Chapter Text
Jeff Koval didn’t burn. Somehow, the fire never caught. The flames licking his sweatshirt and exposed bone simply ceased.
He had no way of knowing this to be different than the intended course of his end, but he knew a few things.
He was in pain. The most indescribable, earth-shattering pain he could convey.
He was losing blood, fast.
And he was alone.
The woods had ceased all noise, as if the very rotation of the earth, the whistling of the winds, the creatures that lurked within, had all begun to hold their breath.
Jeff was alone, and he was going to die here. By fire or blood loss, or by a more painful, more lengthy combination of starvation and thirst. He assumed the latter, as he had become adjusted to the nature of his circumstance.
Understand that the worst has come to pass, but prepare for worse yet to come.
Habit had long since left, after surrendering Jeff to It. He had walked away after striking a match that never caught, calling out to It. The camera-armed creature had followed him away, leaving Jeff alone. Alone with It, which left as soon as Habit had, Jeff could only assume to let him bleed out in peace. (Though his questions regarding why the creature that had tormented him would allow him a peaceful passing would remain unanswered).
“JEFF! Hey, come on man, we’re headed out. Don’t want you to miss it!” Alex called out to him from the treeline. Alex. So this was it.
Jeff couldn’t walk properly, as his insides were kept inside of him with barely a thread (the ones he still had, of course). But he crawled, gripping the soft dirt with his tired, broken bones. If he got to Alex, it could all be over. He could leave. Finally.
How long had it been since he had been complete? Since he had all of his fingers? His eye? Two months, maybe more. Maybe less. He had no way of knowing.
How long had it been since he saw Vinny? Maybe nearing a year. It had been spring when he had set out to Evan’s house, spring when he had been stabbed. Spring when he lost “Evan.”
It was winter now, most likely earlier in the season. The air was biting and the leaves beneath his body crunched loudly with his weight, though it was as much diminished as he was.
“Come on man, we gotta go! Daniel’s got the car, we’re headed up. If you don’t want to come, just say so!”
Jeff tried. He tried to call to his brother, tell him to wait, that he would be there soon. As soon as he could be. But his voice was shattered from months of disuse, and he nearly cringed at the cracking mess that was his garbled attempt at speech.
All he could do was keep crawling, praying to the powers that had abandoned him to keep his body intact for long enough to walk with his brother again.
The closer he got to Alex, the more he felt his world disintegrating. His eyesight was blurring, static at the edges. His heart, deafening, was beginning to slow. Jeff embraced this unraveling, as the gentle ceasing of his skin to feel allowed him to scramble on the ground with a reignited volition. His wounds catching on stones and branches was the least of his worries as he dragged himself to his own very unstable feet.
With wobbling but certain steps, he made his way towards his brother, one hand on the dampening front of his hoodie, and the other braced on the nearest tree.
He would clench his jaw, if he was certain he could still move it, but he neglected all care for pain tolerance for the racing adrenaline of walking for the first time in weeks. He put every ounce of his strength into the paces he made towards his brother, who stood patiently. Ignorantly.
Jeff reached the treeline in a matter of days. Minutes. Weeks. Seconds. Hours.
He didn’t care. He knew that he had made it, and that the screeching tires of a car halting on the cracking asphalt was his final, eventual, rest.
But it wasn’t Daniel’s voice that the driver spoke to him with.
“Jeff? Holy shit.”