Chapter Text
The screen screamed at him again.
Thrice now its crackling cacophony lured him in like a moth to a flame. Calling. Beckoning.
Mono all but crushed his ears with his hands to drown it out. Answering its screeching call if only to make it just shut up.
Well, that and reaching the door at the end of the hallway.
The hallway that haunted him both in dreaming and in waking hours. The mystery. The unknown. Yet the unshakable promise of an answer lying in wait behind the door with the eye.
The answer to stopping this madness. To a better world.
Mono couldn’t explain it, he just had a feeling.
One he thought he could trust.
So he pressed his hand to the screen again. Tuned the Transmission again. Hoping his third attempt once he passed through the glass display would be the charm.
At once, he was in the hallway. Mono wasted no time getting up and running for the door. No distortions slowed his pace this time. And before he knew it, his hands were pulling the handle down and the door slowly swung open.
A wash of magenta light gleamed into the hall from the now-opened room. Dimming as it bent around the dark figure sitting in the room’s center.
Completely monochrome in dark shades of gray, a fiendish monster taking the deceptive form of a tall, slender human. A Thin Man dressed in a suit and (admittedly) a very nice fedora hat, in Mono’s opinion.
This however did little to lessen the growing terror in Mono’s chest as the figure rose to its feet, distorting the room and hall around them like a jagged flickering signal. A horror Mono had now unleashed.
A jolt.
Then at once, Mono was abruptly ejected back through the TV like the times before.
Six is there beside him, prodding him to sit up. Gesturing frantically for him to get up, pointing at the screen and the picture moving closer.
No.
The monster closing in.
The monster he released from its cage.
Six waves her hand, urging him to follow. To escape.
Mono himself still doesn’t know why he didn’t. Why when he stood up, he stepped towards the TV again.
Did he think he could tune the Transmission in time to block whatever he let out from reaching them or some other foolish idea like it? The kind of foolish that Six would swat him for as she did so many times on their journey?
He just knows Six is going to lay into him for this one. If they even make it out.
Mono barely has his hand lifted when the ringing returns, and a dark spectral pair of hands press against the screen from the inside.
Six sprints for the door in his peripheral vision while he’s stuck in place, clinging to his ears. The staticky din is so overwhelmingly, so painful, and it takes all his might not to scream with it.
It only lets up when the Thin Man emerges from the TV, gradually rising up to his full unnaturally tall height.
Mono bolts for the door.
Time is all weird around him (no doubt the Thin Man’s doing) and his legs feel like he’s running through the swamp water again, but he doesn’t slow down.
His heart stops when he trips.
Mono hits the floor hard, his limbs heavy like molasses as he tries to get up.
The Thin Man advances upon him in a calm stroll. No rush or urgency in his pace. Mockingly so.
Mono backpedals on all fours, still dreadfully slow thanks to the Thin Man’s power. The doorway to the second room is almost in reach. If he could just get there and hide–
That’s when Mono sees Six hiding under the table.
Right next to the door.
The brief distraction is all the opening the Thin Man needs to snatch Mono up.
Mono struggles against the tight hold on his body, but he’s no match for an adult, a monster, over five times his size.
Not that it stops the stubborn boy from trying.
Even as their bodies discorporate into glitching static as the Thin Man returns to the TV with his prey.
Mono fights and squirms, yells and kicks with all his might. And momentarily, he managed to free himself.
He dashed back for the TV doorway. Tiny fists banging against the screen. Trying to remember how to break through as he did all the times when he just had to see behind that stupid eye door!
Breathing hard and quick, Mono wills himself to focus despite his want to curl up in a ball. Wills for the glass to let him back through. Away from the monsters chasing him.
The boy all but cries behind his paper bag when he sees Six on the other side. Pulling on his hands back into the real world.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t the only one.
Just as Six has him pulled out up to his knees, a much larger and stronger hand seizes hold around his waist.
His hands slip from Six as the Thin Man yanks him back.
The girl falls over, reaching for him again, but is only able to reclaim the paper bag of her companion as he’s taken away.
“SIX!!”
Pulsing flesh and hundreds of eyes surrounding Mono’s vision before everything cuts to black.