Chapter Text
EJ opens his eyes.
The room is dark. He’s lying flat on his back, the wood against his button-down cold and solid. He looks up at the ceiling, squints to make out what he’s even looking at, and his brows draw. He’s in the auditorium.
What the hell?
He doesn’t remember how he got here. He doesn’t remember driving here, or being driven here, and he lives way too far to have walked here. Isn’t it Sunday? He thinks it’s Sunday, but he can’t say for sure. Regardless, it’s silent, which it never ever is, which means that most likely nobody’s here, which means that it’s safe to say he shouldn’t be either.
So, as EJ does when he doesn’t know what the fuck to do, he tries to get things straight in his head. Step one: take inventory of his surroundings. He sits up, groaning. The sound echoes against the walls, around the room, hitting the ceiling and the floor before making its way back to his ears in waves. He looks around and sees that, yes, the room’s empty, and shakes his head. The theater is never quiet, never dark. There are always people, and they’re always loud. This isn’t right.
Then, suddenly, his head whips toward the doors. There’s noise. It’s faint, but it’s footsteps. Murmurs. Shit. He'll have to explain what he’s doing here, alone in the pitch-dark, and he doesn’t even know where to fucking begin. What is he doing here?
Suddenly, though, just as soon as he thinks he can pick out Carlos’s voice among those of the group, there’s a hand grabbing his wrist.
“Come with me,” says a voice, low and urgent and an inch from his ear, and EJ jumps. He turns to look it in the eye, and finds two deep brown ones boring into his own. They belong to a boy, just around his age, with dark copper hair and a panicked look on his face. EJ’s never seen him before.
“Come on,” the boy says again, tugging on his wrist, eyes beseeching and desperate. With one last glance at the door, EJ grunts in exasperation and confusion and follows.
The boy drags him to the dressing room, weaving between boxes and sidestepping cracks in the floor like he’s made the trek a thousand times before. EJ’s brows crease. He doesn’t know him. He looks a bit familiar, but it’s faint, and EJ doesn’t think he’s ever seen him in his life. He can say confidently that he’d remember those curls.
It’s about the only thing he can say confidently at the moment.
Once they’re safely in the dressing room, the boy lets go of his wrist and turns around, slamming the door shut behind them and breathing hard. He scrambles to lock the door, and once he does, he spins around and collapses against it, eyes screwed shut.
“Oh my god,” he breathes, pressing a hand to his stomach, bending over and sighing. “Why do you guys always have to get here so early—” he starts to say, voice tired, before his eyes snap back open and meet EJ’s.
“Um.” He swallows. “Hi.”
EJ’s brows draw. His mouth opens, then closes, and what finally escapes it once he’s capable of making any noise at all is a strangled grunt.
“‘Hi’? Who even are you?” he asks, gesturing aggressively in the boy’s direction. “Did you bring me here?” he asks, more an accusation than a question.
The boy holds up his hands. “Whoah, no, okay? Nobody brought you here. I just—” He sighs and pauses, worrying at his lip. He hesitates. “I didn’t want you to see them yet. I have to talk to you first.”
“Talk?” EJ shakes his head, mystified. “Talk about what, you kidnapping me?”
“No,” the boy says, voice firm, holding out a hand to calm him like he’s a fucking dog. EJ’s blood boils. Who is this guy?
As if in answer, the boy speaks. “My name’s Ricky. You don’t know me, but you’re EJ, right?” Without waiting for EJ to nod, the boy—Ricky—nods, as if he’d known he was right before he’d even asked. He continues, lowering his hands. “No one else has ever showed up here before, so I don’t really know how to go about this, so I guess I’ll just rip the bandaid off, yeah? Okay. I’ll just say it.” He bites his lip and hesitates.
“You’re dead.”
EJ waits for him to finish his sentence, but Ricky’s quiet. He’s staring at him, shoulders tense, waiting for a reaction, as if anything he just said was complete or coherent or anything EJ could react to at all.
“Why am I dead?” he asks slowly, shaking his head. “What did I do? Do you live here or something?”
Ricky stares at him, looking like a doe-eyed baby deer in the headlights, before his eyes narrow slightly. “Do I—?” He breaks off. “I don’t think you’re totally grasping what I’m saying,” he says carefully.
EJ throws up his hands. “I’m dead! Something about me being here at the ass-crack of dawn pissed you off enough for you to drag me into a dressing room and threaten me into leaving. Which I’m happy to do, by the way, but can you at least tell me what I did? I don’t even know how I got here,” he tells him.
Ricky visibly cringes. He looks at him with such overwhelming… EJ can’t think of anything to call it except pity, that his face screws up against it. “No, I mean… you’re dead. You died. This place meant a lot to you when you were alive, so your spirit went here after… you know, whatever happened happened.” He averts his gaze, dragging the toe of his beaten up sneaker across the linoleum at his feet. “But yeah, man. You died.”
EJ blinks. A moment passes in silence before he blinks again, then scoffs, shaking his head. “Very funny—Ricky, was it? Great job. Hilarious, truly,” he grants, before sliding past him and unlocking the door.
“EJ—!” Ricky calls, but he’s already gone.
He makes his way down the hall, hopping onto and off of boxes as he goes, and notes with some confusion that he can’t hear footsteps following him. In fact, everything’s quiet, not a single sound permeating the silence of the hallway. It’s a bit odd—he thought Ricky would have at least tried following him. His joke was embarrassingly short-lived if he gives up on it now.
Once he gets close enough to the wings, though, he can hear his friends chattering amongst themselves. He picks up the pace and straightens his spine. “Hey, you guys—”
The second he rounds the corner, he’s blinded by the brightest blue light he’s ever seen.
He staggers back, throwing up a hand to cover his eyes, and cries out. His eyes burn, and he whimpers, but the chatter doesn’t stop—it carries on as if there hadn’t been a noise at all. His friends’ voices are loud, coming from where he’d seen the lights, but that doesn’t make any sense. Ricky had been a momentary distraction, but again, he’s drawn back to the fact that none of this makes any fucking sense.
He cracks an eye open and squints between his fingers, trying to make out where the lights are coming from, and can see the vague shape of a person. His eyes slide over the stage, and he counts five. No, six. Six lights in the vague shapes of people, sat in a clump, glowing blue, with his friends voices coming from them.
When EJ turns around, Ricky’s there, looking at him as if he’s a powder keg. He feels like one.
“Talk,” he grits out.
Ricky nods. “You should sit,” he says nervously, gesturing to two wooden crates strewn in the wings.
With a glance at the boxes, and one at Ricky, EJ does.