenda to discuss, but save the major ones for lunch. Getting up might have been really fucking sucky, but you know when you watch John go off and start to monologue about the double mobius reacharound of the spacetime continuum that it's going to be a good day. You're not really sure if he knows himself what he's talking about—he might just be using all these vocabulary words to make himself sound smarter—but it doesn't really matter. You just enjoy watching it.
You just enjoy watching him.
"I had another nightmare," you tell him after getting off the bus. He hugs you.
The bell for your first class rings before you can tell him you might have a crush on him, and he runs off to his first class. You have no classes together. Maybe you'll tell him tomorrow.
or not