Work Text:
Overture
Steph hadn't always felt like she was being watched, but she'd felt it long enough she couldn't remember otherwise. It was something she got used to, in a terrible way. She’d thought it was just the Man but that turned out to only be half right.
The revelation happened in early December. Steph had been staying at Evan's house then, which she'd been cautiously starting to think of as their house. She'd missed the quiet and people-watching opportunities of her apartment at Princeton, but she'd found safety in numbers. And beside Evan. It was nice there; she hadn’t had someone nearby who understood what she was going through in a long time. She might as well make herself feel at home.
She’d been working on some watercolours up in the kitchen when noise broke her concentration. A crash from the basement, like a body thrown into a wall. Someone's scream.
Steph froze. Rabbit reaction. Internal alarms blared, keeping her in her seat, before a second yell bolted her upright. Without thinking she'd dropped her paintbrushes, ran to the front door and grabbed the baseball bat that Evan kept there. She'd raced downstairs with it in her hands.
Her shout of 'what the fuck' got stuck in her throat when she hit the landing of the basement. For the spare seconds it took her to process the scene, she stood still on the last stair. Someone was beating the shit out of Evan.
At the other end of the basement, the two men froze too. Evan was held up against the wall by his neck and shoulders; a tall stocky guy Steph didn't know was choking him, both of them looking toward her.
And something else. Something else watching, lurking, present in her spine and her gut. In slow motion she watched the colour drain from Evan's blood-smeared face. The other guy's eyes narrowed.
The air in the room throbbed like a pulse.
She'd fell through the ice into the river underneath, numbing all at once, heavy and cold and panicked and vanishing-- something familiar had knocked in her head, like kicking a door and being pleasantly surprised when it opened. Home so soon?
Then floating. Something filling her up like a sail and leading her forward, like she was on the heavy drugs again. The baseball bat had clattered onto the floor. She hadn't felt her feet moving. One second she'd been on the stairs and the next she was in front of the tall guy, hitting him with the flat of her hand so hard his cheekbone crunched inward.
Her stomach lurching like she'd missed a stair going down, a flare of light blinding--wind rushing by her ears, everything blanketed by darkness that wouldn't let up and the smell of trees and blood. Evan somewhere, howling like an animal caught in a trap. Steph hadn't been able to see him. She'd tried to call to him but something blocked her throat, way in the back where she couldn't reach it. She choked, jerking forward. There'd been softness beneath her, dirt and leaves, but she couldn't push herself up, couldn't get her arms to move. In the darkness everything spun and lurched. It was like being swallowed. Something's eating me--
Her heart had kicked like a rabbit in her ribcage and someone had laughed hysterically out in the darkness, kept fucking laughing. She'd tried to get her hands underneath her, failed, tried again--
until suddenly she'd been back in the basement, on her feet, swaying in the shitty fluorescent light.
For a second she hadn't been able to do anything but be grateful of her breath.
Next second, pain and disorientation hit like a brick wall.
Evan had appeared from somewhere, lunging forward so he'd been beside her to break her fall as she collapsed onto the floor. The gross black shit that infected those followed by Him had bubbled out of her mouth, and holy fuck no, not again, not here. She'd swore out loud without knowing what words she was saying.
Evan had been shaking, furious in the way he got when there was nothing nearby he could be furious at. He'd been bleeding all over. His breathing sounded all wrong. She'd tried to wave him off but he'd only pressed closer to her, moving his hands over her back and sides in a way she would've thought was him feeling her up in any other circumstance but now could only be checking for injuries. Broken ribs, fuck, his ribs were probably broken, and Steph hadn't been able to do anything except sit there and shake apart.
Evan had been babbling too. Only some words had come through the panic. “--st --ppened, -- the fuck, what the fuck-- --kay--”
A low alien buzzing had resonated through her head; a consideration. It'd been familiar like the knocking, like His voice had been when He told her to go north. Steph had quailed underneath it.
“--lk to me,” Evan had stopped checking her for fractures and just held onto her hands. He'd sounded afraid, which was what had made her look up at him. She'd bent almost all the way to the ground without realizing and he had moved with her, his eyes wide and freaked out. “Talk to me, Steph, god fucking damn it, just say anything-- can you hear me? Are you--”
“I'm not okay,” she'd finally burst out. The words triggered coughs. She'd turned away and jerked upright as her lungs spasmed. The movement made her vision swim, and then clear. Finally. God. She'd turned back to Evan and tried to ignore the way the ink dribbling from her mouth stuck to her sleeve, grabbing onto his arm for support. Evan clutched her back. “I’m-- I’m not fucking okay, Christ, I’m not--”
“Yeah, yeah, you’re not okay, I get it.” Evan had laughed with her a little hysterically, then stopped, coughing. He’d swallowed, shaking, then squeezed her hands like she’d float off if he didn’t. (And her right hand had hurt like a motherfucker, how hadn't she noticed that before?)
“I’m not either okay, hh-- what the fucking fuck was that shit, I was so-- Jesus, come here--”
Steph had leaned into him as he'd folded her into his arms like he’d never let her go in his life. “What the fuck,” she'd said thickly, her voice warbling.
Evan had just shook his head.
They'd huddled on the floor together until the terror-adrenaline wore off enough for them to move.
Steph had wanted to know who the tall guy had been, but there hadn't been any use asking: Evan had been a bundle of vibrating nerve and fury, plus dizziness from the broken nose, and freaked out to all hell besides. The tall guy wasn't actually the Tall Man, and that was all Steph had been able to process. He'd still done a serious number on Evan, whoever the fuck he'd been. It'd taken the two of them twenty minutes to properly patch up his torso, arms and hands. (Both of their shirts had been a lost cause, with how close they'd been clutching each other. The bloodstains wouldn't ever fade.)
“What the fuck,” Steph had repeated, looking at some of the bruises spreading thickly over Evan's back. “Something's gotta be broken. We need to get you to the hospital--”
“You know we can't go to the hospital,” Evan had replied through gritted teeth. His eyes had been closed against the pain as he'd pulled adhesive tape around his wrist in short bursts, splinting something that had torn or popped or sprained.
And yeah. She'd known. She'd inhaled all the shitty words that flew to her throat, securing more bandages in place with the purple ducttape they'd grabbed since the shitty first aid kit had been out of actual gauze pins. “You need to not spar for a couple weeks,” she'd hedged instead, to a grunted reply.
“Steph,” Evan had said after a little while. “Why'd you come down here?” He'd been staring over at the bottom basement step where the bat had still lay, glinting dully. What he hadn't said was, you never usually run at something. After all, she was Damsel, and damsels got saved.
Coming from Evan it'd stung. It had still been true though. Steph had never been the one to throw herself into situations, not after the first time. That was part of why she'd picked the nickname in the first place. But fuck that. “I heard yelling,” she'd answered, defensive. “I thought somebody was hurting you.” That was true, too.
She waited for Evan's sarcastic reply. Instead, her boyfriend had nodded mutely, wincing as he flexed his swelling hands.
After that he'd shipped her off to Jeff's. It'd been frustrating as hell, but Steph got it. Evan had just been trying to protect her the best way he'd known how.
He’d been dialing Vinny when she’d gotten into the car, subtle desperation in the way his hands shook.
The involuntary camera in Steph's mind had catalogued that for future art use: slant of the bandages, grime under his nails, phone screen as light source. She'd guessed it was going to be a long night of not sleeping for the both of them.
A couple hours later, alone on Jeff's couch, Steph stared at the dark around her while weird scrapes skittered in the walls. She finally had time to think, and she didn't want to. The realization still settled like ice into her bones.
The knocking feeling in their basement hadn't been the same as the static that stretched from Him. But it'd still been familiar; Steph had felt it before, whether she remembered or not. So something else had been following her her whole life, too. Something different entirely.
///
Asides
HABIT let people ask questions when She knew she had them in a trap, the way a cat let go of a mouse's tail just long enough for it to skitter a few inches forward.
Jeff had had a lot of questions, and HABIT had taken Her time. She'd used the knife Evan had given Steph to do a lot of it. Jeff had slit open under it like a fish, like a rabbit. His insides had been oily, dark red or pink. The colours smeared all over Steph's hands.
“If it makes this any better, Steph feels terrible,” HABIT said to Jeff through Steph’s mouth as She methodically pulled the handsaw back and forth, looking down at the blood on his mouth and his wet eyes. “Absolutely terrible about all this.”
Jeff made a sound. It was hard to tell if it was a reaction to the words or purely involuntary, like the continued beating of his heart. He hadn't been able to speak sense out loud for two days.
“It's true! Really, it's heartwarming how much she cares about you. She's a good kid. Had a good family too-- kinda like you, huh?”
Jeff coughed, crimson burbling out of him. HABIT grinned.
Later, HABIT was driving somewhere in Evan's old car. A stash of wicked sharp-edged instruments rattled around in the trunk. She flipped people off when they overtook Her spot in the lane with fingers that were still stained pink from Jeff's blood. Jazz hummed out from the radio, and She whistled along.
Out beyond them on the road Steph could imagine something huge moving, coalescing like a storm, like several storms brought together.
Steph was numb because there was no other way for her to be. The question slipped out from her consciousness without her active thought. Why?
“Why?” HABIT repeated her with interest, out loud, like She wasn't occupying most of Steph's skull right down to the meat. “Well, you gotta get a bit more specific, there. Come on, say what you’ve got.” She waited, meeting Her own eyes (Steph’s eyes) in the rearview.
In the mirror's reflection She could see Herself, and the twisted, ever-present cameraman which sat hunched in the backseat, a handheld camera thankfully hiding its face.
Steph floated, her thoughts tangled: Why youmenow why him why here WHY.
“Oh, wow. Okay.” HABIT sounded outright amused. She tapped Steph's fingers on the steering wheel and then reached to the radio, flicking it off; the better to hear Herself. “Okay, we'll start from the top. Why me. Well, that's basic fucking physics right there, sunshine. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion, and, not to be too modest but I've doing this for a real long time. Obviously. I'm a professional.
"Now, why you, that's more interesting. Excellent question, excellent. Part of the reason is just our history. We're real buddies, you and I, right? Total pals. That helps, the familiarity. It's worth a lot. Otherwise these,” She jostled Steph's glasses with one hand, “Would get annoying real fast, let me tell you. Also, uh, like I told poor little Jeffers back there, it's 'cause you're one of the few people ol' stick in the mud can't really mess with. You, Jeff, good old Vince. And your boy, of course.” She chuckled.
Steph said nothing thought nothing was nothing. Nothing still heard the gurgling purple-shift in the footage as She laughed. In the backseat, the cameraman thing straightened.
“Mhmm. Oh, Evan. You know, I was right with him for a while there. Went up into that violent squirrely brain o' his and said hello. Thought maybe he'd make a good long-term place, y'know, but turned out, not quite the right--” She took her hand off the wheel to wave noncommittally, “-- fit. Good fundamentals, though, definite team player. I would've stayed with him, probably. But then there you were.”
HABIT's tone changed abruptly. “He breaks different than you. Did you know that?”
If Steph had her own eyes right then, she would've closed them.
HABIT laughed again, softy. The static got louder. “He does. Sure he puts up a fight for a while but after enough pressure for enough time he just--” She let go of the steering wheel for a second to clench Steph's hand into a fist. “Squashes. Like an eyeball. After that there's just a whole bunch of goo.
"You, though, you splinter into a bunch of different little pieces-- and you can put yourself back together with all of those, given enough time, can't you? Yeah, ya can. You've proved that, even without a big-ass button to help you. It's what makes me surprised I didn't try this earlier, to tell you the truth. You just keep putting yourself together over and over, and you always will, despite everything everyone's thrown at you. Including me,” HABIT added modestly. “I admire that kind of tenacity. So. That's also why you, and why him.
"Oh, and as for why now-- because it's my fucking turn! That's what I told Jeffery, weren't you paying attention?” She laughed again, almost a cackle, and reality shifted back. “You crazy kids.”
Steph was silent. HABIT left the radio off. There was only the road and the metal-on-metal sounds from the trunk, and the wheezing of the cameraman. Out the windows the landscape slid by.
Where are we going, Steph thought after a long silence.
HABIT snorted. She leaned over to the passenger seat and rifled through the pile of hats She'd stolen from several victims, picking out a straw fedora with a wide purple band. She flipped it onto Steph’s head one-handed. “Well, darlin', we're going for a ride.”
*
When Steph surfaced next HABIT had spread Herself out over an unfamiliar couch, sneakers casually slung over one end. The soles of Her shoes were caked in something dark. A nice TV attached to the wall opposite where She was laying played an abandoned asylum movie. HABIT was holding a notebook and a click-pen in one of Steph's hands. As various grisly murders screamed across the display, She hummed and scrawled a couple notes.
“I live in the weak and the wounded, Doc,” She mouthed the last line when it came around, popping the 'c'. She hit the power button on the remote before the credits rolled, pausing in satisfaction in the silence. Then She cleared Her throat. “'Afternoon, Stephanie.”
Steph didn't know why HABIT pushed her down in her own head sometimes and other times lets her see. She remembered what She said to Jeff, though, and didn't want to know.
HABIT chuckled. “You're learning.”
She slung one of Steph's legs over the back of the couch and managed to pull Steph's body up and over the edge without using Her arms. She landed with a small 'woop', moving purposefully.
The house they were in looked old, the kind that sit with cracked foundations in suburbs slightly outside the other suburbs. The walls were covered with yellow wallpaper that had vines running through it, and new-looking red flecks all over the vines; an open door to a basement loomed like a throat on the left as She walked through the dining room. Tall sliding glass doors stood on the right, leading out to a veranda.
Inside the veranda--
Steph didn't think about it. She turned all her focus forward.
Thankfully for her, HABIT was focusing forward too. Reaching the house's small kitchen, HABIT stopped and stretched her arms. She spoke out loud to Steph, casually. “You must be feeling pretty disoriented, huh. Well, it got kinda obvious I needed to get a good meal into your stomach so I decided to pop in somewhere, and these good Samaritans just happened to open the door. Had to take care of them, obviously. Don’t worry, I cleaned up. Mostly anyway.”
She strolled up to the sleek black oven and popped it open. Inside, a hunk of meat sat simmering in a pot of marinate. The smell was rich and thick.
Steph couldn't suppress the sudden stab of horror.
HABIT rolled Steph's eyes. “Pipe down, it's just beef.”
She pulled the pan out with Steph's bare hands. Steph could feel her palms blistering from the heat, but with HABIT moving them they didn't even shake. With a clang She dropped it onto the stove, then cursed as some of the marinate slopped over the side. She flicked off the oven while grabbing one of the cloths from the nearby steel sink. “Fuck. It'd be less of a issue to just get some goddamn cheeseburgers,” She grumbled. After wiping the spills She took one of the carving knives from the counter, where they'd been laid out in neat order from longest to shortest, and began hacking up the side of beef. “But then again, guests can't be choosers, huh?” She chuckled again. She kept cutting the beef into irregular slices until all of it was done, then skewered the meat on the end of the knife, lifting it out of the soup and onto a waiting plate. “Oh. And merry Christmas.”
What?
The last time-- it had been late fall, hadn't it? Or something. Not December.
HABIT snorted. She took the plate full of meat and sat down at the round table with three chairs that took up the rest of the kitchen space not used by counters or a set of dark green cabinets in the corner. The table was covered with lunch dishes. Some of the forks had plastic handles emblazoned with cartoon characters.
HABIT grabbed a book from the table and flipped through it one-handed like She knew it front to back. The pages were watermarked and scribbled over in places, added onto in others. They looked like a script to a play. Near the middle there was a pen tucked inside. HABIT clicked the pen open and made a new annotation:
THE FIREBRAND WILL TAKE HIS UNATTAINABLE COMPANION ON A JOURNEY THROUGH THE DARK, AND THE COMPANION WILL CATCH A FIRE OF HER OWN.
On the last page, She paused a second before amending a older note: EXIT ALL ?
"This is exciting shit,” She remarked. She tapped the pen twice on the page, then dropped it in favour of grabbing a champagne bottle warming on its side the table. Half of the bottle had soaked into the tablecloth, spreading out the stain left by another, reddened carving knife. HABIT drained the champagne some more, smacking Her lips. “Good stuff,” She mumbled, then turned Her attention back to the book, silent in her concentration.
Somewhere in the house a clock ticked steadily.
“So this is different,” HABIT said after a while. “I don't know if you knew this, but, I genuinely don't think we've ever done this before. Do you have any idea how rare that is, with how long we've and you've all been going around?”
Steph didn't know what She meant.
“Hmm. Yeah, yeah. You've never really been one to pry. Most of your problems just come to you, huh.” HABIT took another hunk of meat and chewed it thoughtfully. “Don't worry over it. You'll know soon,” She said with a voice like gravel in Stephanie's throat. She kept eating with one hand and turning pages with the other. The bottom of the the last page, along with the [EXIT ALL] and now the question mark, was covered with doodles of infinity signs.
“I meant what I said before. About Evan,” HABIT added after some time. She angled the gleaming butcher knife She was toying with so Steph could see herself reflected inside. “Poor little Evvy. Quite the person. He loved you, you know. With every fibre of his being, the way humans are made to.” The metal reflection of Steph's face grinned, like a private joke.
Steph boiled under feelings she couldn't articulate-- thoughts, memories. Some vast humming reserve of sorrow that if she budged too hard against the walls of would break and obliterate her completely. An abiding fury that she’d harboured in her for a long time but was given a new shape from from Evan, from his tempers and his revenges. It was buried deep but it was there, sharp and red. Loved him too.
HABIT laughed again. “I know you do,” She said. “I know you do.”
She finished Her plate, wiping off her face with a embossed cloth napkin that looked like it might've been saved from someone's wedding. “Think that's all for now,” She said in Her normal, Steph-sounding voice. “Yep. See you later.”
Sudden as being shoved off a pier, Steph went under again.
//
Reprise
She wanted to stop.
Steph was face down on the ground when she decided. It’s not a hard choice. For the first time in months-- months and months-- she was alone. Everything from the inside of her teeth down to the tendons of her feet ached. Stubbornly, her body refused to give up.
She rolled heavily over to stare at the sky. There were trees above her. She didn't know how she got here, or where ‘here’ is. She stared dully, her scattered thoughts glinting on the ground.
The only reason she peeled herself off the forest floor was the sound of water running. She started walking in the direction it was coming from, stumbling at first, so purposeful her hand shook around the handle of Evan's knife.
Steph was grateful for the sharpness of the machete as she waded up to her chest into the river and, staring at Him standing on the opposite bank, shoved the blade into her throat. She was grateful for the thumping of her heart and the rush of the water in her ears as she went down.
It almost covered up the sound of Her laughter.
*
She should've known.
Steph woke up covered in stinking mud and weeds, her glasses gone. She was laying in a puddle in a ditch; an unfamiliar shirt and a jacket covered with bloodstains stuck to her like additional skins, heavy and stiff. The shirt was purple and the jacket had duct tape covering rends in the seams. HABIT had changed her clothes.
She lurched half-upright after a minute, instinctively, sluggishly checked herself for injuries and found nothing. Her throat was smooth and intact, her arms untouched. The back of her neck felt cold. HABIT had cut her hair.
She's embarrassing me, Steph thought. It was an echo. Malice and some terrible intent wrapped around it like smoke, like a bike chain covered with blood around her arm. If she wasn't so exhausted she'd wonder where the thought came from.
Her knees cracked and shook when she stood and struggled up the bank. Something cold and flat shifted against her leg; the machete.
Everything she could see was static and flickering, like the ditch and the road above it were nothing but set dressing in a room with malfunctioning lights. From the top of the ditch the silhouette of the Man was obvious in the distance, sirens wailing forwards and backwards around him. As always, He saw her.
And... it wasn't fair. None of it was fucking fair. Steph had tried to get away from everything. To be left alone. She'd tried to keep herself closed off, keep other people out of it. Keep Jessa safe. In turn, Evan had tried to keep her safe, then Vinny and even Jeff. She'd watched over them as best as she could. There'd even been a couple weeks when she'd thought that she might've had a child, her own tiny wonder to protect, hers and Evan's, but she'd turned out to be wrong.
Now she was grateful she hadn't been pregnant. One less person to lose.
Because nothing had worked. Everyone she loved had tried tried tried, but they couldn't run fast enough when the time came. None of them screamed loud enough for anyone to hear and come rescue them. Her family. Her first friends-- losing the group she'd travelled with before running back south had been horrible, and she hadn't even seen their fate firsthand. Jeff, and those poor people that had been in the house with him, they're long hours of suffering clear in Steph’s memory that make her want to scratch out her own eyes. What happened to Evan is scored into every corner of her skull and she can’t ever, ever forget: she wasn't meant to have people to love.
The Man blurred her vision, or the landscape blurred around him. Steph turned away.
She sunk down onto the wet grass again, not caring about the cold water that seeped into her jeans. It was a little surprising she could feel it at all, she should've been out here long enough to get hypothermia by now. But a knife to the throat hadn't ended her, so why would something as simple as being cold and wet?
She pressed the heels of her peeling sneakers into the earth. She took the machete out from her belt and held the flat side of it to her forehead. She counted to five over and over, clutching Evan's knife in her crushing hands.
//
Recognition Scene
What happened was this:
HABIT killed Jeff first, several times over until there was nothing left of him to hang on, then cleansed him with fire and left his body to the Man’s non-existent mercy. The people whose attic She used for Her feeding grounds had been tossed away without thought, necks broken and lolling. She’d complained of the stink and fussed over the smudge one of the bodies made on the carpet as the cameraman hauled them outside.
Evan had lived through all of it. He’d been dropped, unconscious, in the dark basement and been given a sharp order not to fucking pull at the ropes on his wrist or his wrists would get pulled off. Then he'd been left there, abandoned for however long it took Jeff to die.
He'd woken up a few hours after HABIT had come back from the forest with the smell of gasoline still on Her shoes. Whether HABIT had kept Evan asleep for so long, or if he'd just gotten knocked on the skull so hard he went into a coma, it wasn't clear.
Evan announced he was awake with a barrage of bellowed curses and challenges, muffled by the floor under HABIT's feet.
“Well then,” HABIT said to Herself after She swallowed the last of Her coffee, putting Her mug and the newspaper She'd been perusing down on the kitchen table. “It looks like our guest has returned to the world of the living. Briefly.” She smirked.
The darknesses in the house folded in on themselves, twice as heavy as they should've been. Several cameramen made skittery shadows at the edge of Steph's sightline. HABIT stood and went into the living room, grabbing packets of syringes and the wireless iPod dock/speaker that was warbling out Sinatra off the side of the couch, and pointed sharply at a cameraman that was lurking behind a chair. “You! Follow me, and keep out of my goddamn way.”
The thing didn't nod, but HABIT seemed to assume it understood anyway. She stuck the bag of syringes under Her arm and held the iPod dock in Her left hand, making Her way down the basement stairs while swaying Steph's hips to the tune. The cameraman followed behind them breathing like something dead that’d been left underwater.
HABIT stepped into the basement grandly, a ringleader stepping in with a lion, a virus entering its host.
Evan was tied to a lawn chair in the middle of the dark room in front of Her. He sat half hunched over, staring at his knees, taking deep, even breaths. Every so often he would strain suddenly against the ropes trapping him, nearly throwing himself over.
“Well hey there, friend!” She called out, throwing Steph's arms wide like She was surprised to see him.
Evan looked up at the sound and his expression froze. Shocked and speechless. .
“Heard your dulcet tones all the way upstairs,” HABIT said conversationally. She stepped from the stair's carpet onto the cold floor, continuing, “You're gonna wake the neighbours! Or, you know, you could've if this place had neighbours. Or if anyone could hear you. But that doesn't matter, you should be more considerate. That's the point. Oh, and I said this before but looking back you might've been kind of out of it, don't bother trying to do any tricksy-tricks--” She jabbed a couple fake karate motions at the air to illustrate Her point, “-- to get out of those ropes. I made 'em as tight as they can get without literally ripping your limbs off.”
Evan's shallow breathing quickened in the dim light, but he stopped struggling.
HABIT nodded at him. “Smart boy.” She placed the still-singing iPod dock carefully on an old pingpong table that was pushed against the righthand wall of the room. A row of bottles, filled with murky liquids and labelled with clinical-looking words, sat waiting. Beside them were a row of blades arranged by height: it started with pocket knives and went up to one actual, literal sword with a stained handle. “I prefer a proper vinyl, myself,” She said casually as She flipped through the iPod, getting the playlist right. “ The sound's cleaner, and these fuckin' things can be so fiddly. But they have their uses. Kinda like good ol' Steph here, and like you.”
It seemed to click for Evan what was going on then. “You--” he said, choking as all the pieces came together in his head. “ You- ”
“Me,” HABIT replied in a very 'fair' tone of voice. She'd taken out the syringes from their packet and was placing them carefully beside individual bottles. She glanced over Her shoulder at him and grinned in a bad parody of coquettishness. “Nice to see you again, soldier.”
Evan managed to get over his all-consuming rage long enough to speak, then. If his words had been paint they would've been colourful enough to splatter the whole room neon, with an extra helping of blood for how much violence he promised. It rolled out of him like a tide.
HABIT ignored him. She chose a machete off the table and rolled up the sleeves of the loose tropical-themed shirt She'd taken from somewhere. “I've been curious about something,” She said as if he was listening. She turned and walked over to Evan, holding the knife casually as anyone would hold a pen. “Do you think--”
“You pig-fucking son of a bitch,” Evan shouted. “If you don't leave Steph the fuck alone I swear to God-- ”
HABIT frowned.
A second later Evan was on his side, feet kicking uselessly in their ropes on the legs of the chair. Thick blood poured out of his mouth, and a gurgling animal groan from his throat.
HABIT shook out Stephanie's left hand, flexing it without flinching despite the grinding jolt of a busted knuckle. She crouched down, elbows on Steph's knees, and pointed Her knife at Evan. Her voice was low and even. “Number one,” She tapped his cheek with the knife hard enough a thin line of blood slid down it, “That's not how you talk to a lady. Number two, ” a harder tap, “It's rude to interrupt. Got anything else, smartass?”
Evan spat darkness onto the floor, glaring at HABIT through watering eyes.
HABIT looked down at him, and Steph could feel Her decide to continue the act. She contorted Steph's face into a grin again, and when She spoke it was with the jovial tone She'd used when She'd came in. “Not that I'm a lady, or a mister either. Doesn't really apply to me. But ol' Steph here, she refers to me as a lady, so we'll go with it for now. You know? It's good to let the kids use terms they understand, really helps 'em along.
"Now. As I was saying, I'm curious about something.
"See, I like to spend as much time with my guests as possible, and most of my guests, these people-- they're just people. Squatters, if you will. They last a few day at most-- actually, one hundred and ninety-two hours was my personal record, and that was quite a run let me tell you. But mostly around the thirty hour mark they get all flaky, passing out left and right. I, uh, use the drugs to help with that. Along with some other things; old-fashioned, I know, but gets the job done for regular bastards."
"But you, ” She tapped Evan's face with the machete a third time, bisecting the other two lines, and Evan twitched. HABIT nodded to Herself. “You were a good place to hang out, for a while. Showed some promise. You're pretty strong for a particular definition of strong. I'm curious if that'll make a difference in how long you'll have before you break. What do you think?”
Evan spat on the floor again, towards HABIT's shoes. His eyes were set stubbornly, furiously. I won't break shit, he would've said if his lower jaw wasn't in two pieces.
HABIT's face smoothed out into seriousness again. “Showing off for your girl, huh?” She asked quietly. “I can get that. Suits you. Your buddy, Jeff--” She ignored Evan's sputtering protests, leaning closer-- “Poor little Jeffers, he talked and talked. Asking questions, moving around the edges, always tryna--” She swayed side to side like a snake lining to strike, narrowly avoiding Evan's ear with the knife. “Figure stuff out. You, though, you just go right for it. Yeah? Always. Right there. Always tryna fight off, show off, push out. Get some action. You think people must figure you're unbreakable, huh? Run right into everything, never think. Never doubt! Just full bore into the brick wall, into the breach. And sometimes you even make it. 'Someone that strong must not be freaked out by anything,' that's what they all must be saying about you.”
HABIT lifted Her machete away from his face and pressed the tip of the blade into the floor, leaning interlaced fingers on the handle and Steph's chin on Her fingers. Steph's eyes felt heavy and liquid. HABIT didn't blink, matched gazes with Evan unrelentingly. Her voice was hoarse and quiet, barely above pillowtalk tone as She continued. “But I know you. I've been in that squirrely head of yours, right there with you. I know better.
“See, you're scared. Totally terrified. You're never not, anymore. The scaredest kid in Shittedpantsville yet this go-around, and I've got you all to myself until you're dead. Because-- no, listen-- you will die. Here, in this dripping room. Not for a while, but you will. Most likely screaming. And nothing will help, and nothing will get you out of here. Nothing will hide you. No doctors to stitch you back together. And when you're through, and your story's over, and your feelings in all a' this are done for this go 'round? When you're decorations all over the wall so much your sweet girl can't recognize your bones? I'll still be here. I'll get up, and walk outside, and laugh with the sun in my face while you're way more than dead. Always have done. Always will.
“Do not get all high and mighty, strong upper lip with me.”
A long, stretched silence.
Then HABIT popped to Steph's feet, casual as anything. The Sinatra music on the speaker had just reached a particularly loud swell, and Steph felt it as the other sounds in the house faded away. HABIT clapped Steph's hands together once, cheerfully, smiling like an oil spill. "So now that that's cleared up. Let's get right to it!”
*
One hundred and ninety six hours.
Evan did scream, his voice warped and stretched from wear and even when HABIT tore out half his throat with a bizarre mix of savagery and surgical precision that left him breathing and not bleeding out, but voiceless he didn't seem to stop screaming, it was shards of metal against Steph's ears and a nailbat to her heart, to her spine, everywhere, her eyes shook and her mouth filled with the phantom taste of iron at the sound, it went on for so long, and never did he call out to her. To Steph. Not once did Evan plead with her to wake up, to throw HABIT off or break through. Not once did he say the things that every horror movie with a possessed villain would have directed him to say.
Steph huddled in the minuscule caged corner of her head that she had left, feeling herself crack down the middle and fall apart and crack down the middle again. Evan kept howling.
She understood why he didn't try to talk to her, even when his increasingly red-covered eyes were forced up to look at the thing wearing her face; even when HABIT pulled out rambling monologues along with bits of his intestines. He didn't because when he looked at HABIT he saw the tiny part of Steph peering out, terrified, and he knew.
He knew. He'd been through this, too. The horror and the sick feeling and the oceans of blood and the utter, utter failure to hold back the tide.
Steph got so close to controlling her own body that she could make the muscles almost twitch, sometimes, but it was never because Steph drove Her out and it never would be. HABIT hauled Steph up into moments of sudden blinding clarity, shoved her back under the placid suffocating lake of her own unconscious. HABIT walked through people's heads like they were rooms.
Steph couldn't stop what her hands were doing. Could not. Neither could Evan when it'd been him. He loved her, and he knew.
That made it all worse.
*
HABIT left the basement with a cheerful bounce in Her step, like She'd left the forest and every other bloodbath She'd made. She spent some time in the shower and then picked out new clothes from a pile in the strange house's second bedroom. The machete, She left to soak in the kitchen sink, trading it for a hand-sized switchblade which She stuck in Steph's bra strap for easy reach. The bump it made under the shirts She layered on could've been a cell phone.
When She let them out of the house She locked the front door with a confident click, dropped the key into a pocket on Steph's shirt and almost skipping down the driveway.
A tabby cat sat hunkered on the sidewalk, hiding in the non-existent shadow of bushes that had lost their leaves weeks ago. HABIT immediately crouched down and offered the stray Her hand, crooning. The cat crept along the ground but eventually let HABIT scritch its chin and the back of its ears. It sniffed curiously at a smudge of Evan's blood under Steph's nail, ears tilting when HABIT encouraged it with a tickle.
A car door slammed down the block, and the cat leaped. By the time HABIT had lifted Steph's eyes towards the offending sound the animal was halfway down the block, fur puffed out until it looked double its size.
HABIT chuckled and stood up, muttering, “Damn I love those things.” She inspected Her hand for a second and then tilted Her head up, holding onto Her fedora with one hand, squinting through Steph's glasses at the sky. “It's a beautiful day, isn't it, Stephanie?” She said.
Steph--
Steph was broken glass on the sidewalk. Stephanie was splinters. Dust. She couldn't move or breathe or talk or think, she couldn't scream, she'd been screaming so long she no longer heard herself. She's nothing; she's nothing and she can't do anything, she never will, she can't she can't can't can't can't CAN'T.
“Nah, you'll put yourself back together,” HABIT said, almost gently. “You always do.”
She looked casually around the street, then stuck Her hands in the jeans' pockets and ambled back to the house, “Just your luck,” She added when She'd gotten back onto the shade of the front step. “Survival's a kind of curse, isn't it?” She chuckled, then sucked at the finger that had the bit of blood under it. She nodded once when She'd finished, looking at the chipped polish on Steph's nails critically.
“My guests don't die before I let them,” She said quietly. “So don't go saying you are or aren't anything. Besides, none of this would be half as fun if you couldn't see.”
//
Chorus
It's freezing in the attic. Steph knows why, she knows, but she doesn't want to think about it. She can't not-not think about it. Can't do anything except watch.
Right now she's only half-drowned. Her breath makes fog in the air and on the metal of the knife that HABIT's holding close to her face, but she doesn't feel the cold. She hears the door creak open and the choked back gasp, but can't turn her head.
The air crackles and shifts. HABIT had been sitting in one of the chairs by the shitty metal table, playing with Her iPod and the portable speaker, setting the stage.
She looks up at the newcomer with a winning smile. The music stutters out a dark chord as She rises. And rises. Steph feels Her stretching above and beyond the puppet She's made of Steph's body; the heart of a giant's shadow; oily smoke spreading out to fill the dark room, the small landing beyond it, this whole goddamn house. HABIT fills.
Steph tries to move or say something, anything, to warn the last living person that she might call a friend. HABIT bats her away into a farther dark of her mind without even a twitch.
“Vinny,” HABIT says, with great ceremony. She opens Steph's arms as if to accept him. “Last man standing. It's a pleasure to see you here, friend. Figured you'd come around eventually. We've been waiting a real long time.”
--fin.--