Chapter Text
Hunger. Hunger.
Human, tasty human. Soft flesh, veins pumping blood.
Muscles tight, pouncing-
The strap around his throat tightens, yanks him back and he tumbles on the ground, his arms are bound in a straightjacket and prevent him from catching himself.
Winding, like a worm. Back on his feet. Pouncing, again.
On the floor, again.
He screeches, not as high-pitched as Hannah did, or the miners. Too low, too human. Not enough human.
More movement. Hunger. More straining against the bounds that hold him.
The movement stops. He can’t tell if they’re gone or still. But it doesn’t matter. All that matters is the hunger.
They will move again. He will pounce again.
oOo
Sam turns, turns away from Chris, and Mike, and the doctors. Turns away so they don’t see it in her eyes. The fear.
She’s not easily scared. In fact, she hadn’t been scared climbing a rock wall out of a Wendigo-contaminated mine, in the middle of the night, in winter, in the Canadian Rockies.
The thing the rangers found on Blackwood Mountain, the thing they brought back – that thing they call Joshua Washington.
Sam finds it hard to see the sweet, gentle boy who loved his younger sisters so much. Finds it hard to see the funny guy who was ‘joshing’ her on multiple occasions. She even finds it hard to see the distressed, whimpering mess of a boy she found in the mines.
That creature in a straightjacket is not Josh.
And yet... when it – he – sits, sunken against the wall, the left side of his face pressed into the elastic material covering his cell, his eyes closed, it’s easier to see it. The teeth are hidden, then, and the milky eyes don’t stare towards the door, barely seeing anything. He’s not snarling, not growling. He’s just a boy, paler than he usually is, and in a straight-jacket, but a boy. That is, until he senses movement and strains against the ties holding him again, teeth bared.
oOo
“Josh, uh... he’s not well.” Chris’ sounds exactly like Sam is feeling whenever she tries to think of the boy she might have had a connection with. Nowadays, it’s only the snarling creature in the cell she sees.
“No kidding,” she replies, hoping to mask her tormented mind behind sarcasm.
“Shit, Sam. I mean aside from the growly bit,” Chris shoots back and their attempted humour passes without any effect. They’re still highly uncomfortable. At least the telephone hides facial expression. “The doctors say he doesn’t eat.”
Sam feels a hollow feeling in her stomach now, too, but it’s not from sympathy for Josh’s appetite. “It’s because they don’t give him what he wants,” she manages to say.
“Yeah, I figured the Hamburgers are not made from actual German citizens.” Chris pauses. “Great, jokes about cannibalism. That’s a good first step, yes? Means we’re recovering, emotionally?”
“I don’t think anyone will ever recover from your jokes emotionally,” Sam replies without hesitation and usually, she wouldn’t have said that, not to Chris. That’s Josh’s part. They both know it’s a Josh thing to say. But Chris laughs nevertheless and it’s nice.
“Josh has been rubbing off on you,” he tells her.
Like you have been rubbing off on Ashley?
Sam knows, without doubt, that that’s what Josh would have said. Chris does too, probably.
“Do you think he’ll get well soon?”
Sam closes her eyes, tries to picture Josh and sees fangs and claws and blind eyes. “I don’t know.”
“Flame-thrower guy,” Chris wonders, “he must have known so much more about these things. I wish-”
“It’s not your fault,” Sam interjects, sensing despite her own troubled mind that Chris is dangerously close to falling back into the pattern of self-blame he was in after the stranger on the mountain had finally shown himself and, subsequently died defending Chris. “He’d been hunting them for all his life. It was bound to happen.”
Chris makes a noncommittal sound. Then: “There has to be a cure, right? I mean, you can use garlic for vampires and silver bullets for werewolves. Maybe... thyme for Wendigos?”
Sam laughs despite not wanting to, but she also sees the flaw in this logic. “These things kill the monsters, though. They don’t cure them.” She pauses. “Look, I want to help Josh, too-“ claws, fangs, blind eyes, growling, not Josh – “but if there was a cure, don’t you think flame-thrower guy would have tried that? Or his father before him? Why kill them if you can just turn them back?”
And if there is a cure, would we have had the chance to save Hannah? Did we kill her for nothing?
Chris is quiet, Sam can practically feel him thinking about it. He doesn’t come up with a solution, though. Finally, they hang up. His last words to her burn into her brain, though.
“If you want to help Josh, maybe you need to do the same thing you’ve done before.” Before Blackwood. “Be there for him.”
And Sam really wishes she could, but she can’t because there is no Josh, is there? There is only it. The monster.
oOo
He can smell food, but it’s tasteless slobber. Cooked, the flavour gone. Greens, he doesn’t need greens anymore than a wolf needs grass or a tiger bananas.
There is meat, too, but it’s cold, dead.
A faint memory of a bright summer day, a pool. Laughter, friends. Jessica and Emily, best friends still, lounging on deck chairs. Ashley reading in the shadow of the tool shack, Chris eyeing her ‘inconspicuously’ over the rim of his sunglasses. Matt and Mike at the barbeque, sizzling steaks and burgers, hot and delicious. Sam is floating on her back in the pool, exhausted after swimming lane after lane. Hannah and Beth on air beds, floating, too. The steaks are perfect, juice dribbling down his chin and he tries to wipe it away and the others laugh-
Dead meat, he cannot eat it.
oOo
Sam guesses a hunger demon or spirit or whatever can’t actually die of starvation. And if they can, the doctors will be the first to find out.
She expected to see a bald head, white, bulging eyes, and sinewy limbs. A creature barely restrained.
Instead, he’s still shockingly Josh.
His hair is greasy (Sam guesses no one really wants to get to close to his head or more precisely, his teeth), his cheeks sunken in, but he’s human. Even though his foot nails could really use a trim and his fingers are permanently crooked, with sharp nails, resembling claws more than human hands.
He’s breathing shallowly.
It’s been a week since she came to see him, and almost two weeks since Blackwood. Jessica is out of the hospital, and everyone else is physically healed, too. Mentally, though...
The only people Sam has contact with are Chris, who is busy looking after Ashley, and Mike, who understandably doesn’t leave Jessica’s side. If Sam had a someone, that someone could probably talk with her about Blackwood. Sucks that her someone – the person who could’ve been her someone, in another life, maybe – is possessed by an indigenous monster and looks like the ultimate challenge for every orthodontist in the country.
The doctors don’t believe in Wendigos. But they don’t have an explanation for Josh, either, so they’re basically useless. They can’t force-feed him, his skin has hardened and cannot be penetrated by needles, he won’t swallow pills and no-one wants to get close to try another way of putting him to sleep so they can implant a stomach tube.
Sam could mention that fire softens the Wendigo skin. But then she has an image of a writhing, screaming Josh in mind, the video-feed of his prank where he’d been sawed in half. Instead a saw there’s a blow torch, though, getting closer and closer to an exposed strip of pale skin.
The thought alone sickens her and she whirls around, sprinting towards the closest bathroom. She barely makes it.
oOo
Movement. In front of his door. A smell he faintly recognizes.
He growls, quietly, but the person his hastily retreating.
He wants to chase, but he’s bound, and weak.
oOo
Chris has many feelings concerning his former – and still, despite everything– best friend Josh Washington. But it’s hard to look at your best friend when you learn about the craziness tormenting him. And when he’s turning into a human-eating monster.
There’s no cure, not as far as Chris has found out, but the Internet is useless a lot of times and he figures that if he and the others survived a night on a Wendigo-infested mountain by themselves, he might find a cure by himself, too.
Until then, it’s important to not have his best friend die of starvation.
He goes to the hospital alone. It’s lunchtime, and the cart with the trays of food for the patients, all labelled with little name tags and meal options (Meal 1, Meal 2, Vegetarian Option) is slowly being rolled down the hallway, with small intermittences when the nurse grabs a tray and disappears into the rooms of the more stable patients, handing them their food.
Chris is fidgety, but when no-one is looking, he slips on the white lab coat he ‘borrowed’ from one of the hooks in the changing rooms of the hospital. Finally, when the nurse disappears into the next room, everything happens quickly. He hurries over to the cart and takes the lid of the very last tray, the one labelled “J. Washington”. He yanks his backpack open, drops something on top of whatever thing they’re serving Josh today, and smashes the lid back on the tray just as the nurse returns.
“What are you doing?” she demands, glaring at Chris suspiciously.
“Just tying my shoe, sorry, Ma’am,” he replies, giving her his widest grin. She glares at him a bit longer, then shakes her head and returns to her duties. He almost breathes in relief, when she turns back, giving him a once-over. “Who are you, anyway?”
“I’m... new,” he replies lamely, trying not to look as if he doesn’t belong here.
“Oh, you must be the replacement for Anna. Special care, right?”
Chris nods. What else is there to do?
“You had your introduction talk, right? Because I don’t have time to go over it again.” She chuckles. “It’s easy anyway, isn’t it? Just stay away from his face and make sure the straps are tight.”
“Uh, yes ma’am.”
She shoves a tray in his hands and, when he doesn’t move, raises an eyebrow. “You waiting for an extra invitation?”
Startled, Chris shakes his head. “No, ma’am.” He turns, and finally looks down on the tray in his hands. Fuck.
The plan was to stop Joshdigos starvation by slipping him something raw, not to be the food source. But the nurse is still watching, so there is nothing else to do but open the door to Josh’s room.
“Josh? Be a bro and don’t eat me, okay?”
oOo
Movement. And the smell of more dead meat and greens.
But there’s a living person. The smell is familiar, so is the shape.
His eyes are bad, the lights are too bright and his sight is watery at best. The person is white, like all the other people constantly prodding. But there is yellow, and a reflection of light on glass. The smell is familiar.
He doesn’t care for the voice, the words. He can smell fear, nervousness. Living meat.
And then... more dead meat. But different. Raw. Bloody.
There is a word, “liver”, but it means nothing, nothing as he screeches and the person drops the meat. He’s straining to get it, and then his teeth catch a bit, and he yanks his head around and wolfs it down.
It’s wrong. Cow, a part of his brain provides. But it’s bloody, uncooked, and the first thing he eats in days.
More. Hunger.
oOo
“You... want me to play nurse.”
It’s crazy, it has to be. Chris stopped by early in the afternoon and told her he’d been sneaking into Josh’s room and feeding him raw liver.
And now she’s supposed to do the same.
“Look, I know it’s crazy. But- it’s Josh. Crazy is obviously his thing. And I’ve slipped him food for the past four days. It works, I think. He eats it. And he’s still got all of his hair.”
“Mental illness is not... being crazy,” Sam tries to defend the memory of Josh Washington, but the picture of the Psycho chasing her through the lodge, taking off his mask after forcing Chris to shoot either Ashley or himself replaces Josh. The picture of a rambling, hallucinating Josh in the mines, does, too.
“Fact is, we’ve been back for over two weeks, right? And Hannah’s diary said the changes start after about four days, and then it’s bang, boom – full-Wendigo.” Chris is excited about that, Sam can tell, and now he’s talking himself into a frenzy. “But Josh is still...”
Not ‘still Josh’, Sam thinks. But she understands.
“It’s like he’s stuck in the middle,” Chris concludes. “And being in the middle means he can go both ways, right?”
“I’m not a Wendigo expert,” Sam tells him, trying not to feel the hope flare up at this conclusion. Of course she wondered if it was reversible, if there was still a Josh under all this monster. But now Chris said it out loud, and he believes it, truly believes it, which makes it even more real. More possible.
Chris argues: “Considering I shot the bastards and you escaped a house full of them before blowing it up, I’d say this makes us the leading experts.”
“So, what? You wanna... trick the Wendigo? A centuries old spirit?”
“It’s either us trying it, or we get Emily to yell at it for a while. Might work, too. Besides, you’re good at the climbing stuff, and I’ll... I’ll just be the mastermind.”
Sam snorts, she can’t help it. “What you’re saying, essentially, is that I’m the brawn and you’re the brain?”
“No, I’m obviously both, and you’re the sexy sidekick who gets her clothes ripped of halfway through the movie and spends the rest covered in only a flimsy-“
“Towel,” Sam concludes drily. Hey, jokes about traumatic events.
Chris looks content. “Exactly. So, tonight, you’ll serve Josh his dinner and try to see if you can get through to him. And I’ll be on my date with Ash, and tomorrow we’ll start to figure out a way to ghostbust the Wendigo out of our favourite psycho’s brain.”
oOo
Sam isn’t one of these vegans that try to force their lifestyle onto others, and she doesn’t condemn her friends for eating burgers, but there is a line, and trying and failing to put a raw piece of liver on a fork for a possessed guy she might have been into is crossing that line.
Josh – or the creature – had been crouching in the middle of the room when she entered earlier, watching her intently ever since she had slipped through the door and had placed the tray on the ground.
He’s just sensing your movement, Sam tells herself. He doesn’t recognise you.
Nevertheless, she had said ‘Hi’ and a constant stream of quiet, gentle words is spilling over her lips noq, much like talking to a sick animal that you try to coax into eating. Except that at the sight of the raw meat, Josh shivers and looks more alert. So much for coaxing.
“Right, what did Chris say? Cut it in chunks so you don’t choke trying to wolf it down.” She tries not to breathe through her nose and smell the metallic sensation of raw, bloody liver while she cuts it up into rough chunks. Then she picks one chunk up with the fork and looks up at Josh, taking a deep breath.
His eyes are focused on the meat.
Sam fights the urge of closing her eyes, turning her head and just sticking out her arm. Instead, she slowly holds out the plastic fork for Josh. Even though she had steeled herself for the jerky movements all the Wendigos had displayed, she flinches when his head shoots forward like a snake and his fangs close around the raw meat, as well as the prongs of the fork, breaking two of them.
“Fuck, Josh, was that really necessary?” Sam hisses, momentarily forgetting that this isn’t Josh, and even if it was, it – he – can kill her with those crooked fangs and she shouldn’t aggravate him. However, the reaction of her opponent is different than she expected.
Instead of yanking his head around to tear the meat of the fork (and quite possibly the fork and two or three of Sam’s fingers, too), he freezes, his fangs still closed around the fork, but keeping his head perfectly still. He glances up at her from beneath long, dark eyelashes and if it weren’t for the eyes, the fangs and the general Wendigo-ness of his body, he could’ve been dorky Josh who had messed around with Sam one time too often and is now frozen realising he went too far.
Then, he slowly and deliberately unlocks his jaw from the plastic fork and pulls back his head, the chunk of liver as well as little plastic pieces falling to the ground. He lowers his head and suddenly Sam hears a quiet noise that sounds almost like... cooing.
If it were chips, or popcorn, Sam would’ve just picked it up from the ground and threw it at him, but it’s raw meat that’s been in his mouth seconds ago, so she tries to ignore the sounds that match a fluffy kitty more than a sinewy half-Wendigo and, for lack of more forks, drills the plastic knife into the piece of meat like a makeshift marshmallow stick.
When she holds it out this time, she notices how his muscles tremble in an effort of keeping his movement smooth and slow, and how his breathing gets heavier close to the meat, but he only slides it off the knife carefully. He does munch on it with his mouth open and extremely disgusting sounds, but at least he tries to behave himself to get it.
oOo
Sam starts humming and the part of Josh’s brain that is not the monster recognises it as the theme music to Little Shop of Horrors. He wants to laugh, and even though he can’t, it gives him strength.
He hungrily devours the other bits of liver and then leans back, ignoring the rest of the food on the tray.
oOo
“Can’t really blame you for not eating that,” Sam agrees, poking with the now bloody knife at the slimy, brown stew in one bowl. Josh makes a sound like a cat throwing up a fur ball, it startles Sam, but slowly the realisation dawns on her that this is a laugh. Granted, a joyless, helpless laugh, but... so human.
She eyes him intently. “Josh?”
Nothing. Then- growl.
“Very manly,” Sam mutters. He cocks his head, narrows his eyes. They’re more green, somehow. Still very light, but the milky hue is only a veil over muddy green.
If Sam wanted to get her hopes up, she could tell herself it means he’s getting better. But then he growls again, throws his head around jerkily and the Joker-esque wide grin with the pointy, crooked teeth sends shivers down her spine.
It’s like the grotesque version of an eternal Dolphin grin, but a dolphin that’s part shark. There’s nothing joyful about that mouth.
“I remember how much you hated your braces when you were 16,” Sam tells him. “I guess knowing you need another pair now makes up for a lot of the shit you pulled.”
He growls more, but this time, it’s not just animalistic. His eyebrows furrow and she swears his lower lip is slowly pushed forward. He’s pouting.
Her heart is thumping in her chest, because for a second, she can see Josh, the old Josh surface. The Josh before Hannah and Beth died, before the reunion on Blackwood Mountain happened. She continues intent on keeping this Josh with her for just a moment longer. “When you get out of here, we’ll take you to the Italian place around Mike’s, you know, the one where they do that famous Bolognese sauce, and we’ll order a big bowl of spaghetti, just so you can go through the trouble of eating them with your new, shiny braces.”
The image sends her into a giggle fit (that is, admittedly, slightly hysteric, too) and she leans forward, unconsciously, until suddenly Josh’s bony shoulder rams into her and she loses her balance, topples over and scrambles to get to her feet, laughter stuck in her throat.
For a second, she stares at him with wide eyes – and for some reason, he seems just as scared as she is – and then she bolts out of the room, down the hallway and out of the hospital, away.
Josh, in his cell, whines unhappily for a long time and one of the nurses who are there, trying to figure out what set him off like that, thinks she can see something like a tear on his cheek. But she shakes her head, choosing to ignore it. It’s probably just spit, anyway. It’s not like that thing – she can’t think of him as a boy – retains enough humanity to be upset.