Chapter Text
It’s a little after seven o’clock in the evening when Jaskier turns off of Main Street to find his entire street swathed in fog, a series of yellow and white barricades preventing him from doing much more than pulling his car safely off of the main road—and even that’s a stretch, seeing as his bumper had kissed the nearest barricade long before the fog had cleared enough for him to actually see that there was an obstruction in the road.
He cuts the engine with a flick of his wrist and slides his keys into his pocket. He’s literally less than one-hundred feet from Geralt’s house, he can walk—
He slides out of the car, phone in hand. The flashlight function won’t help him here—the fog is much too dense, and the bright light will only further obscure Jaskier’s vision. But, if there’s something… wrong… then he wants to have it close by, in order to dial 911. He’s not sure why their road is blocked off, or why the fog is so dense here when, on Main Street, the night had been clear, but he’s seen enough horror movies to know that these are never harbingers of anything good. He cannot see flashing red-and-blue lights, cannot hear voices in the distance… but there is an odd scraping sound, which stops and starts at odd intervals, like someone is dragging something heavy and metal behind them with each belabored step.
The sound of his car door slamming closed echoes in the otherwise silent night, the resounding thwap causing his heart to leap up into his chest. It’s fine. It’s fine. He reminds himself, firmly, that there’s less than one-hundred feet between himself and safety. He has the spare key that Geralt had given him just a few days ago in his pants’ pocket, right alongside the keys to his car. He can’t run—it wouldn’t be safe, seeing as he can barely see more than a foot ahead of him at any given time—but if he keeps calm and keeps his wits about him, he should be able to navigate down the road without incident. With that in mind, he reaches out to feel along the barricade, looking for some kind of opening that would be wide enough for him to be able to slip through—
“He’s coming for you.” Two sets of identical, electric-blue eyes bore into him. Jaskier cannot really make out the rest of their faces, but he sees what he thinks might be blood and that wrenches a proper scream from his throat. “Run little birdy. Run.”
That horrific metallic screeching is getting louder. Jaskier thinks he smells something burning, sees the bright flash of sparks cut through the fog.
What in all the hells had he walked into?
He still can’t run, because he is absolutely not about to become a horror movie stereotype by tripping over nothing and opening himself up to be impaled with a fucking chainsaw, but he can certainly pick up the pace… quite a bit. He has to swing a little too close to the creepy children for comfort in order to make it past the barricade—they’re twins, he realizes, dressed in all-black clothes that look like they’ve been charred; they’re holding hands and pointing off in the direction that the scraping is coming from, the bulk of their faces still shrouded in fog and darkness—but he considers that a small price to pay to be that much closer to safety. Geralt will know what’s going on. Geralt will—
Jaskier was supposed to be home a little over two hours ago. He’d promised Geralt that he would take part in his family’s time-honored tradition of going ridiculously above and beyond for Halloween every single year. He’d assumed, at the time, that this meant being asked to wear one of Lambert’s handmade outfits. (To be honest, when Geralt had told him that his youngest brother had been in charge of making everyone’s Halloween outfits for the last several years, he’d been… a bit skeptical as to the quality he could expect. That was, of course, until Geralt had shown him pictures of their costumes from last year—the family had been inspired by the video game series Borderlands, and not only had Lambert created a hyper-realistic Handsome Jack mask for Geralt, he’d also designed a functional mech to go along with his own Gaige costume. When Jaskier had looked at him, completely and utterly gob-smacked, he’d flushed as bright as his hair and admitted he’d had some help from Vesemir—
When he’d brought Ciri over to Geralt’s house that morning, so that the girls could finish getting ready together, he’d found Geralt pinning Hadria into an interactive Poison Ivy costume. All of her vines were motion activated—Jaskier didn’t even want to begin to think about how much time it’d taken to craft all of the individual moving pieces, let alone how much it’d cost to put it all together. There was truly no denying Geralt’s family went above and beyond…
It actually made Jaskier a little sad that all they’d asked him to do was wear a pair of jeans, a bomber jacket, and a blond wig.
He hadn’t the slightest who this mysterious ‘James’ character was… and it didn’t really matter now, seeing as something was apparently chasing him—)
Now, the absolute last thing on his mind is the outfit that Geralt had carefully laid out on his bed for him, or the fact that he’d never actually bothered to ask why Geralt was so insistent that he be home by five o’clock. There’s a distant part of his brain that thinks that Geralt might’ve tried to explain all of this to him when he’d first proposed the idea… and again that morning, when he’d dropped Ciri off before school… but really, Geralt should know by now that Jaskier only listens to about fifty percent of what comes out of his mouth. The other fifty percent of the time, he’s too preoccupied watching the way those pretty lips contort around the sounds of vowels and consonants to think straight—
Especially when, like that morning, Geralt is indulging his oral fixation… his boyfriend had been sucking on the pins he was using to hold Hadria’s vines in place, and that simply wasn’t fair. How the hell was he supposed to concentrate when the thin lines of metal were creating pretty little divots in his plush pink skin, the sharp end of the needle occasionally pricking his delicate skin and drawing dark beads of blood to the surface…
Mmm… now was definitely not the time.
He’s coming up on Geralt’s house now. Just a couple more steps, and—there’s a sudden flash of silver, and then the scrape of rusted metal over his skin. “No, no, no…” He stumbles backwards so fast he trips over the curb and lands squarely on his ass.
The… The creature that’s apparently been stalking him grunts, long and low. “Hgnnn…” Jaskier thinks he feels his soul leave his body.
A hand closes around his shoulder and squeezes, either intending to help him back to his feet so that the creature could impale him on that ridiculously large knife that it’d been dragging around (no wonder he could hear that horrible scraping sound from clear down the street), or dislocate his shoulder and incapacitate him from the pain. Neither were particularly good options, as far as Jaskier was concerned.
He lashes about, frantic, and manages to dislodge the creature. For being a thing of nightmare, it’s incredibly clumsy—Jaskier doesn’t think that it can actually see him all that well behind the mask, especially not through all the fog. He takes advantage of its momentary confusion to haul himself to his feet and take off toward Geralt’s front door, his right hand clutching his phone so tightly his knuckles bloom a brilliant white, while his left hand fumbles in his pocket for Geralt’s house key. It takes him all of three seconds to realize that it’s not in there. And then he remembers… he’d brought his car to Geralt’s shop earlier that week to have it inspected, and his boyfriend had asked him to take all of the keys off of his key ring before dropping them off in the after-hours drop-box. He’d never put the key back on his keychain, which meant… the key wasn’t in his pocket after all. It was in his car’s cupholder, which was lost somewhere in the white void of fog. Gods, he was… he was locked out of the house, with…
He looks back just in time to see the creature stumbling after him, the blade in his hand throwing up sparks as it drags along the concrete. The fog is a little bit thinner here—to the point where he can see that the creature appears to be wearing a skirt made out of an unusual material, in various, deeply unsettling shades of pinks and browns. It’s shirtless, it’s scarred chest on full display, muscles rippling beneath pale skin as it hauls its weapon onward… and attempts to balance an over-large triangular pyramid on top of its head. Gods above, was that was he’d felt rubbing against his skin when he’d… He stumbles backwards, nearly tripping on the stairs that lead up to Geralt’s front porch.
The door is locked, because of course it is. There’s a bowl of candy on the little wrought iron table, with instructions to ‘take one’ written in large, flowing letters—Hadria and Ciri were supposed to be taking Aiden and Lambert’s kids out trick-or-treating that night, but Jaskier didn’t know when they were leaving or when they’d be back. He doubted they’d be back so early—there was no point trick-or-treating while it was still light out, after all, but—
He bangs on the door like a man possessed, each wrap of his knuckles against the wood ringing through the eerily silent night like a gunshot.
“Hadria?! Ciri?! Are you in t-there? Please… oh, gods, please open the fucking door.” He grabs the handle and rattles it, shaking the door in the doorjamb. He can hear the creature approaching behind him—he’s over by the garage now, getting closer by the second. “Please..!”
The door swings open, and two ghastly looking creatures in faded, rotted pink nurse’s uniforms come stumbling out onto the porch, their sallow, gray-yellow faces streaked with blood. “Hgnnn…”
One takes a swipe at him, and this time, he falls clear off of the porch, landing flat on his ass. It hurts like a bitch, but there’s no time to think about the pain.
He screams, rolling out of the way just in time to narrowly avoid colliding with being crushed in-between the mutated nurses and the thing of nightmare that’s been stalking him (which he is beginning to think is wearing a skirt made out of human flesh). One of the nurses, far braver than Jaskier would ever be, thunks the beast on the chest, and they grunt back and forth at one another for several moments before deciding that the best course of action in this situation would be to all gang up on Jaskier at once. Which is just… fucking… wonderful. He stumbles to his feet, taking off through the dewy grass in the hopes of buying himself just a little bit more time to make a clean getaway—
He presses the ‘home’ button on his phone and demands, shakily, that “Siri, call Geralt.”
She repeats back to him, in an utterly detached monotone, “Calling Geralt – home.”
The phone is ringing, and then—to his horror, he turns around to find that the skin-skirt that the creature is wearing is lighting up, like there’s a fucking internal pocket. The creature, it… it has Geralt’s phone. Tears burn at the corners of his eyes as realization settles in his bones like lead. Every so often, the moonlight reflects off of the creature’s massive blade clearly enough for him to make out the unmistakable splatter of blood.
Whatever this… this thing was, it’d already killed Geralt—and it was coming for him, next.
“He’s coming for you.” Two sets of identical, electric-blue eyes bore into him. Jaskier cannot really make out the rest of their faces, but he sees what he thinks might be blood and that wrenches a proper scream from his throat. “Run little birdy. Run.”
He starts to move faster, fear overriding his sense of reason. “Siri, call Cirilla.”
A pause, then, “Calling Cirilla – home.”
He prays, silently, that she’s out trick-or-treating with Aleksander and Aleksandra. Because, if she is, that means that she’ll answer her phone, and—his train of thought comes to an abrupt end when the call rolls over to Ciri’s voicemail, her cheery outgoing message informing the caller that she’s probably out raising Cain with her girlfriend right now and can’t be bothered to come to the phone. He tries calling her three more times, each with the same result. And then his phone decides to inform him that it’s down to twenty percent battery life—the bitterly cold air draining its reserves even faster than usual. He has a charger at home, and an extra one at Geralt’s house—neither of which are viable options at the moment. There’s also one in his car, but, again… He makes a right off of Geralt’s property, intending to head further down the street in the hopes that there might be someone around that could help him. As soon as he turns, however, he sees it.
It being a massive conglomeration of bodies lurking at the end of the street, which seem to jolt to life every time that one of the street lights flicker to life. No, bodies doesn’t even seem to be the right word for them. They’re… legs stacked on top of legs, twisting and writhing against one another like insects. He stops in his tracks, air catching in his lungs. He… thinks that he might be better off taking his chances with the creature with the oversized butcher knife.
The children pop back up at his side, their eerie blue eyes glowing in the darkness, “Ring-a-round the rosie, a pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all… fall… down!” Jaskier falls flat on his ass yet again, and oh, gods, is that going to hurt come morning.
If there even is going to be a morning, after this hellscape.
The horrible scrape of metal on asphalt is what gets him back onto his feet one last time, his legs stumbling around the singing children to make a last minute break for the park. “Siri, call Hadria.”
“Calling Hadria – home.”
He doesn’t think that she’ll answer. If she was with Ciri, or if she was in the house… so color him surprised when, a second later, Hadria answers the phone, greeting him around a long, drawn-out yawn. He’s so shocked that he cannot bring himself to say anything to her at first (although, that might also have something to do with the fact that he doesn’t think he’s ever gotten this much cardio in his life—if the creature doesn’t kill him, this just might).
“Julian?” She almost sounds concerned. A million different questions come to mind and die on his tongue. “You were supposed to be back like… two hours ago. What gives?” The concern gives way to irritation rather easily… ah, yes, that’s the Hadria he knows.
But there’s no time for him to dwell on that now. “Where are you?”
“…At home?” She says, as if it is inconceivable that she would be anywhere else. But… there was literally no way that she was at home. Not when those… those nurses had come tumbling out of Geralt’s front door, covered in blood. And… if she was at home, where the hell was Ciri? “I’m literally standing outside, watching you run around like a chicken with its head cut off.”
All that registers in Jaskier’s panicked brain is the fact that she’s outside. “W-Wait, no. What? You have to get back inside, somewhere safe—right the fuck now. There are creepy children covered in blood following me and I don’t even fucking know how to begin to describe what the hell is going on at the end of the street and—” He hears that scraping again, coming over the line. “H-Hadria? Hadria, what’s going on?”
There’s a pause, then, “You’re panicking, Julian. Just stay put. We’re coming to get you.”
“W-We?”
The call ends abruptly, and he realizes, with a start, that his phone battery has finally died. His body aches for the sheer number of times that he’s stumbled and fallen, and the idea of progressing further is so damned exhausting he can’t bring himself to move. Tears pour down his cheeks as he thinks of his precious daughter, of his boyfriend… Hadria couldn’t have known what’d happened to them. She’d been far too calm. The only consolation he has for the absolutely brutal death that he’s certain awaits him is that he’ll be with them again soon. It’s with that thought that the nurses’ gnarled bodies appear from the pocket of fog, the gruesome, pyramid-headed creature nipping at their heels.
He appears to be… holding onto them, like he can’t see out from underneath his mask. That’s… odd.
“Hgnnn…” all three of them seem to growl, in tandem. That silver blade swings forward, the tip imbedding itself in the dirt. Oh, that was going to hurt when it pierced his skin—
And then they… they reach for his mask with their gnarled, gray fingers, and… well, Jaskier doesn’t remember much of anything after that, because his legs choose that moment to give out, sending him tumbling forward into a surprisingly comfortable chest—and then everything goes black.