Chapter Text
Zakk doesn’t speak to him for another week.
Brodie spends it in silence; he doesn’t play music, barely leaves his room, doesn’t leave his house. Anything he needs, he can ask Medina to grab for him and pay her with his ever-shrinking stash pilfered from abandoned houses around the neighbourhood. She'll pull a face and call him a lazy ass, but come back from her part-time job with bread or milk or cigarettes.
He doesn’t tell Medina that Zakk talked to him. Hell, it doesn’t feel real half the time, like he imagined it. It was only a few words, barely a greeting, and then a sharp burst of staticky screams, and silence. Maybe it was just wishful thinking, missing Zakk like a motherfucker, combining into some weird-ass hallucination. Or, maybe not.
He doesn’t tell Medina though. She doesn’t find anything strange, at first, with Brodie’s silence and brooding and staying inside. It’s not uncommon for him to be quiet, especially not now, and sometimes he can’t deal with playing music. It’s like he’s there all over again, Daggers’ house, facing down against goddamn cultists and demons, and Zakk, twisted horns and sharp crooked teeth, fighting against the pure evil inside of himself, all because of Brodie’s hunger for power and petty jealousy. It eats at him, like rats, a slow torture, just for him, the one who caused the whole fucking mess, who caused so much shit, so much blood.
The one who caused Zakk’s death.
He can’t really blame Zakk for not talking to him again.
Eventually, seven days after Zakk spoke through the record player, Medina mentions it. Subtlety never was her thing, so when Brodie leaves his room to get something to eat, she corners him in the kitchen and says, “What’s up with you?”
Brodie wants to leave, but Medina has, almost certainly purposely, positions herself between him and escape, leaning on the door frame with crossed arms and a soft look on her face.
He knows it’s only because she cares, but it doesn’t stop it from feeling like an ambush.
“Nothing.”
Medina doesn’t roll her eyes, but it’s a near thing. A look crosses her face quickly, that he doesn’t quite catch, but he knows she knows he’s bullshitting. Moving away from the doorway, she stands beside him, still looking at him with that look. Like he’s going to run if she moves too fast. Brodie can’t stand looking her in the eyes when she gets that look and turns away to stare out the kitchen window, gazing onto the dull green lawn and the for-sale signs dotting the houses on the opposite side of the street.
“If you don’t wanna tell me, I’m not going to make you. But, y’know, I’m here. If you do want to.”
She leans in and kisses his cheek, and he lets her. It’s the sort of thing she does, small touches, and he can’t say they’re not reassuring to him.
They haven’t done more than some late-night and half-hearted groping and, literally, sleeping together, but Brodie finds he doesn’t mind. She’s not treating him like fine china, so he figures that’s something to do with her rather than him. (He pretends it’s not also a good excuse.)
As she turns to leave, he grabs her wrist, and slides his hand down to grasp hers, squeezing gently. She squeezes back, and he knows she understands.
Brodie traipses back up to his room to–
To what?
He hasn’t done much since it all went down, and even less since Zakk talked to him. It feels redundant. He hasn’t got anything to work towards; his school’s closed, his family’s all dead, his mom’s in a mental institution on the other side of the fucking country still, he has no friends anymore, since Giles and Dion and- since they got killed. He has Medina and his guitar, and maybe fucking schizophrenia since he heard his dead best friend through the goddamn record player.
The thought only passes through his head before he hears the crackle of a record starting. The vinyl - Spiritual Healing - starts spinning, but no music plays, only the faint buzz of electricity and static.
He feels frozen in his desk chair, the same as he felt staring down Aeloth, the same oppressive feel in the air, like before a thunderstorm, like a live wire.
The shriek of guitar is felt before he hears it, the ground seeming to rumble and quake, shaking his rickety desk chair so much he can hear the protesting creak of old springs, and he finally finds his feet and propels himself forwards towards the record player, which cannot be making the noise, it’s so fucking loud, so fucking much-
Sparks seem to fly from the record player, bursting out as a bolt of bright blue shoots across the needle, and he can smell burning plastic it’s spinning so fast. The sounds are unlike anything he’s heard before, not the slow, heavy rhythm of the Black Hymn, but like wind howling and fabric ripping, screams of guitar like the screams of Aeloth, piercing and seeming to fade into the roaring din as he hears a voice. Zakk’s voice .
He wants to shout and laugh and punch something, Zakk’s talking to him again , but he stays silent as Zakk’s voice comes into focus and the words are apparent.
“Brodie! Brodie ! I’m- I’m gonna--”
The next sound levels Brodie to his knees, and fuck , that can’t be coming from the record player, it’s so strong and sharp it feels like a getting gored by Aeloth all over again. He’s just barely aware when something hot and wet spills down from his ears and he knows it’s blood, it can’t be anything else, other than maybe his brain fucking liquifying.
And then the sound gets higher, higher than he thought possible, but then heat grows in his head and all noise stops.
He comes to with a hard slap to the face and Medina holding onto his shoulder sharply, slumped against his bed and hearing nothing when her mouth opens.
There’s a faint something ringing in his ears, something like a ringing but he’s never experienced something like this, not even after the apocalypse, but he cannot hear Medina.
Medina seems to understand, and moves away from him, searching through his desk drawers, and he sees the record player, sitting in the corner of his room, thick smoke coming from the back of it. Well fuck. That’s evidence towards him not having schizophrenia, he supposes.
Staggering to his feet, he looks around his room, seeing glittering pieces of glass on his bed from where his window has shattered, and posters hanging off the walls, moving in the fierce wind coming through his window. The sky has turned dark grey, clouds converging to a black, swirling storm cloud above the neighbourhood. The air feels electrified, and if the sky is anything to go by, a storm is coming.
The hand on his shoulder startles him, distracted by the freaky, hypnotic weather, and he turns to see Medina holding a notebook up to him, written in a shaky hand, what the fuck happened.
He meets her eye and sees the same fear he feels reflected back at him. He shivers, and it could be the bracing wind through the shattered window, but he feel uneasy to his core. Viscerally wrong, sickening dread settling low in his stomach.
He opens his mouth and then closes it again. What the fuck did happen?
Zakk… Zakk did something. Brodie feels sure of that. That was definitely Zakk, not some hallucination or figment of his wishful imagination.
He can feel his voice vibrate through his skull, but can’t hear it aloud, when he says, “Zakk. He’s done something.”
Medina says something, then winces and starts scribbling something down again, turning to him with wide eyes when she finishes and hold up the notebook. Zakks dead.
Yeah. He thought so too.
Brodie’s head burns, his ears ache, and a wave of blinding nausea makes bile rise in his throat. He hurts so much, and he’s so confused, and he can’t stop when tears well up and run down his face.
Medina’s face crumples and she steps towards him and his arms wrap around her, holding her tight to him, and he is so goddamn glad he has her still. She feels like she’s holding him up, both where he stands and in general, a light to talk to, about music, about life, about whatever bullshit because he knows he’ll feel like a person after it. He holds her, and pretends he can’t feel her shirt grow damp under his face.
Medina sends him straight to bed, which isn’t a bad idea, but he still feels like protesting against her silent judgement and perfected glare.
“I can’t do that, my window’s broken.”
She doesn’t say anything, just gives him the look again, and goes in search of something to sort the window out.
The storm outside seems to call as much as it seems to repel him, growing darker even though it’s still morning, darker until his room is shadowed when Medina returns with a roll of duct tape and a large piece of cardboard, throwing the tape to Brodie, who fumbles, dropping it, making Medina smirk, and he even cracks a smile at that.
Together, with Medina holding the cardboard (an unfolded pizza box, disgusting even to him) up to the window and Brodie strapping it to the wall with long strips of duct tape, ripping pieces off with his teeth and pretending the harsh sound so close to his skull doesn’t ring through his head like the music did not thirty minutes ago.
When it is securely taped down, he flops down onto the bed, not even caring about the scattered glass, too exhausted to care, until Medina huffs and he relents, sitting up to brush the tiny shards away. One catches on his hand, and he winces, but the pain is nothing compared to the pounding still in his head, increasing with every second he spends upright and awake.
The tape seems to hold against the wind, not getting blown out as he sees the cardboard bow and bend against the strengthening storm, and he hopes that it does stay, because the dark of his room drags him to the edge of unconsciousness, and when Medina drags his discarded duvet over him and gently squeezes his shoulder, he’s out like a snuffed match.
What feels like mere minutes later, he’s awoken by the loudest clap of thunder he’s ever heard, on the same level as the tempestuous storm that had shaken the entire town during the apocalypse.
He feels dizzy and disoriented, the pitch blackness only adding to his confusion, feeling like he’s been swallowed by the void. He strikes out in a panic, his duvet having twisted around him in his sleep, feeling trapped, even more consumed by the darkness.
Half-staggering, half-falling out of bed, he takes a few quick steps before he falls, dizziness rising so much that he can hear static which joins the ringing of his ears, a cacophony of white noise, too loud in the dark, too much.
He stays there a moment, on his knees, head buried in his hand and eyes screwed shut, hiding from the sound, from the pitch black of his room.
When he feels like standing won’t bring him right back to his knees, he runs a shaking hand over the ground in front of him, searching for something, familiar, anything, until he feels where carpet meets wall and guides himself to his feet. He moves his hand until he finds the edge of the door frame, grabbing the handle and pulling it open.
The light from the hallways feels like an assault on his brain, so bright and so much, and goddamnit, has he not already had enough when another clap of thunder that seems to echo in a staccato beat rings out, reverberating until Brodie realizes it’s not just his fried brain that’s making it carry on, resonating like rapid-fire knocking.
When he focuses on it, it almost seems like somebody pounding frantically on the front door.
Medina? Maybe she got caught in the storm?
He makes his way downstairs trembling, still feeling raw from earlier, and finds the downstairs dark but for the light near the door. It casts his reflection back at him, distorted by the warped glass, acting as a mirror and hiding whoever is on the other side, still knocking; it’s slower now, longer pauses between raps, off-beat musical bangs that rattle the, albeit battered, door frame.
When one long pause seems to signal the end of the attack, Brodie almost opens the door; he waits, one second longer and a strike of bright and pale lightning makes the light above the door blink out momentarily as the person on the doorstep is illuminated in eerie negative space, like a black and white movie monster, hand raised to begin another round of knocking on the door, and Brodie pulls the door open as thunder rattles the ground beneath him (or maybe, none of this is advised for people who still can’t hear anything in fine detail, only for people can stand with any reliability and who don't feel the floor shake when they stand or walk or breathe too hard) and he near falls on his ass when the door is blown open by the wind, the figure swaying into the dimly-lit threshold as they go to pound on the door again, and-
It’s Zakk.
Zakk, covered in wet mud from head to goddamn fucking toe, dressed in the tattered and stained clothes he died and was subsequently buried in, up at the lookout where Medina and Brodie had carried ( dragged ) his stinking body to, once they escaped the suffocating care of the hospital and rushed back to Daggers’ house before anyone could clean up the mess there and take him.
Zakk, teeth and eyes startling against the opaque brown of grave dirt, illuminated by the weak yellow light, who takes a couple of steps into the house, enough to throw a hand back to throw the door closed, before promptly dropping like a bag of fucking rocks at Brodie’s feet.