Chapter Text
The high-pitched note coming from the EMF interwoven with John’s frantic gutturals stab at the primal part of his brain. Arthur grips the doorknob again, pulls and pushes, feels it slip under the fabric of his gloves. His breathing is as fast as his heartbeat.
“Arthur, it’s locked god dammit!”
“What do you see?!” He gives up on opening the door and instead presses his back to it, flattening himself as much as possible. Anything over twenty miligausses was past ghost territory – and by extension, their expertise.
The number smears the dark of his mind like spilled paint. He feels his knees buckle slightly and sweat dribbles down the side of his neck.
Even though he and John had been through their fair share of scraps and troubles, the complete uselessness he feels in these kinds of moments never disappears. At the mercy of his frayed instincts and senses. And John’s.
“I– I can’t see anything!”
“Shit!” He feels the glass of the dial crack and dent under his thumb. The high-pitched beep distorts, falls an octave, rises back again, the entire gadget breaking down.
There’s another sound of something creaking, contracting. A heaviness sets on his chest and it’s suddenly hard to move. Arthur manages to push himself to lean on the door with his good shoulder to weakly push at it.
“Miss We–!”
The window explodes.
“Get down!”
He does, but not before feeling something cold and thin dash across his cheekbone. Sudden, freezing wind knocks him back and the back of his head slams against the thick wood. His ears ring and his skull pulses, but adrenalin forces him to scramble back up onto his feet. The cacophony of terrible sounds is almost unbearable.
“There’s nothing here!”
“Then what the fuck is happening?!”
Warmth trickles down his cheek to the corner of his lips. The metallic taste spurs something in Arthur and he places the heel of his left foot to the bottom of the door. The EMF finally cracked under the pressure that was currently also pushing against his bones.
His skin feels tight and he can feel his teeth buzz.
“Arhur, this can only be one thing– but I don’t– Arthur!”
Instinctively, as if goaded, he snaps his head up. There’s a sloshing sound, sticky and wet like tar. The room seems to press in as if there was a black hole sucking the air inwards. Arthur rocks forward, down onto his hands, pushed and pulled by the changes in force.
“John…”
“It’s a– Arthur, it’s a fucking demon!”
The ceiling creaks and there’s a scraping sound from the middle of the room. Arthur tries to mumble out a question, a cuss, anything, when a drop of thick liquid drips down onto his shoulder.
“It’s coming out of the ceiling through some kind of… portal?! It’s turning the material into black goo. Fuck, Arthur, it’s covered in blisters and– and teeth? Or horns, I don’t– It’s fucking nasty and it’s crawling towards us!”
Another gust of cold wind sweeps over them and Arthur finally hears it. The weird clicking and creaking of its misshapen bones, the way its naked skin contracts as it moves, like a zombified leopard. He feels for his bag and presses it tight against his body. His head turns back towards the window and with a full body shudder, he fills his lungs.
“Arthur, the bible!”
“Fuck the bible John, we’re going out the goddamn window!”
“What?! We’re on the second floor!”
“I’ll release you.”
“What?! Arthur!” It was somehow hard to hear him through the rumbling in his skull.
“Catch me in time, do the incantation and we’ll have some time to find Miss Wells!”
John tsks and grunts and Arthur knows there’s no other way they are getting out. They aren’t versed in demonology, and the few pieces of paper Oscar had left them tucked between the bible pages weren’t going to help now.
“Trust me!”
“Fine! Go! It’s getting closer!” He can hear its wet claws scrape and tear at the wallpaper. It gurgles, hisses and lets out a ghoulish groan that makes Arthur’s stomach churn.
The one thing he did know about demons is that it takes them tremendous effort to move through the physical plane when they materialise. He was going to seize the moment.
He parts his lips, the foreign words thick against his throat. The incantation was truly a desperate solution. It wrecks his body and effectively tears the two apart. Still, he yells it out.
“Libertatem tribuo dirae animae tuae.”
Leaning forward on his hands, one heel still on the door, he can feel sweat pooling on his neck.
“Vola! Qui inlaqueatus est, fugite hanc insomniam animam!”
“Go!”
He pushes off the door like a sprinter, the demon dropping down where he was crouched with a heavy thump, warbling and screeching. The thick liquid it produces sticks to his shoes as he runs. Three, four, five steps.
He breathes, then doesn’t.
“Jump!”
“Ite, rem atrocem!”
Arthur curls in on himself to fit through the smashed window. There’s a gust of air, a whooshing sound as he plummets and then nothing.
When Arthur comes to, he’s wet and dizzy. His mind somehow races yet is also in slow-motion. The first thing he manages to do is crack a smile.
It hurts to move his mouth and there’s a weird, scalding pain in the middle of his chest, as if someone’s pried his ribcage open just to squeeze it back together. Nonetheless, the pain means he is alive.
He takes a laboured breath, the humid air heavy on his lungs and a cough scratches at his throat. Left arm, right arm, left leg, right leg. Forces a fist and wiggles his toes. Nothing was taken from him.
“Get up, you ass!”
Bliss.
“Where are we?” It takes a second for Arthur to mumble the words out, his breaths coming in quicker now as his body adjusts to not being comatose, even if it was for a brief moment. His hands search the ground, feeling around for his bag. The strap slips between his gloved fingers and he hurriedly pulls it towards him, managing to heave himself up into a sitting position. “How long was I out?”
“I don’t know, two minutes? I reversed the incantation as soon as I got you down. We’re in the garden we were looking at earlier and we need to move. I looked up at the window we fell from but it’s too dark to see anything up there.”
“Miss Wells. She’s still in there.” His knees wobble as he stands up, another heat sizzling under the skin on his back. Probably where John had held him. “She disappeared on us the moment the demon appeared. I think she…” He stumbles, puts a hand on a statue, he presumes. John mumbles a careful, low. “I think she’s in more trouble than she thinks.”
“Obviously.”
“We need to hurry, who knows what’ll happen if she enters that room.”
John grumbles in agreement. “Turn right, and go straight. There’s a gravel path near you. It’s dark, but I can make out a gate even with a few lamps lighting the way.”
Arthur listens, gets off the grass and on the gravel. The crunch of stone underneath his heeled shoes is too loud in his head. He would make haste, but the dull ache in his kneecaps is too much and he doesn’t want to make it worse for himself. There are a lot of stairs in the mansion. So he trudges along, wincing.
“Is it wrong of me to think, ow, that Miss Wells locked the door on us?”
“Why would she do that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think demons are even able to do that, be it telekinesis or whatever, especially before they’ve even manifested, and I swear I couldn’t hear her on the other side.”
“Whatever the case, we need to find her. Hopefully she’s still alive.”
There’s a moment of silence, except for Arthur’s breaths and steps.
“That thing is powerful.”
“It is.”
Silence.
“We should ask–”
“Ugh.”
“John, I’m serious, we aren’t equipped to deal with this and you know it.”
“So the first thing you would do is crawl back to him?”
“Crawl ba– crawl back?!” He wants to stop, wants to bite back even more, but instead pushes forward even faster. That’s all he’s ever done, push and push.
It doesn't last long.
“Is that what you see me as? A sniveling sadcase crawling back?!"
“Stop.”
“I wish you’d stop with your petulant whining and get over it already!”
“Stop walking now!”
He stops. He does, because there’s worry in John’s voice and he’s no better than a dog.
A short breath escapes him like he’s been holding it in and for a moment he reels back his frustration.
“What?”
“I think the… the…”
“Spit it out!”
“I’m looking at the exit gate but I– I don’t think we’ve moved at all.”
Arthur swivels his head around on instinct, feeling the chill settle on the tips of his ears as the night grows colder. The air is still and he can’t hear anything.
“What, like we’ve been– walking in place?”
“The statues, hedges and shrubs have changed but the gate hasn’t gotten closer. What the hell…”
Arthur clenches his fists. If a job went smoothly and by the book just once he would never complain again. Instead of feeling scared, there was just more frustration bubbling beneath the surface. John didn’t need to react like that over Oscar.
“Time dilation, spatial reconfiguration.”
“Fuckery.”
“Right.”
“What do we do?”
“I don’t know.”
They stand there, sinking into the awkward silence.
“I didn’t mean that.”
“You did.”
“Arthur, I–”
“Save it for when we get out of here.”
He starts to walk forward again, absentmindedly. His hands are hot.
“Just listen to me now, will you?”
“I know you think you’re my, what, protector of hearts, but what happened with me and Oscar is behind us, is it not? My suggestion was purely based on the fact that we don’t know any other fucking demon hunter now do we?!”
His voice echoes out into the stretched out, implausible place around them. It really feels like there’s nothing but them sometimes. Him, John, the heat, the cold and the pain and the disembodied voices he’ll forget in time. The silence is crisp in his head again, like when you breathe in cold air.
John sighs. It almost makes Arthur yell out again, demons be damned.
“Okay.”
The type of ‘okay’ one gives not in agreement, but in impatience.
“Okay.” He repeats, annoyed. “Right. Now where do I go?”
“If you walk forward and I’m guessing backwards the distance won’t change. If you go off-path, I’m not sure if we’ll be able to get back here again.”
“Well there’s no use in just walking forever. Let’s go right.”
“Okay.”
John doesn’t fuss over the decision. Arthur guesses he doesn’t have a better idea.
“There are different kinds of marble statues, neatly shaped hedges surrounding flowers and small fountains all scattered around. Their positions don’t make much sense, it’s like someone just– put everything here at random. I didn’t even notice this before.”
“The garden is the demon’s playground.”
“Or the Wells family likes chaos.”
“Could be both, with the way things are turning out.”
He walks further into the garden, occasionally reaching out to feel out the damp leaves and corners of quiet statues. It’s disorienting and annoying and there’s a chill crawling up his spine as they move farther away from the path.
After walking for what felt like fifteen minutes, John says that the path is gone. They are in the belly of the garden now. Not only were they completely lost, but John remarks how things seem to move and change when Arthur looks away. Or John does, rather.
Arthur leans against a random lamp next to a random statue of a cherub. The cuffs of his pants are wet and mud sticks to his shoes. His body aches everywhere and he can feel anger rising in his throat.
“Any ideas?”
John is silent for a moment and Arthur can tell he has none, but lets him pretend to think.
“We’ve heard of demons being capable of this but only in… small rooms, chapels, maybe. But entire gardens?”
“And how is it doing this without manifesting? It’s powerful, but that physical form could only hold up for about five minutes. This should have let up ages ago.”
John heaves a breath like he has lungs of his own and Arthur drops his head down, bottom lip between his teeth.
“You’re hurt.”
“Letting a primordial being rip through the very fabric of my soul does that sometimes.”
“So does jumping out of a window.”
He says it in jest this time and Arthur can't help but smile. They are ridiculous.
“I promised, didn’t I?”
“Kind of. Right after saying never say never.”
“Just so you know it wasn’t part of the plan.”
“I know.”
Arthur rolls his right ankle, wincing.
“I’m sorry, by the way.”
He sighs. “I know.”
He knows, he knows John like the back of his hand and yet feels like he forgets the finer lines constantly. With his arms crossed, Arthur starts to work through the information he has. No current physical manifestation, space and also possible time distortion. It didn’t make much sense.
He remembers the bible, the few basic exorcisms written down in chicken scratch latin on a ripped piece of paper between the pages. Oscar wrote them down in a hurry and his fingers were warm when he handed it to Arthur.
Even if they did work, without a physical manifestation of any kind the exorcism was useless. Arthur clicks his tongue and rubs his face, the leather cool on his skin.
“I don’t think it’s a demon.”
He stays buried in his hands. “What?”
“That thing up there was definitely one, but this makes no sense. Think about it.”
“Hm?”
“Why the hell are we still alive?”
His hands drop down. Right. The chill at the base of his neck punctures through his skin and Arthur shivers, full-body.
“Playground.”
“It’s playing tricks, distorting time. All this greenery, plants, flowers.”
“Don’t tell me.” There’s an empty space on his belt where his knife should be and Arthur’s painfully aware of it as his hands rest on the holster. “Shit, shit!”
“It’s a fae!”
There’s a sudden hissing noise to his right and his head snaps in the direction, a bead of sweat rolls down the middle of his forehead. This wasn’t good at all.
“Arthur…”
He sucks air through his teeth in response.
“The cherub… its eyes… they’re real.”
“Huh?” Is all he manages to mumble out. His muscles are tight, heart beating against his ribs.
“Bloodshot, greenish eyes instead of stone and it’s– it’s looking right at us.”
The stone cherub hisses again and Arthur flinches, the soreness in his body dissipating as adrenaline pumps through him. He can almost feel it in his mouth.
“You’ll have to run.”
“Yes.” He whispers.
For a moment, nothing happens. A wicked staring contest. And then, Arthur hears stone break.
“Run!”
He bolts, a terrible screech following after him in mere seconds. John manages to navigate him through the myriad of objects littering the area. There’s thumping behind him, like heavy yet quick footsteps that turn into soft, meaty sounds at some point. Its stone form must have been hindering it.
Arthur turns a corner suddenly, smashing his shoulder against an Aphrodite statue that suddenly materialised out of view. It hurts, so he dives down next to a big fountain, cowering beside it on his stomach. Water splashes and gurgles above him and he tries to stifle his groans.
“Arthur we need to kill it! If we don’t we’re–”
“Dead or stuck here, fuck, I know.”
“It’s toying with us, making us wait like this. We need to come up with something fast.”
“Decapitation. Only sure-fire way it stays dead.”
The thing screeches again, the devilish noise turning into something akin to a laugh. It echoes, far. Arthur can’t tell where it is.
There’s no time. Arthur reaches into his bag, the pain in his shoulder splinters up to his neck and it makes his eyes water. Nothing sharp, nothing useful. That is, until he picks up the EMF. The glass on the meter is broken, but the cord connecting the detector to the box hasn’t been ripped off.
“John, I’ll need your help.”
“With what?”
“I’ll cut off that fucker’s head with this.” He snaps the cord off where it meets the box, effectively destroying the EMF entirely and gaining a rope.
“How?!”
“Like I said,” he heaves himself up, hands resting on the edge of the fountain, “I need your help.”
John stutters, audibly stressed. “Okay, tell me.”
“How deep is this fountain?”
“I can’t tell, it’s too dark.”
With no time to waste, he lifts himself over the edge and carefully enters the water, feet first.
“What the hell are you doing?”
It’s deep, deeper than it should be and Arthur barely manages to touch the bottom with the tips of his shoes, his face just above the water.
“I’ll lure it here, give you control and we ambush the motherfucker.”
“Give me control?! Again?! Do you have a death wish?!”
“Listen to me! Only my arms and my legs. With your strength its head will pop clean off.”
“Arthur, that's even worse, you know your body will fight back! It’s different when you’re comatose, you-’re–”
Arthur sighs, feeling his cold clothes stick to his skin underwater. “I don’t see any other way, so do this for me, please. I wouldn’t suggest it if I didn’t think we could pull it off. You and me.”
John growls and Arthur imagines him walking back and forth as he stresses. It’s weird to imagine him. There never is a face.
Finally, he stops fussing. There’s silence again and Arthur’s breath stutters from the cold.
“You and me.”
“I promised you that goddamn lobster.”
John laughs, light, and Arthur can’t help but smile. He’d be lost without John. It’s better to be lost together.
He fills his lungs.
“Hey!”
His voice echoes just like the fae’s did, a short bark of a yell but just enough for something otherworldly to start running in their general direction, the soft patter of its long appendages disgusting in a way.
The incantation slips through his lips as if he was breathing and his mind feels hazy. He submerges himself fully, the murmur of water suddenly too loud and foreign.
Then, the pain starts. His arms first, a terrible burning sensation from his elbows to the tips of his fingers where he grips the cord. He grits his teeth, fighting back when his legs experience the same. His lungs burn, everything burns. John is somewhere in the back of his head now, saying something. Too far away.
He can’t die. Not here, not now. He has promises to keep, after all.
The water stirs, he can feel it move around his face. It’s here.
John yells at him, somewhere. They need to go.
“Now!” He manages to yell, using the last of his air, feeling bubbles shoot up past his eyelashes just before he's effectively launched up.
The thing looks down into the fountain as Arthur leaps up, probably crazy-eyed and all teeth. Crocodile. He manages to grasp onto the fae’s naked, rubbery skin as they both go down over the fountain edge. Or so he guesses. He can’t feel his hands anymore.
The only things he can feel is the water seeping through his clothes and the way his entire body stills as John guillotines its head off. He’s sitting on top of it, its hisses cut by pained gurgles and then silence.
He can’t hear anything. His own hands, or John’s, whoever’s, come up to hold his face. He knows they're there. It’s heavy, everything is so heavy. And it’s so dark.
He slips away, somewhere, maybe underwater.