Chapter Text
There had always been the buzz of static to his skin.
Not always. Not constantly. But she’d noticed it, the first time he reached out to her; something light and sightless, that fizzled across the empty space between them and tingled like the air of an oncoming storm. It hadn’t been the only reason she pushed him away and fled, but it certainly hadn’t hurt.
And then, in all the time thereafter, it lingered.
Sometimes the threads on his coat stood and quivered, electrified by static. Sometimes when he took her hand, there was nothing stranger to it than skin…and others, there was the bite of the shock discharging. Never quite painful, but always startling. In their time stumbling through that hopeless city, she had time enough to almost get used to it. Time enough to pause once, beside the hum of an abandoned television, and draw her fingers across the static at its fizzling screen, and feel uneasy at the familiarity of it.
There had always been the static. And, after it was all said and done, and there was no longer a hand to crackle in hers, it still remained.
Beneath her raincoat, the threadbare fibres of her clothes lifted in the static charge, as though he was still there beside her. A ghost, or a remnant, that she couldn’t shake away.
She gave a wide berth to every television she saw, and at all costs avoided touching them.
Until a library, in a twisted ship, where a twisted creature and its twisted arms were hunting her, and a familiar screen sat quiescent in the corner. It wasn’t on, but the barest hint of that familiar electricity lingered about it regardless. The charge she still carried made the hairs on her arms stand on end as she looked at it, then stared back behind her wild-eyed at the stumbling Janitor, and then finally lunged for the switch.
She’d have avoided the accursed thing forever, if she could. But she needed a distraction to get out of here with the crank, and pragmatism won out.
Six turned on the television.
Something in the static came alive then; something breathing, something hissing, something more vast and dizzying than the electric expanse of the air could ever begin to hold. Her head swam as she lunged away, scrabbling for the bookcase as the Janitor clattered over. Wet breathing and tapping hands sounded behind her, a clack-clack of teeth in a twisted face; the creature investigated the television, but found nothing amiss except that it was on, and making sounds, apparently of its own accord.
It was a success. By all accounts, it was nothing but a success. She couldn’t quite manage to climb with the crank, and didn’t want to risk running through the doorway unless she had to, but she tossed it through to recover later, so it should’ve been a success. Six should have been half-way across the room by the time it took his attention to shift, should’ve been gone, should’ve been a quiet shadow in the papery rafters, no more substance for spindly hands to grasp than the dust in the dark.
Instead, she climbed the stack to the window, and then lingered there with hands tight on a book larger than her own body, head swimming, vision pulsing with light, struggling not to fall. There was the breathing of the Janitor and the singing of the television, droning on and on, the sound shifting up and down and up and down and through the teeth of a terrible, crackling, seething mouth of white-noise in her ears, in her hands, in her skin and gums and teeth-
She remembered a tall, thin man; she remembered the static storm of his presence, the way the world bent and warped and her mind warped with it and her flesh warped with it; remembered what it was like to be taken in. She shuddered and shook like a leaf, and was so dizzy that she didn’t even notice she was falling until she hit the ground.
It hurt. It made a noise, too. By the light of the television, swimming and pulsing in her eyes, she saw it: the Janitor turned, long arms questing, twisted head listening, teeth clack-clack-clacking as it lunged to where she’d fallen.
She stumbled to the side, just barely far enough. She pushed to her feet, just in time to jump away from the hand that snatched for her middle, fingers large enough to block out her vision before she surpassed them; the strobing light burned in her eyes. The Janitor’s body occluded the gap in the wall; its arm guarded the only way she could climb. She could jump over it, if she was lucky, if she could stand, if she had her wits about her.
But she was full of white noise, and could not climb, and there was only one direction left to go.
Six was a creature of fear, but worshipped survival with a desperation that lived in the very marrow of her fragile bones. To touch the distortion was a horror beyond belief, but it was not death. Death was not the static in her teeth. Death was the hand looming behind her. She rejected it, and leapt for the swimming, blurring screen of the television. Had there been figures dancing on it, a minute ago? Voices singing? Now there was only the pale blue warp-and-twist of the Transmission.
Her fingers touched the glass, and it was not glass. Static bit at her and swallowed her; momentum carried her in. The Janitor hissed and shrieked behind, voice all eaten up in the white noise as she vanished into the throat of the empty, flickering corridor.
An empty corridor, with a door at the end. The stone eye carved there seemed almost to watch her.
Six stared, frozen where she knelt, half-fallen and trembling. Suddenly it seemed terribly quiet, as though the static buzz had carried over into some space where it was the meat of the silence, maddeningly loud and frightfully empty at once. The contradiction ached at her. Her head pounded, the pain lurid enough that colours pulsed and shifted behind her eyes.
It was hardly the first time she’d seen this place. She’d pulled Mono from it twice, fear icy in her veins, electricity bursting over the spaces where their fingers joined. It had been so hard to drag him out, when it seemed to want so badly to swallow him whole. And then…
She breathed in, breathed out, and the sound of it was dead and gone in the deafening not-silence of the empty space. Beyond her terror there was the desperate, familiar clarity of life-and-death. She’d escaped destruction by a hair’s width too many times to lose her head to fear. Coldly, in the midst of terror, she acknowledged: she had absolutely no intention of approaching that door. Never, never, never. She’d wait, perhaps, wait out the static and the noise and the biting crackle of the air, then leave the way she’d come…
Until she turned, staring at the way back, where there was nothing. Not a wall; not quite. Something like a shadow, but nothing to do with light. Something about an absence where elsewhere there was presence. She could not pass that way. There was nothing there.
Slowly, Six turned back towards the door, and watched. This place had her now. Wouldn’t it take her? Wouldn’t it twist her? Wouldn’t the door open and swallow her whole?
But there was nothing. Nothing stirred, nothing reached, nothing opened. Slowly, Six sat down, ears going numb in the deafening static hum, and waited.
For as long as she’d lived, there’d been hunger.
The world as she knew it was twisted and cold, and what little of it bore fruit was contentious; all that was not guarded was full of thorns. She knew the ache of rotten meat in the belly, knew the way that hunger became more than pain after long enough, became a physical force that reached into a shuddering body and crushed it down.
There had been a hunger in her all her life, but something had changed, and she wasn’t sure when it had happened. Hunger wasn’t an emptiness now. Hunger was teeth.
She remembered the taste of fresh blood in her mouth, the shriek of the rat and the breaking of its tiny bones within the crush of her jaw. She’d never bitten through bone before, never living meat, never the pulse and warmth of a living thing dying on her tongue. Blood was the universe, less a taste than a driving part of reality, the bite and swallow and bite and swallow of flesh washing through with such a desperate rapture that she almost couldn’t regret the cage that had closed around her. Unconsciousness had been a relief, and when she woke, the hunger was gone.
Normal hunger built slowly. It was a thing that waxed predictably with the passage of time, waned with food.
Hunger now was a battering ram. It was nothing, and then it was everything. Every time, it was more everything. It hurt. It bit. It clawed. It spread from her belly like a waking nightmare, a livid flush of bloody colour, red-red-red behind her eyes, a pain that gasped from her hungry teeth and ate up the world. Last time, she’d barely had space for any thought beyond it. Last time, she’d noticed the trap where the living meat sat; she just hadn’t cared. There was meat. All beyond it was meaningless.
In what little rest Six had grasped since then, the memory scared her. The death of the rat didn’t bother her, nor the raw meat, but the all-encompassing madness of the hunger was another thing entirely. This time there had been food, and the cage had been something she could escape from. But what next? What if it happened when there was nothing to eat? What if its desperation led her into a mistake she couldn’t surmount? What if it killed her?
She was accustomed to ruthlessly excising everything in her life that might hold her back, might present a risk to her survival. She didn’t know how to cut the hunger out of her. She didn’t know how to withstand it, either.
So Six sat in the deafening silence of the corridor for a long, long time, staring at the door that might bring her ruin, and knew at the first twist of her stomach that her answers might soon be terribly, fatally upon her. She was on her feet in seconds, for now more afraid than hungry, pawing again at the nothing from whence she’d come. It remained as it was. The walls within her reach, too, were cold; they felt like stone, but buzzed on her fingers, electric and indistinct as everything here was.
And then with the next twist, there was hunger. It dropped and she hunched over into twitching, shuddering-red madness.
Food, she thought, already desperate, for all that she knew there was nothing. And then: meat, because food itself was a much narrower category than it had once been. But the hallway was empty and the walls were cold, and mortar held no blood for her teeth.
Hadn’t this place twisted, when she was twisted? Hadn’t it been flesh? Hadn’t it been meat and skin and shifting, squelching eyes?
Desperation circled around the memory and strangled her mind, a wire noose tightening on her throat. She gasped and convulsed and staggered wildly down the corridor, feeling desperately at the walls that didn’t shift, didn’t pulse, didn’t open into fleshy eyelids that looked at her with wet quivering eyes. She scrabbled at them but there was no skin to break and dust and static scattered over her fingers; her fingernails broke in her desperation and bled.
She sucked at her bloody fingertips as she swayed and crawled towards the door, everything red and swimming in her vision, the world gone senseless behind the teeth of hunger. There was blood in her mouth, coppery and warm, but it wasn’t right, and all the world was narrowing down to the pinprick pulse of the white noise and the door.
Behind the door there was her terror and her regret – she had twisted and broken there, had suffered, had gone mad in another way that rang and broke again with the shattering notes of a shattering music box. Behind the door was terror, but she was hungry, and there was no meat, and there was nowhere else to go.
Something broke, when she turned the handle. Something shattered in the world around her. Something went wrong. In the fundaments of her being, she knew: I was not supposed to open this door/I did not open this door/I could not have opened this door. But the door was/wasn’t opened, and she wrenched it wide, panting and insane, to see what was/wasn’t inside.
The walls were/weren’t meat, twisting and red and wet and writhing in the shadows, plain grey and mortar in otherworldly violet. She lunged to her left in desperation, all teeth and scrabbling bloody hands, but the meat was/wasn’t there and she couldn’t touch it and she couldn’t breathe. Insanity was the not-time she spent beating her fists on the walls, spent clawing, came close to breaking but stayed just shy of it by virtue of the terrible weakness seizing her limbs.
There was a chair.
The not-world went still as her eyes turned, drawn away from the not-meat writhing on the walls for the first time, desperation seeking something new.
There was a chair.
In it, there sat a boy. A man. Both, neither, something in-between, but familiar all the same. He flickered and broke like everything here had broken when she opened the door, both/neither at once; the boy looked up at her with eyes too empty for shock, the man looked up at her with a shadowed face and a ceaseless unerring nothing.
There was no fear in her now. There was only the one thing, that ate up her mind and numbed her to the static and to the slow, ponderous rise of the boy/man to his unsteady feet. How long had it been since he moved? How long had it been since she left him here?
None of it mattered. There was only crawling forwards in desperation, and then lunging.
She couldn’t have brought the Thin Man to the ground. He was too tall, too powerful, too twisted and strong in the long spindly lines of his limbs. But he was the boy when she hit him, and he was so much smaller; he clattered backwards, taller/shorter with empty eyes. The chair went flying.
Six crawled onto his chest before his sluggish arms could come up to stop her. Shaking hands shoved his head down, the old familiar static buzz of his skin breaking over hers; the boy’s face crumpled and the man’s face twisted, and the man’s was – not closer, not when they were both there/the same/at once, but it was there.
Hungry teeth opened; hungry teeth bit down.
The boy screamed. The man made no sound at all. Both convulsed around the teeth in their throat, and the scream dragged through the teeth of shrieking static that whined high-pitched and terrible in her ears. The world crackled like it was coming apart, and she swallowed down flesh and blood and ozone until something far more fundamental than his spine broke under her teeth.
Snap, went the not-everything, and shattered apart.
Six went flying, and didn’t even care, because the rapture of feeding was upon her. The desperate hunger was broken; in the seconds afterwards, it seemed perfectly fine that everything else break too. She hit the ground, and it pulsed and squirmed beneath her. An eye opened in the floor to her left. In the black exhaustion that rose after the rapture, it seemed fine to stay and let it stare at her.
And then abruptly she was herself again, and knew just as viscerally as ever that she did not want to die.
The room shook and writhed around her and she stumbled away from the walls. The sight of it was all too familiar from the last, terrible time she’d been here – the walls turning to flesh and eyes, the malice of it eager to close in and smother her in twisted flesh and keep her forever or eat her or both – she didn’t know, she didn’t want to know, and just like before there was nothing to do but escape.
There was still a door. She scrambled for it, and tripped on – something.
Six stared wide-eyed for a horrified second at what she’d stumbled over. There he was: the boy she’d known, face bare and eyes uncharacteristically empty, staring back at her from where he lay prone and trembling on the distorting ground. He was solid, and real, and entirely uninjured. No blood at his throat. No broken skin.
Terrified, she scrambled back from him. Then she pulled herself to her feet and ran.
Whatever she’d broken when she opened the door was unbroken now. Or, perhaps, broken in a different way. She pushed past it well in advance of the walls shuddering into flesh and skin and twisted eyes around her, sprinting down the corridor to where she’d come from, hoping that something had changed when she split this place open, when she gorged herself on distorted flesh, when the world broke beneath her teeth. There had been no way out before, but now, maybe, maybe…
Her steps stuttered. They came to a halt. The end of the hall was an end; there was nothing there.
She tried to beat her fists on it like she’d done to the walls earlier, tried to struggle, tried to create a door from desperation that had never been there before…but there was nothing. Nothing enough that she couldn’t even hit it. There wasn’t even any static anymore – just the wet, squirming sounds of flesh opening from the melting mortar behind her. She didn’t dare look back.
And then:
A whisper of tingling, electric pressure in the air. Something brushed past her, and she flinched back, head whipping to the side.
Mono walked silently up beside her, steps slow and dragging, as though all the movement and urgency had drained out of him long ago. He stared at her, eyes not quite empty. There was a quiet stirring of something like pain in there, like it hurt him to look at her. He didn’t speak. Slowly, his head turned to the nothing at the end of the corridor, eyelids blinking slowly, as if he was caught in a dream. He didn’t even seem to notice the writhing, fleshy collapse of the hallway, perilously close now.
Towards the nothing, his hand lifted, perfectly limp on the end of his arm. It trembled a little, as though with weakness, and then finally the fingers lifted. A heartbeat passed, and then there was a pulse, an outwards fulmination of pressure and white noise that rushed over her with sickening familiarity, and in the wake of it…
It was glowing faintly blue. Insubstantial. She couldn’t have described it as a door, or a window; there was nothing there that she could touch, for all that she knew it was a way out. She tried anyway. She failed, and was still here, here with the Tower’s malice closing fast at her heels. She could almost feel it on her, now – a moist, humid, meaty stink at her back. The air felt red.
Mono blinked at the way out, slow and unhurried. He didn’t look around, but his eyes moved sidelong to peer at her through his weary eyelashes. This time, the pain there spread a little further, enough for his eyebrows to draw inwards with something like hurt.
And then, as though nothing terrible had ever happened between them, he held out his hand.
Six stared at it unbelievingly, heart thudding wildly in her chest. The meat of the hall was now so close she could feel it pulling at her feet, dragging her back by the edge of her raincoat, too near now to flee. Tears spilled from the edges of her eyes, hot with fear and desperation and some terrible emotion she couldn’t name. What else was there to do?
She took his hand. Electricity bit at her skin, even as his fingers closed tightly around hers, and he sighed. He looked up to the way out, and the world dissolved into the deafening hum of white noise.
Some time later, reality spat them out again through the shattering glass of a television screen. They landed on the floor with a muffled thump. Out in the library, the Janitor clack-clacked with sudden alert.
Six scrambled away from the boy she’d emerged with. Their hands were still joined; his fingers clutched at hers weakly for a second as though pleading for her to stay. But she was the stronger for now, and in seconds she was away from him, sprinting for the books she knew she could climb.
She looked back, just once. He was staring after her, crawling to his feet far too slowly to hope to escape the Janitor and its awful reaching arms. His eyes were not quite blank, and that made it all the worse. Something terrible twisted in her chest, an aching pain to go with the blinding fear. When she reached the rafters, there were tears on her cheeks.
In time, she found somewhere quiet in the rafters to sit and ignite her lighter, staring into the trembling flame.
Survival tasted like ashes in her mouth.