Chapter Text
“Someone has to go back. Warn the others to stay inside.”
Their voices, their breaths, echo off the cave walls as each exhale hangs in the air in front of them, frozen by the cold. Josh’s breaths come faster than the others, his body shaking from the chill more than even Mike and Sam’s, cold as they are in their wet clothes. The overalls... they’ll be hard to maneuver in the water on the way back.
“Sam, you should--”
“You can climb up there, can’t you?” Sam interrupts, Mike’s face twisting into something like regret as she does. She schools her features, a careful mask of determination. “You can get up those rocks? With your hand the way it is?”
“I--Sam, I can’t, my hand--”
“Can you do it?” she demands of him, and Josh turns and rubs at his face and mutters and she feels almost bad about it.
Mike breathes, and looks pained. “Sam--”
“Go, Mike.” She steps toward Josh, slowly waving a hand into his periphery -- just so he’s not startled by her proximity -- and easing into his space. An arm around his shoulders, his hand grasped in hers. “I’ll go back the way we came with him, and we’ll figure out what to do when we get there.”
He stands there, looking at the two of them, hesitating, wasting time, giving the monster that’s tracking them through the tunnels all the more opportunity to find them, and she’s furious. She doesn’t know at who, she doesn’t know what about, she’s not even sure if she’s mad at them or at herself, but she’s angry.
“Michael!--” she shouts, but he holds up a hand.
“Alright. I’m going.” He turns to the wall, braces his hands on it, tests the strength of the remaining three fingers of his left hand, turning it so the joint of his thumb holds most of his weight, and then he nods. “I’m going, but if I don’t see your ass back at that lodge in twenty minutes, I swear I will--”
“I got it. We’ll both be there, Mike. Now get out of here.”
Luckily, he recognizes the dismissal, and begins climbing. Sam rests a hand on Josh’s back, turning him away and toward the direction of the river she and Mike waded through to get here. “S’cold,” Josh says, small and quiet. Timid.
“Yeah, it is. It’s about to get colder. Come on,” she says as gently as she can manage to be, which is frankly not much.
Walking under the hanging corpse of the stranger who helped them sends Josh back into a frenzy of tormented mutterings and half formed exclamations that Sam tries her best to quell. When all he can say is “Sorry,” over and over, she doesn’t ask him who he’s apologizing to. What he’s apologizing for.
“Sam,” he whispers, strained and desperate. “Sam, I’m sorry. I need you to know I’m sorry, you need to know that. I wasn’t doing the right thing, but it felt like I was and I’m so sorry...”
She stops, and he limps into her back, starting when she remains unmoved. “Don’t,” she says.
“But... no, Sam, you don’t get it, I--”
“Don’t apologize to me now, Josh,” she says, hushed to keep the anger from colouring her tone. “Don’t apologize when you’re mentally unavailable, don’t apologize when we’re both half convinced we’re going to die, don’t apologize to me when your si--when this monster is still hounding us.” On impulse, she reaches back to grab his hand, and squeezes. She’s not sure if she wants it to be reassuring or painful, but she feels him straighten behind her, and she thinks maybe it’s just grounding. “Apologize to me when you’re getting the treatment you need, when you’re lucid, when you know exactly what you’re doing and that it will mean something to me that you do.”
A weight presses between the blades of her shoulders, his head, and she hears Josh sigh. Fingers squeeze hers back.
“Thank you,” she whispers, just as a nearly-human screech echoes off the walls. “Come on, we have to move it.”
She drops his hand, but sticks close to him and lets him into the water first when they reach the edge. He slips in, looking alarmed and uncomfortable, but her sympathy only extends as far as it takes him to stop moving without her prodding. She eases herself down and into the water behind him, and they move.
Until something brushes past her foot and pulls her under.
The cold water is shocking, and she has to fight against her first instinct to gasp against it as she’s dragged through the shattering chill like a dirty cloth. As suddenly as she was grabbed she’s let go, and when she breaks the surface with a painful inhale, she hears the hissing-roar of Hannah-turned-Wendigo. Pressing herself still against the walls of the cavern, fighting the chill that sets her bones shaking, Sam watches Josh get plucked from the water without a care by long, skeletal arms bearing a tattoo so familiar to her it aches more than the cold.
“Hannah!” Josh cries, and the thing only screeches at him again, elongated teeth glimmering in the dim moonlight that shines in from Mike’s escape route.
Sam prepares herself to scream, to put herself in danger to let Josh free, and he looks terrified to be held by the neck above the water, but he stills. “Hannah?” he says again, pleading, and the creature his sister has become freezes.
Holding her breath, Sam prays. Prays to the mountain, to the spirits that live on it, for the order of the world to right itself and balance out the shit that they’ve endured in a single night. That it balances in Josh’s favour, that his nature is inherently good enough for whatever forces are at work to save him.
The Wendigo wails, then flings the long arm holding Josh off toward the water wheel, the wood cracking and groaning under the force. As Sam fights the urge to call out to him, the monster before her moves in blinking motions back to the ledge they came from, crawling away like a spider that knows the flies in its web can’t escape. She waits, waits as long as she can until the hiss-screeches of the Wendigo are nothing more than indistinct reverberations, and then she swims. Like an Olympic hopeful racing against the clock, she rushes to the wheel, finding Josh bruised and bleeding but still breathing in the wreckage. “Come on, come on, Josh. We need to go, please tell me you can walk, please.”
He eases himself up and off and back into the water, but it’s as if the cold doesn’t get through the impassive wall he’s become now. His expression doesn’t change. He’s not muttering anymore.
He takes a few steps towards her and she nods. “Okay, okay good. Great, let’s get the fuck out of here.”
The trek back up the mountain is cold and unforgiving, but the sounds -- which will haunt her dreams until she dies -- never follow them back to the lodge, and Sam tries not to wonder where that may mean they’re being heard now. If the monster isn’t tracking them...
When they reach the lodge, Mike is standing at the back door and wheels on them with fists raised, looking frightened and unsteady, but he sheds it like so much skin and carefully does not make a face when his eyes land on Josh. “You made it,” he says to Sam. “Thank God.”
“Yeah, we’re here, but we won’t be for much longer if you keep standing around like this. Is the door locked?”
“You think I’d be standing around waiting for death to greet me if it wasn’t?”
Sam fights a scoff and settles for a frown. “I don’t know, Mike, I’m not exactly crystal fucking clear on your decision making right now.”
He frowns back at her, but there’s no heat in it; or maybe she just doesn’t feel it after so long in the chill of the mountain air. “Whatever, pass me that rock, let’s get inside.”
Everything happens in a rush, and suddenly Sam is face to face again with the monster bearing the tattoo her best friend wanted for years, standing stock still and hoping against hope that her nerves don’t get her killed.
“Hey! Hannah!” Josh yells, and Sam only moves to tell him to stop.
The Wendigo is in front of him before she can blink, and it stares down at him like the decision between eating him and letting him go is just too much.
“I’m so sorry, Hannah,” he whispers, and then Sam sees the match in his hand.
“Josh, no!”
Mike is already out the door with Ashley, Chris and Emily, the light switch abandoned, and Josh is on the other side of the stairs. It’s either run to the door and leave Josh, or...
Sam makes a decision. She sprints for Josh, grabbing his hands before he can strike the match, and waiting for the impact of the Wendigo’s teeth or claws.
They don’t come.
When Sam dares to turn her head, following Josh’s line of awe-struck sight, she sees the Wendigo, the monster formerly her best friend, standing tall and still. The bodies of the other two monsters lie motionless on the floor of the lodge, disintegrating as though the only thing holding them together anymore was the sheer force of their hunger. She holds still, not letting Josh’s hands go, while the Wendigo before them turns with two agonizingly slow motions, and moves within a split second to sit by the pipe leaking gas. Its eyes are nowhere near them, not possibly capable of catching their movements, and Sam doesn’t hesitate to drag Josh out the door.
“Sam, I gotta--” he starts, shaking one of his hands free, and she lets him.
“Wait till we’re out the door,” she says, and when they are, he strikes the match and lights it, then throws it into the lodge.
The building lights up with flame, the gas combusting with all the force of a hurricane and all the warning of a snapping twig, and Sam is thrown out into the snow by it, Josh landing with a groan next to her.
“Sam?! Josh! Are you guys okay?” comes Ashley’s concerned scream, and Sam laughs to hear it, hysterical and frightened like she’s never been in her life.
“I think we made it?” Josh says next to her, laughing with her, both more and less hysterical than Sam feels, but it’s a problem for later. “I think we’re all alive?”
Mike grunts. “Yeah. Yeah we are.”
Josh rolls in the snow, his overalls from the Psycho outfit torn and ripped in so many places that he must be colder than anything, and he looks directly at Mike. “Dude, I--About Jess...”
“Not now, Josh. Just... fuck off, for right now.”
He nods, rolling onto back again. “I need to sleep.”
“You need your fucking meds,” Chris says, but there’s no edge to it. Tentative concern, a bone-deep weariness, but no sharpness.
Emily sobs. “Will they just land already? What the fuck, how hard is it to land a fucking helicopter up here?!”
“Hard, Em, alright?” Mike snaps, and Emily whimpers. “We just... it’s done now.”
“Yeah,” Sam mutters, watching Josh curl into himself in the snow. “It’s done now.”
-----
“Miss Callaghan, please just answer the quest--”
“No!” Sam cries into the echo chamber of the interrogation room. It sounds so much like the caves, she half expects every other sound to be a Wendigo mimic, that she’ll see some milky-eyed freakshow crawl around the walls and eat her for lunch. “I’m not answering that, you can’t say that shit, he’s not well--”
The interrogator sighs. “Miss Callaghan. Please, be calm. I was only wondering if maybe Mister Washington’s recent mental health problems could have lead to the death of the man we found in the mines.”
She grits her teeth hard against the vulgarities she wants to spit at this woman feigning concern, and breathes first in, then out. “No.”
“Well, some of your friends mentioned that Mister Washington was behaving dangerously earlier that night, and--”
Sam slams her hands on the metal table separating her from landing her fists on the interrogator. “Stop.” Breathing continues to be not easy, but she forces it. “Josh is a traumatized young man, dealing with the deaths of his sisters after some stupid bullshit my friends and I pulled a year ago. Sure, he has a number of issues with his brain chemistry, that’s true, but that his ‘mental health problems’ make him your first suspect is far more indicative of your half-baked attempts at an investigation than how severe his state is.”
She breathes again, more even this time. “I need you to tell me,” she hisses, “if he is getting the same treatment right now as I am. If you’re just sitting there, on the other side of some fucking line you’ve drawn, asking him questions and not giving him time to answer properly, assuming silence is proof of guilt, Hell! Assuming he’s guilty before you’ve even asked him anything!”
Her accusation hangs in the air, bouncing off the walls eerily, but she doesn’t back down. The woman interviewing her sighs. “Miss Callaghan--”
“Don’t bullshit me. After the night I’ve had, I can fucking smell it.”
Another sigh. “Alright. Mister Washington -- along with the rest of your friends -- is currently being attended to at the hospital at the foot of the mountain. They assured me that they have their best psychiatric team looking after Mister Washington, so--”
Sam nearly growls. If she weren’t feeling such an aversion to ever eating again, she might think she’d been bitten down in the mines. “Not. Good enough.”
“Then what would you like to hear, Miss Callaghan?”
“I’d like to hear that he’s going to be getting therapy, proper therapy. Not just medication thrown at him like a couple of well placed pills are going to make all of this go away.”
The woman crosses her arms. “I’m afraid that’s up to him. Now, if that’s all you’d like to ask me about, I believe we were conducting an interview.”
“You were conducting a bunch of bullshit, but whatever. Get on with it.”
It takes another thousand and one questions to get out of the interrogation room, but Sam manages to give what she thinks are reasonable answers. Based on the look the woman gives her as she leaves, Sam would say that there was maybe a little more bite than bark.
When she re-enters the lobby of the Park Ranger station, Ashley and Emily meet her. “Are you okay?” Ashley asks, reaching up to cup her face and pat at her cheeks. “You were in there so much longer than the rest of us, did they say something to you?” One of her hands is cold from holding an emergency ice pack to her black eye.
“No,” Sam says with an apologetic smile while Emily looms over Ashley’s shoulder. “I just, sorta... y’know, gave ‘em hell. For Josh.”
Ashley’s hands drop, clenched into fists, immediately. “How can you trust him, after what he did, Sammy? What he did to you?”
She sighs, scrubs at her face. “I don’t know, Ash. I’m mad, I’m pissed as fucking shit, but...” she chokes down a sob, wipes at her eyes, and blows out a breath. “But you didn’t see him down there. You didn’t find him screaming at the walls and tearing at his face and bleeding from places he’d scratched himself down there. He was a mess, Ash, and he needs help. What he did, no matter how it makes me feel, has to be more than proof of that.”
Emily snorts. “Yeah, no sane person thinks something like that is, like, a thing that people do anywhere but on TV.”
“Whatever,” Ashley mutters, crossing her arms like an afterthought. “I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive him. If Chris doesn’t deck him the next time he sees him, I’ll do it.”
Sam grimaces. “Depends on which one of them gets out of the hospital bed first.”
The ride to the hospital is tense. They’re down the mountain, so Emily can grab her car with a ride from the officials and take them straight there without a Park Ranger escort, but Ashley isn’t looking at Sam and Emily is careful to focus on driving. No one speaks. Sam is only surprised it hadn’t gone quiet sooner.
The nurse on duty at the front desk points them in multiple directions. Predictably, Ashley heads immediately for Chris’ room. Emily hesitates a moment, then heads for Matt’s room with an unreadable expression on her face.
“What about you, pumpkin?” asks the nurse, though the only indication that he is one is the scrubs and the nametag, between his tattoos and the shaved sides of his head. “You know how to get to where you’re going?”
Sam takes a moment to think about going to see Mike and Jess, to make sure they’re okay, but she has the flash of a thought, an image of Josh strapped to a bed like he’s in some inhumane asylum, and nearly chokes on the bile that rises in the back of her throat. “Um, actually, I was wondering if I could see Joshua Washington? Is he--Can I see him?” It suddenly feels desperately important that she see him, with her own two eyes, know that she could reach out and touch him.
The nurse clicks through the computer behind the desk. “Hmm, Joshua Washi--Ah! Here he is. Uh,” he pauses, eyes flicking up to her, back to the computer, and up to her again, “he’s in the psych ward in the south wing of the building, you alright to find your way down there on your own?”
She nods furiously. “Yeah, yeah I’m good. There’s the coloured markers on the wall, right? No problem.”
“Alright, honey, take it easy. Visitors are only allowed down there for another forty-five minutes, don’t stick around too long if he needs to sleep.”
More nodding as she turns away. “Yeah, of course. Thank you,” and she’s gone, tearing down the hallway, ducking and weaving around professionals and patients alike.
Suddenly time is against her, the Wendigo at her heels again, waiting for her to trip into its waiting jaws. As though if she doesn’t make it to Josh in time, she won’t be able to help him. If she gives him any time on his own he’ll become what Hannah became.
She knocks on his open door, finds the room is a single bed occupied just by him. He turns to look at her slowly, his eyes blinking like molasses, lethargic and out of sync. “Hey, there, buddy,” she says finally, quietly, the peace of the room disturbed by her and her heavy breaths.
“Hiya, pal,” he slurs back at her, but it’s so good to see him anything other than anxious and jittery that she can’t seem to care.
Sam steps in, carrying a chair to his bedside and sitting down heavily. “Hey,” she says again, smiling without meaning to. “You doing alright? Seeing everything clearly?”
Josh laughs at her, though it sounds like someone’s taken the noise and slowed it down fifty percent. “S’that your way of asking if ‘m still seeing the twins?”
“No, no, I just--”
Chuckles, now. “S’okay, Sammy-baby. They’ve dosed me up! I ain’t no danger to no people now. Ain’t seen Hannah-Beth since the mountain. You’re all,” he slurs more, sweeping his hands in small arcs through the air above his stomach, “perfec’ly safe. From me, anyway. No promises about flesh-eating moun’ain demons.”
Her hand is grasping his before she thinks about it. “Josh, you weren’t a danger to us, but... But you did some things that really scared us. Scared me. You did things I know you wouldn’t have done if you were being taken care of properly, if you were handling everything the best you could. And maybe that’s my fault. Maybe I should have been there for you more, or better. But...” She’s not thinking clearly, she’s so exhausted and frustrated, and it’s been so long since she slept, but she can’t stop herself. “You need to own up to that. What you did... it has an explanation. It doesn’t have an excuse.”
“But I was so bad,” he whispers, on a whine, and he’s not looking at her. “I did so many bad things, Sammy. What if... What if owning up to that isn’ enough? ‘I’m sorry’ ain’ gonna do no one no good. It won’t... s’not gonna make what I did not happen. I’ve hurt everyone so much already, stickin’ around would hurt you more. I don’t want to hurt you, Sammy.”
She swallows around whatever is choking her, and nods. “I know, buddy, but... It’s not just about what you want. It’s about what the rest of us need. And we need to know that you understand what you did, and why it was bad, and why we’re mad at you, and... I know--There are people who can... who can help you come to terms with that. I know some great people--”
Instantly, Josh tries to curl up, ends up hunching and flinching instead. “M’not going back to Doctor Hill. He didn--”
“No, no,” Sam says, patting his hand. He relaxes, and rolls on his side toward her, curling like a bracket to face her. “No, if you don’t want to see him, you won’t. But...”
“You’re gonna see someone.”
She nods. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m gonna talk to someone. We all should. What we went through... it was horrible. And you’ve been through so much more than the rest of us. Please, as much as you can right now...” and here she squeezes his hand, like she did before, like she did in the caves with him, and his eyes get sharper with it, “and I’m gonna come back again and again until I make sure you’re promising me properly, but--Josh. Please, promise me you’ll see... someone, about all this? All of it. So that you can apologize. So that you can own your wrongs and do better in the future. Okay?”
Josh pouts, bringing her hand toward his face. “No one is gonna believe us, Sammy. Monsters aren’ real.”
A sigh eases out of her, and Josh looks up at her like he’s worried he’s said the wrong thing. She squeezes his hand again. “Then we don’t tell them about the monsters. Or we do, but we make it a metaphor. Who the fuck knows, everything is... messed up right now! But the rest of it: we tell professionals. And not people who are just going to medicate us with wild abandon.”
He presses her knuckles to his head, and she feels her face heat though she knows between painkillers and anti-anxiety meds, he has no idea what he’s doing. “Meds helped me b’fore. Are they bad?”
“No, buddy. They’re not bad. Not when they’re used with... other--other strategies and approaches and whatever. To get at the root of the problems.” His breathing comes soft and regular on the tips of her fingers, and she smiles down at him. “No. Meds aren’t bad. You aren’t bad. Not in your heart.”
“Thank you,” he mutters against her hand, and she can feel him drift into sleep. Without her permission, her hand lifts up and traces the curve of his head, smoothing his hair down. He relaxes with each pass of her palm, a gentle breath easing out of him like he’d been holding onto it for years. Maybe a single year.
A knock comes at the door, and an older nurse smiles at her. “He finally asleep?”
Sam nods. “Yeah, he just went out.”
“Hallelujah,” the nurse whispers, raising her hands to the heavens. “We’ve been trying to get him to sleep for hours. Kept saying he was waiting for someone. To apologize, I think?” Sam watches her put two and two together. “You get your forgiveness on with him?”
He whimpers when she stops petting his head, but she doesn’t touch him again. “Uh, no, not yet. No. I wouldn’t have wanted it right now anyway. It needs to come from a fully conscious place.”
The nurse nods. “Well, I can’t say I don’t respect that. Hopefully that’s sooner than later.”
“Yeah,” Sam says, making for the door with an eye over her shoulder, “hopefully.”