Chapter Text
If anyone asked his friends, Mason was a man who specialized in suppression.
It’s easy, once you get the hang of it, sharp-bitten words stuck to tongues, sarcasm dripping like poison in place of the anger that threatens to leak, silence in the quiet of fear.
It’s easy to suppress your emotions once you’ve done it your whole life, it also means it’s easier for them to break out the moment something hits.
And it hits, in the form of his father’s odd, horrifying body.
(“Are you scared?” Buck asks, kind as always as he leaned over the couch.
It was, what? 12am? Usually everyone was asleep by now.
Then again, the upcoming days were more important to them than any other day before that, Mason wasn’t surprised if everyone was still awake.
He thinks he needs to check on Eddie soon.
“About what?” Mason finally replied, tearing his eyes off the screen.
It was his father’s video tapes, when Mason was young and her father was obsessed with capturing things on tape like it was the 80s.
He’d been replaying the same one over and over, trying to remember the lines of his father’s face.
“Ya know, everything that’s gonna happen?” Buck huffed lightly, as exasperated as he was worried.
Immediately, Mason thinks of the photos.
Uncle Evan, with avian-like features and eyes so big it almost made him puke when he looked at it.
Uncle Brock, with antlers atop his head and more moose than human, if Mason focused he thinks he can hear the heavy stomps of one in his head.
Uncle Brian, the uncle he was closest to, dragging his leg around like it didn’t belong to him, his voicebox embedded in his throat like a jewel.
And his father and uncle, stuck together like glue.
It was hard to look, Mason reflected, feeling bile threatening to come up.
His father was small, melted as he was into uncle Scotty. His once bright skin now dull like decay, his arm a stump and his head, oh his head.
His head had melted into the side of uncle Scotty’s rib cage, his eyes wide and empty like a fish, his teeth razor sharp and sticking out like those lantern fish at the bottom of the sea.
But if his father looked horrific, then uncle Scotty looked like the Devil’s plaything.
Even melted into his father, uncle Scotty somehow grew long. Long, so long the photo couldn’t capture the whole of him, stretched as tall as a skyscraper and leaning down like a wise old wisteria tree.
In a way, Mason could almost imagine them like twins in a womb, one destined to absorb the other.
“Mason, you there?” He jolted to life, reminded of the presence of his best friend. “You were gone for a while.”
“Sorry.” Mason snapped, curt and angry and trying to banish the thoughts from his mind. “What did you ask again?”
“If you’re scared.” Buck led on, bypassing the waspish response. Buck was kind like that.
Mason still wondered how Eddie and Tommy were doing.
“No.” He said, like a liar.)
“You fucking bitch!” Buck screamed at him later, standing over his father’s sunken form on the ground, spazzing and futzing like a broken electronic.
In a way, it was.
Mason huffed, shoving his shaking hands into the pockets of pants. “What?! I’m just doing what our mission entailed us to do! Not my fault you were dillydalling over it! You did it the other times we’ve found them! Why is it the moment I do it you make me a bad guy?!”
“Because you’re absolutely being a bitch about it!” Buck yelled, ignoring the stressed sounds of the deer, its knife-like antlers poking at them in distress.
“So what?!” Mason yelled back, hearing the sudden shuffles of Eddie and Tommy waking up.
(Fuck, they woke up, Mason absently thought about how little sleep they’ve gotten in the days leading up the mission.
He wished he knew how to say sorry.)
“So stop it! These are your uncles as much as they are our fathers! Why do you insist on ignoring that relationship!?”
“Because emotions are useless in this mission! You want them back, don’t you? So it’s best that we do what we have to do so they can come back quicker!”
The deer is distressed, its antlers are poking too hard into Mason’s skin. Without a glance back (why hadn’t they just done the same thing to this damn moose yet?) Mason pushed the antlers away.
“Stop it!” Tommy yelled, panic in his voice as he tried to pry them away from each other. “You’re going to attract the others here! We’re too high-strung to even work together right now!”
Buck kept yelling, and Mason was never one to take the high road.
(Back when Mason was young enough to have his father, he remembered all the stories about him.
“Your old man was always the fighter between us.” Uncle Evan laughed. Soft and kind as he was, Mason was always in awe when everyone told him uncle Evan was the troublemaker between all of them. “Every time someone made a bad remark, it was either him or uncle Tyler running in to fight them.”
“So papa was cool!!” Mason yelled one, confused at the laughing sound echoing throughout the table. His other friends seemed to be in agreement though!
“He was.” Uncle Scotty nodded, warm like the fireplace on a cold winter day. “But when you grow older, you shouldn’t become someone like your papa, okay? Hell, you shouldn’t become like any one of us.”
“Why?” Mason pouted. In his eyes, papa and his friends were the coolest people around! Who wouldn’t want to become them?
“Cause we were bad kids, Cocoa Puff.” His father said, ruffling Mason’s fluffy hair. “When you’re older, we’ll tell you how bad we were, you should never become teens like us.”
Mason nodded, unable to comprehend how they were bad when they were so cool in his eyes.
Every son’s dream is to become their father. Mason hadn’t been an exception.)
They only stopped when Eddie suddenly yanked them away to hide.
It’s panic, how Eddie moved, using the assistance of the deer to drag them up onto the trees.
“Wha-“ Tommy got immediately shut down when he looked out at their campsite.
Dread rising in his bones, Mason did too.
There, inspecting their camp, was his father and uncle.
The thing that Ruby called his uncle Scotty was tall. Truly, apprehensively tall. His legs were at least 2 meters long, his torso even longer, bent in half as it was to inspect the world below him. His neck slithered like a snake’s would, elongating according to his wishes as it slowly whirled around, casting stares across their camp before staring at uncle Brock-the deer, almost inquisitive.
The smaller man, the man that made Mason a dreamer, stared at them, empty-eyed and ghostly, some facsimile of love dancing in his rotten teeth.
(Uncle Scotty and his father were Mason’s world.
They were like superheroes, in Mason’s starry-eyes, father with his confident smiles and cocky attitude, uncle with his pleasant demeanor that glossed over his equally horrible personality.
In a perfect world, Mason would grow up to be just as cool as his father.
When told so, his dad laughed. “Kid, I’m the worst person you could have taken after. I fought all the time in school, I stood on the sidelines when your uncle went out to cause trouble, I was more interested in video games than studying! If anything, you should look up to uncle Sark, he’s the best out of all of your uncles.”
“But I wanna be like you!” In Mason’s mind, there was no one better than his dad, as sturdy as a cornerstone and as reliable as can be, Mason knew that if there was anyone he could have taken after, he’d choose his father in every lifetime.
“You‘ll make this old man cry.” His father laughed.)
The long-necked thing stared at the Moose, it’s silence as notable as the still-frizzing body of the robot.
Like a response, the Moose crooned.
In the silence that sound leaves behind, Mason shoots.
Like lightning, his friends hurriedly followed suit.
The day his father and uncle went missing, the world was as bright as Mason’s life.
He was just a kid, sitting outside in their yard and staring at their flower bushes, his hands twitching like it wanted to pick at the flowers.
“Don’t do that.” Uncle told him once. “If you pick the flowers the tree will be sad! And when trees are sad they won’t want to give us flowers anymore!”
Mason, a child on the single-digits, believed him.
Now, staring at the flowers and the fruits that grow on the plants, Mason was tempted to try them.
But why hasn’t papa come back? Where was uncle? They promised him they’d take him to the park!
Mason, young and intelligent as he was, walked inside the house to find the phone his dad had given him, some old brick-looking thing with a number pad instead of the big screen he saw laying around.
With childlike, clumsy hands, Mason tapped his dad’s phone number.
All he heard was the automated voice message box.
He tapped uncle’s number.
Nothing.
Uncle Tyler, uncle Evan, uncle Brock, even uncle David.
None of them picked up their phone.
In one last fit of desperation, Mason typed in uncle Sark’s number.
Like salvation, uncle Sark picked up.
“If this is about my car’s extended warranty then-“
“Uncle Sark!” Mason cried in happiness, tears running down his little face. “Where’s papa and uncles! They aren’t picking up!”
“Oh, kid?!” Sark panicked, Mason heard aggressive whispering over the phone. “Your papa is busy, don’t worry kiddo! He’s just gonna be late today, okay?”
“But he told me he was gonna take me to the park!” Mason yelled, frustrated and worried.
“And he will, kid!” Sark was quick to reassure. “Don’t worry, he’ll be home before you know it!”
Before Mason could answer, uncle Sark cut off.
His dad never came home, and Mason still hadn’t gotten over that grudge he held against Sark.
By the look in Sark’s eyes when he sees Mason, he knew.
The fight was hard.
Eddie, Tommy and Buck were all tired, running on the adrenaline of the day and beginning to crash the more they fought.
So it was up to Mason to fill in the gaps.
God, was the fight hard.
The thing’s limbs could stretch, stretch and stretch until Mason didn’t know where it ended and could barely see the beginning of it, all Mason knew was spindly fingers and long arms that seemed to rise out into the infinity.
But what Mason effectively realized, was that the thing was blind.
Sure, the smaller one that stuck to the long one had white empty eyes, but it had no sight. It seemed to rely on its’ nose more than anything, using it to confer Mason’s movements and commanding the long one to follow.
That gave Mason an idea.
“Hey, Brock!” Mason reluctantly yelled, dodging one of the hands that receded to move his way. The name feels like ash on his tongue. “Make as much noise and sound as possible!”
The deer thing seemed to understand, and it started to work as a distraction.
(By the time Mason was a teen, his dreams of being like his father were long behind him.
That didn’t change the resemblance he had to him.
“Dude! Were you picking fights again?!” Eddie yelled, exasperated, like he wouldn’t do the same thing.
“God.” Tommy huffed, aggressively bandaging Mason’s knuckles. “You’re so lucky the school takes pity on us because of the orphan thing, if we were normal they would have kicked us out by now.”
“They wouldn’t.” Buck was quick to remark. “Our dads used to go here, you know? They caused trouble all the time yet they never got kicked from school.”
The air froze to ice.
Their families were a sensitive subject for all four of them. They’ve been friends since they were in diapers, that meant that they all knew what happened and were all reluctant to broach the subject with each other.
Eddie, because it made him hug the dumb little plushie he carried everywhere tighter.
(Mason told him to stop bringing the plushie around once, and got a black eye for it.
Couldn’t Eddie hear the whispers behind his back for it? Mason is just trying to help.)
Tommy, because he’d cry at the slightest mention of his father.
(Tommy was so damn weak. But Mason would sooner attempt to fly to the moon on a pig than tell Tommy to stop being so emotive.)
Mason, because it made him angry to think about.
(His father went missing, his uncles are missing, yet uncle Sark only picked them all up a week after they were gone.
His friends were quick to forgive uncle Sark’s negligence, but Mason never forgot.)
Buck was the only one who’d willingly talk about them, the only one to bring them up and remind them of their family's existence.
(He was mature like that, he was grieving like that.)
“Yeah?” Mason grumbled when the silence was left unattended for too long.
He didn’t want to hear more about his father, but he might as well entertain Buck.
“Yeah.” Buck laughed. “Pops told me about it all the time, how uncle Evan constantly brought fake but realistic looking guns to school and shoot them with foam bullets, how uncle Brian would join uncle David in causing food fights, how uncle Marcel got into so many fights he scared the whole student body.”
Mason almost stiffened at the mention of his dad’s name.
“And that time uncle Ty-“
“Stop it.” Eddie muttered, sad and angry and looking away from them. “Talk talking about them.”
Tommy seemed upset, like he wanted to encourage Buck but was unable to when his other friends were so upset.
“Why?” Buck huffed, annoyed before he realized. Then he just signed. “Fine. Whatever.”
He went back to helping clean Mason’s knuckles up.
His friends were all so soft for the school they were in. If they couldn’t hear the shit the school spoke about them, Mason would make sure it remained that way.
They were the only family he had left.)
When they finally tired the thing out, all Mason could do was slump beside his friends.
They were tired, too tired from the day’s activities.
But there was one more thing he had to do.
As Mason stumbled off his ass, he moved to the thing laying on the grass, it’s unsteady breaths the only reason Mason knows it’s alive.
It doesn’t move as Mason comes closer, apparently too tired from the overstimulation he subjected it to.
But as Mason crawls on the thing to reach for the soft glow on it, Mason hears it speak.
“Cocoa…..” The small thing spoke softly, muffled as it was by the teeth.
And his life flashes in his eyes, reminding him of every instance his father and uncle called him that.
And the world crashes in on him.
And his hand falls limp.
‘Fuck.’ He thinks to himself. ‘All these things are my dad and uncles.’
And the weight of his words weigh him down.
And as he freezes there, Buck comes in to rip the thing right out of his uncle and dad’s chest.
And their scream breaks open the heavens and restores the intercom between them and Ruby.
And the scream attracts the rest of their uncles right to them.
And the scream attracts the rest of their uncles right to them.