Chapter Text
Norton Campbell wakes up in an unfamiliar bed.
He squeezes his eyes shut against the morning sun forcing its way in through the blinds, rolling over to press his face against the pillow. God , his head feels like someone bashed it about with a shovel all last night. What had he even been-
It comes to him in fragments: a line of bottles appearing in front of him as though in stop-motion, the cool wood of the bar against his cheek as he’d rested his head, and later, raised voices, a sharp pain around his eye … Oh . He raises his head, gingerly prodding at the skin below his brow. Oh, a bar fight. Real classy, Norton. At least, from what hazy images he can recall, he hadn’t started it. (Probably.)
“You’re awake.”
He cranes his neck towards the sound of the voice, trying and failing to blink the light out of his eyes to see just exactly who’d taken him home ( taken pity on him ) the night before. He now sees he’s in less of a room and more of a studio, a screen doing its best to separate him from the rest of the small apartment. It’s sparsely decorated - no, more than that, practically spartan, with the exception of a few stacks of books scattered on top of a trunk at the end of the bed he’s now found himself in, a small plant on the windowsill, and a colorful string of flags hanging on the wall above the couch. Besides those small personal touches, it reminds him of the home of a childhood friend whose father had been ex-military and kept the house stiffly spotless, as though a superior officer would be in any minute for an inspection.
“Unfortunately,” Norton mutters.
The man who’d awoken him scoffs, arms crossed over his chest. “Rough night?”
“You could say that.” Groaning, he pushes away the sheets, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. Well, his jeans are still on, though that doesn’t mean anything about whatever happened last night. Bending down, he grabs last night’s t-shirt and drags it over his head, and when he straightens up, that’s when he gets his first real look at the man whose bed he’s ended up in.
He’s reaching up to close the blinds all the way, with hands that Norton can tell - even from this far away - are criss-crossed with scars, white against his brown skin. He’s well-built, muscles visible in his arms and what Norton can tell are strong thighs beneath his gray sweats, even if he does have to rise up on his tiptoes to reach the higher-set window. He can’t be more than five-three, five-four maybe . There’s a green beanie tugged over his hair, a few chocolate-brown strands falling around his face and between his eyes, which are now… oh, they’re narrowed in Norton’s direction.
“Your shoes are by the door,” he says. It’s as good as a simple get out . Norton rolls his eyes, but he rises from the bed anyway, rubbing a crust of sleep from his eye.
“Alright, I’ll get out of your hair.” There’s no bitterness in his tone. He can’t blame the guy for wanting him out ASAP. It’s already - he glances down at his phone, which he’d apparently fallen asleep with in his pocket, quickly; it’s past ten AM. At least this stranger had done him the kindness of letting him sleep late; no wonder he’s so eager to be rid of Norton.
The man’s brows draw downwards. Ah. He’s annoyed with me. More annoyed. “Just thought you’d want to know.”
“No, no, I get it.” Norton waves his hands in front of him like, it’s fine. He shoves his feet into his shoes, not caring that he’s folded the backs of them underneath his heels in his haste. “I’ll just- go-”
“Your car is back at the bar, by the way.”
Of course it is. He sighs. “Okay.”
“I wasn’t about to let your drunk ass drive home, alright-”
“Alright .” Why does everything that comes out of this guy’s mouth sound like such an argument ? Well, it’s not like he owes Norton kindness or anything, whatever he’d done last night - whatever maybe they had done. Still. Had he really made that big of an ass of himself?
Probably, if he’s being honest.
Not waiting for a reply - regardless of how big of a jerk he’s been, he doesn’t want to let his maybe-hookup get the last word - he ducks out of the apartment, closing the door firmly behind him.
As he leaves, he catches the label hastily applied to the apartment door: 2C.
He’s not looking for it, per se, but he does happen to notice that the mailbox for the door says, underneath 2C, a name: Naib Subedar.
- - - ⏳ - - -
He doesn’t bother to call for an Uber - his phone battery is dangerously low, anyway - so it takes him near two hours to reach his destination. The humidity makes his skin feel sticky, sweat soaking through the back of his already day-old shirt, and his hair is plastered to his forehead. The howl of a car alarm follows him down the street from Naib’s apartment, piercing through his head like a pickaxe, and halfway there, a car skids through one of last night’s leftover puddles, splashing him with muddy spots of water. He swears under his breath, but eventually, his car and the front of Bourbon’s Bar come into blessed view.
He unlocks the car with a familiar beep . At the sound, a familiar head pokes around the bar’s door.
Of course Demi’s opening early today of all days. And, considering one of her favorite pastimes is teasing him mercilessly, she’s going to have a field day with this walk of shame he’s doing.
“Oh, hey, Norton. Long night?”
“I honestly don’t remember.” He shrugs like that’s normal and not, you know, a possible sign of a life-ruining descent into alcoholism, or just into making absolutely terrible decisions. “You’ve gotta stop giving me free beers, Dem.”
“Aw, but then when would I get to see you?” She skips over to his car, the white streaks in her hair bouncing. “You’re either here or shut up in your apartment all day…”
He laughs, and doesn’t mention that he’s barely spent time in the apartment, if he can help it. It’s not that his roommate is a problem or anything; he’s studying something morbid - mortuary science maybe? - and he’s usually shut up in his room with his face in a medical textbook. It’s just… sometimes when he’s there, it feels like the walls are closing in around him, and his throat tightens, he starts to struggle to breathe-
He knows it’s ridiculous and, well, crazy of him, but even so, he’s spent his free time walking in the neighborhood or through the trails in the nearby woods, until he’s so tired that when he returns all he can do is eat a quick dinner and fall directly into bed.
“That’s fair,” he concedes. “By the way, do you know how I-” He taps his black eye, and then immediately regrets doing so. Ouch . “- got this?”
“Ooh, that really doesn’t look good.” Demi leans in to get a closer look. “Yeah, that’s nasty . Uh, some asshole from Oletus U was giving another guy trouble. Short guy, in a hoodie? Anyway, you decided it was your business and stepped in. Looks like he really got you good. You might wanna stop by the urgent care-”
“Yeah,” Norton says, intending to do no such thing. Short guy… It couldn’t be…
Nah, he thinks. Plenty of short guys in town.
“He was fine, though,” Demi adds, grinning. “Not the OU asshole. Short guy nearly broke his freaking arm after you went down.”
Norton thinks back to the man’s arms, deceptively petite but decidedly muscular. (Not that he’d lingered on them, of course. Not at all.) “Huh. Well, I’m glad someone decided to avenge me after my tragic, uh, eye punching.”
“I’m serious, Norton!” she calls through the window as he stoops to get into the driver’s seat. “Urgent care!”
“Yeah, yeah!” he chirps back. Maybe he will take the bartender’s perfectly good advice, for maybe the second or third time in their years-long friendship. He’s just going to go home and rest his eyes first, is all. Then I’ll think about it, he tells himself as he climbs the stairs to his third-floor apartment, as he peels off his clothes and collapses into bed. I’ll definitely think about it…
- - - ⏳ - - -
When he wrenches his eyes open, it’s already seven PM. So much for the whole “medical attention” idea; by the time he drives to the urgent care outside town, it’ll be nearly time for it to close. At least his head is in slightly less pain; he still drags himself to the kitchen, swallowing a small handful of Tylenol and chasing it with a glass of water.
He tries not to look at the calendar.
When he steps into the living room, his roommate is tucked up into the armchair, no fewer than three books spread out across his body and a notebook in hand, furiously scribbling notes. Norton grimaces when he sees the diagrams of blood vessels and bone structure. He doesn’t feel like a bad roommate when he ducks back out of the room; Aesop doesn’t like to be bothered while he’s studying. It would be ruder to interrupt his work. Really, they’re the ideal roommates for each other - neither of them presses the other too much about their lives, which means neither can judge the other too harshly on anything. Plus, he’s so particular about food that he never eats Norton’s groceries, which is a plus. (He might smell a little bit like formaldehyde, but hey, he’d dealt with much worse when it comes to roommates in college.)
Instead of spending the evening sprawled in front of the TV, he grabs a jacket and the pack of cigarettes from his room - it’s a terrible habit, he’s more than aware - and squeezes through the window to climb the fire escape to the roof. From his usual perch on a small low platform - he thinks it might have something to do with electricity in the building, but he’s not sure - he can see the entire town of Oletus spread out beneath him, in all its crumbling former glory. This town is a shithole , he thinks, not for the first time. But with the sun down and the fall chill making the night feel oddly crystallized, from six stories up, it doesn’t look nearly as… shitty.
And besides, where else would he go? It’s a shithole, but it’s a shithole he’s chained down to.
He lights a cigarette, taking a drag and watching the shapes the smoke makes against the blue-black sky. Hey, he muses, thinking of the state of his eye. We almost match.
He’s not sure how much time has passed when he hears the sound of footsteps. Well, step, singular. It’s more like step, drag… step, drag … Maybe someone’s bringing a chair up to the roof. That’s not a bad idea, actually, he thinks, and then-
Then he hears the voice.
It’s not an out-loud, spoken voice, although it sounds the same as someone whispering near his ear; he knows from the sick feeling he gets the moment he hears it. He knows that voice, from his nightmares, and then before that-
Noooorton .
“No,” he finds himself saying, his body suddenly pins and needles all over, and then, “no,” again, nearly begging this time, because he can’t be hearing this. This cannot be real; his mind won’t accept it, but the step continues.
Step, drag, step, drag.
It sounds so close now. And even though his body is still screaming at him not to move, as though maybe whatever it is (though of course, Norton knows who it is) will somehow… not notice him, in his stillness, he slowly stands up and turns around.
The moment he does, he wants to be sick. The body in front of him takes the form of a human, but it can’t be called a person any longer, not really. Bones poke through its skin in places, through the elbows and where patches of its face are burnt away, and one leg is crushed, mangled beyond recognition as a limb if it weren’t still hanging limply from the… the thing’s hip.
Though of course it’s a person, isn’t it? Because Norton knows that face, underneath the blood and burns and the heavy dust of underground.
(The world explodes around him, and suddenly all light is gone; he can hear distant screams and sobs, and though he struggles to, he can’t move, can’t run for help…)
“No,” he says again, as if that will make the man in front of his eyes go away, and the once-was-person twists its lips into a horrible rictus of a smile. Step, drag. It steps forwards.
Norton steps back.
Norton… It’s so cold down here.
“No,” he mutters. “Please, no.” The words babble out of his mouth unbound, as natural as breathing.
Step, drag. Step, drag. Every time the… thing steps forwards, he takes a step back, his own legs moving on nothing but instinct, an instinct that screams run, get away, get far away from here , despite the fact that he’s otherwise frozen in place.
“Please,” he pleads. “You can’t be-”
We can be here, Norton. Wherever you go- if you try to run-
“No,” he says again, nearly sobbing, and takes another step back.
Into empty air.
As he falls, only one thought runs through his head, coldly coherent despite the terror running through his entire body: Well, it’s only fair, isn’t it?
His eyes are closed when he hits the ground.
- - - ⏳ - - -
Norton Campbell wakes up in an oddly familiar bed.