Chapter Text
Survival of the fittest is the only tenet that rules their City.
It's the only way children survive. If they don't, it's because something within them made them too flawed to persevere through the madness. Sadness, or anger, or kindness, or some kind of weak will, anything that held them back was a death knell. You had to be on your toes at all times, because if you didn't, you were dead. It was that simple.
Mono takes time to learn that, as sheltered as he is. Even when he does figure it out, when he knows, logically, that what he did was only for his own good, it doesn't feel right. It curdles in his gut like the bread he's forced to eat night after night, sits and roils like a sickness that builds in his throat but won't come out.
For his own good, up in the Tower. For his own good, left in his room, safe and sound and alone. For his own good, his mentor, the Other, brushing against his mind in soundless whispers when he pulls on the door and tries to leave. Always. Always for his own good.
It's his fault, he knows. What happened. If he hadn't joined them, they would still be alive. If he hadn't stayed. If he hadn't left the Tower, and the Thin Man hadn't had to look for him. Everyone would still be alive.
Children have to survive. It's the only thing they can do. And they hadn't. Because of him.
But he's still alive. Despite everything, he's still alive, because he was too much of a coward to stay and defend them. Because children have to survive, and nothing else matters in the face of that one fact, but the way he did it doesn't feel fair.
His mentor, brushing against his mind, static a buzz in his ears, unreadable but focused. His mentor, the few times he visits, wordless thoughts back and forth in quick tandem through the Transmission, so happy to see him and lonely at the same time. His mentor, absent but always there, always ready if Mono needs him.
His mentor, hand out, reaching for a child who turns to static in his wake. Leaving behind a ghost as her only memento.
Mono wonders, irriationally, what would happen if the Thin Man found out he hadn't survived. If by some fluke he had fallen to his death, been torn apart by Viewers, electrocuted in the waters of the streets. Maybe he should try it, he thinks, just to see what happens. Just to make him feel half how Mono does. Just to make him hurt like he hurt the others.
Mono thinks about the girl who had let him in, the girl who had raised an axe to a being that she'd known she'd had no chance against.
Whatever abilities he might have, she would always be so much stronger than he would ever be.
Mono sets out to accomplish his goal with a single-minded steadfastness.
He climbs to the rooftops. In view of the Tower, he darts off across tiling and hops from roof to roof, using homemade pullies of laundry wire and bridges of old felled wood when the distance is too great. Sometimes he has to scamper in through the windows, make his way through decrepit living areas and hallways to get to the other side. Sometimes there are Viewers. Sometimes there are TVs.
Hands on his ears, eyes staring straight ahead, mind clamped down on his connection to the Transmission, he pushes through and ignores the call despite the shrieking headache it gives him.
He eats and drinks, but only barely, and only because he has to. There's a kind of sheer stubbornness that fuels him, where before there had only been fear and a sense of loneliness. What guides him now is a sense of purpose, partly fuelled by spite, a mission whose sole aim is to escape and survive. To leave before anyone else can get hurt, to get hurt because of him.
The entire time the Thin Man is right on the periphery, and Mono knows that he is close, and always getting closer. That brush with him back in the basement had given the other something to lock onto, and even as he forces their connection away the other is pushing against it just as fiercely, using the whole of the Transmission under his influence to follow his trail with abandon.
Mono sees him a precious few times, senses him coming. Pressing out of a TV just as Mono is dodging out of a window, the shrieking of a Viewer hot on heels only to be cut off with a muffled choke. Appearing out of thin air at the edge of a rooftop just as Mono manages to slide his way down and out of sight, and Mono can feel the force of his presence pressing down on his shoulders.
Mono cannot hear him - his connection is muffled, choked, hidden - but he thinks he knows exactly what the other is saying. And he's not coming back.
He thinks himself smart for managing to wiggle his way into one of the many complexes through an old, broken window as if to emphasize that fact. These buildings, they all look the same, and the other can't dig from top to bottom of each one each time Mono slips from his fingers. Some childish part of him thinks that if he manages to hide in each building, his mentor might just get sick of looking for him.
That's what he's thinking, when he crawls inside. Hide, rest, keep going. But then he sees what it is that he's stepped into, and he pauses.
What Mono expects is the usual apartment complex. Maybe an office, or if he's really lucky, a grocery store.
What he sees, instead, is a large, cavernous room full of seats, and in those seats, weird...people. Things. Puppets, maybe. He's seen them in a few old shops full of fabric, nothing but a torso with no arms or legs, but these look different. These have wrappings, and drapery, and weird heads, made out of masks and lamps and lightbulbs. Some of them don't even have heads at all.
Mono feels himself immediately set on edge, earlier fatigue forgotten in the wake of whatever it is he's stepped into. It's nothing like he's ever seen before, and he knows immediately that this place isn't normal.
He glances back at the window. For a second, he debates returning outside.
Then he turns, and Mono keeps going.
Mono's heard of hospitals before. Kind of. He's seen them on old posters in the Cities, and once or twice has heard them mentioned on the TVs, or by the children. They're places where, once, sick people would go to get better. They looked nice and white and had lots of beds for people to sleep in until they were ready to leave, Mono remembers thinking that it sounded really cool back then.
The hospital that he finds himself in now - because it is a hospital, and nobody can change his mind - is nothing like that at all.
It's dark. What little he can see of the walls and floors are old, stained in some kind of substance that he's pretty sure is blood but could also be rust, and the doors creak on their hinges when he presses against them. The rooms look like they haven't been used in ages, rust and decay having long since set in, and what few patient beds he manages to find are little more than cots with moth-bitten blankets.
It's also far more labyrinthian than it looks, winding downward in a series of old, rickety elevators that Mono's not sure would even work, and as he travels further and further, what he notices far more than the state of the place is the sheer amount of mannequins. They're everywhere, whole or in pieces, taking up every inch of the hallways, operating rooms, lobbies. Tables are piled high with arms and legs, filing cabinets stuffed full, and once or twice he thinks he hears a shifting sound coming from within that makes him speed up his pace.
Whatever this hospital used to be, it's nothing but a weird shell of its former glory. And he's travelling further and further into the belly of the beast, and maybe starting to regret not leaving when he had the chance.
But so far, nothing has come out to kill him. That's one blessing.
So Mono takes it slow. Passing quietly through the morgue, keeping an eye out, learning the place and how it ticks. Everything here is a lot more metal than the rest of the city, uses a lot more electricity. Doors need buzzers and switches to open, lights need batteries to turn on, and he figures out quickly that getting through these obstacles requires an energy source. He hunts for a battery.
For a little while, things are uneventful. Collect batteries, plug them in, keep going, keep going.
But as he continues through the rusted place, he starts to take note of a distinct kind of rumbling that he can't really place. Under his feet is where he thinks it comes from, worries that maybe this building is getting ready to collapse as many have, but the longer he feels it, the less sure he is.
It never occurs to him that the shaking might be coming from the ceiling until he nearly walks in on what he can only describe as a big bag of flesh in an old white coat, hanging from the tiles above.
The creature has all the time in the world to turn and notice him, for all that he's stuck staring. Luckily, whatever it is seems focused on the mannequins lying prone and in pieces on the half-ruined beds strewn throughout the operating room. It looks kind of the way Mono feels whenever he works on a puzzle, full of concentration as it tries on different heads and arms, seeing what fits, all the while breathing heavy and labored through its strange, rotten face.
Okay. Okay.
Mono takes a breath. This shouldn't be hard. It's distracted. He can sneak by and not worry about it.
So he does. Quietly, going underneath the cots, making sure not to step on anything, he sneaks through with a battery in hand, making sure to cover it with his coat so that it isn't visible in the dark. A few times, he thinks the thing might've seen - heart dropping, heart stopping, he is going to die - but it doesn't. He reaches the other side relatively unscathed.
Mono lets out a sigh of relief, allows himself to relax, and thinks that's the end of it.
But No, actually, it isn't. Because the thing follows after him, not two minutes after he's free, and it's a scramble to find a place to hide before it notices.
It's frustrating. Each room he reaches, the thing seems determined to follow, and he needs to get out from under their dumb skin before they notice him or he's dead, dead, dead. The mannequins are everywhere, and some seem like they're looking at him, and he doesn't know how but he hates it and he needs to get out so they don't look at him anymore.
But Mono isn't going to be able to come out of this completely. Because when he reaches the next gate, the one that needs a battery, he is by now familiar with the buzzing sound it makes, and knows that the thing is probably going to come running.
He's going to have to book it.
Underneath his bag, he takes a quiet breath. Courage, stubbornness, determination. Plugs in the battery. Reaches for a piece of wooden block sitting to the side.
Throws it at the button that will unlock the gate.
And many, many things happen at once.
The great behemoth on the ceiling, from somewhere far off, screams. The whole building seems to tremble with the sudden speed at which it starts, and Mono cannot run fast enough to save his own life. His teeth feel like they're clattering against each other with the force of the quake behind him and the adrenaline, the blood, pounds in his ears, in his veins as he searches desperately for a hiding spot just beyond. For a way out.
With everything shaking, including himself, parts go toppling to the ground. Things move. This isn't so much a cause for concern.
When he's hiding, however. When he's managed to crawl into a vent, scrambled through into a room that's pitch-black, too dark to see but for vague silhouettes from where he's emerged onto a filing cabinet, and things slowly, slowly calm down as the thing on the ceiling moves on. When quiet descends.
Things keep moving.
Not at first. It's so quiet Mono couldn't hear it. But it's in the distance. A vague creak of something that sets his hair on end, a clacking, something hollow meeting old cracked tile. Even though the only thing he can see just even a hint of is a mannequin in a wheelchair and another propped up against the wall, he hears it.
He's slipped silently, slowly onto the floor and made his way tentatively through the room, about halfway he thinks, when the sound of something hitting the ground makes him turn his head and stare, his blood turning to ice.
The mannequin in the wheelchair is no longer sitting.
And inside his mind, or somewhere in the building, or somewhere right beside him--
C̴̨͚̺͔̫̖̰̪̖̟̑ͅh̴̨̬̟͍̥̯̏̽̿̌ì̸̜̦̖̃͂̇̀̈̿̅̕͝l̸̡̙̥̯͂̑͜d̷̛̲̅͊̆̆̿͠.̴̛̯͈͎̍̿̔̑
--Mono suddenly isn't sure whether it's the denizens of the hospital he has to be worried about.