Chapter Text
Mark doesn’t think twice before sealing himself off from the rest of the world. It’s unfortunate, more than anything, because his bedroom’s a sanctuary of comfort only until he’s reminded that there’s no windows. He hadn’t expected to overstay his welcome in his own bedroom. Locking the door had become a precautionary instinct enacted upon mental worst-case scenarios bloomed into reality, slightly more convinced the stranger would sit at the door and wait for someone to come out or walk in. Limbs buzz with incessant, thrumming fear in every vein. The carpet beneath his socks feels numb against the soles of his feet, nonexistent. He almost waits for hands to form from off-white, dirtied carpet and reach in and pull him under, somewhere just as debilitating and terrifyingly calming as the impending doom of death.
The first hour in, it doesn’t really settle, just weighs and presses on the back like an inevitable burden he’s yet to shoulder. Mark wants to co-exist his swirling thoughts with the idea that he was still alive, still hopeful, though without confirmation of the unknown he sat in a limbo between human society and this monster’s domain.
His parents—and his little sister—come back from vacation in four days. Something has to give before then.
Time’s supposed to be on his side. He has four days for a police officer to retrieve him from his bedroom and save him from the foreboding silhouette looming on the other side of the door. Four days, if that, to hold his own against garbled warbling and stutters so close to Cesar’s voice it feels like a weight’s pressed onto his chest discerning real words from spliced, mocked ones. He couldn’t let this thing roam in the house until his parents, none the wiser, wandered inside, live bait to the slaughter. Mark would rather let himself die than consider the scenario. (When he tries to call his parents first, though, the line’s completely dead. It’s just another hysteria-inducing sign that something is horribly, horribly wrong.)
He barricades the door using the chair next to his desk, piled with every book he hadn’t gotten the chance to read and various belongings he wouldn’t mind being destroyed in the alternate’s effort to barge his way in. Keepsakes that didn’t attribute to who he was, just collected in different church offerings and school events. They’re a weight to burden the books he’d ignored and nothing else. The back of the chair props up under the doorknob.
The door knob had turned a few times, stopping at the lock’s restraint, and over the course of the first hour the alternate pounded on the door and tried to reach beneath it to find the lock. Now, it continues, as an elongated limb slithered beneath the door to paw for the lock. “Why won’t you let me in–?”
Without hesitation. Mark fires a round at the meat of its arm and it slinks back beneath the door’s crack. His father’s gun’s the last thing he got to grab before he went into his room, circling around the interior of the house to run through the kitchen and back down the corridor to his bedroom just to arm himself with the weapon from his father’s bottom drawer. Better to have something to defend himself with to stall for time. He wasn’t a good shot, and the numbness in his arms made that much obvious. He wasn’t the hunting type.
“Get the fuck away from me.” His voice trembles, quieter than anticipated.
The pounding on the door was starting to drive him insane. “Do you not trust me anymore? Mark, I thought we were close.”
“We aren’t,” He corrects. “You’re not him.”
It’s like it can’t affirm the truth. “Why would I hurt you?”
Mark doesn’t have an answer. He doesn’t… need one. As long as the stranger gives him clearance to call the police and wait for their sirens to beckon his mind to safety, there proved no use in entertaining stupid questions. A choked sound serves as his only response. Instead, his body veers to the rotary dial phone sitting on his work desk in the far corner of his room. His feet stumble, wobbly in their footing, to grab the phone and fumble for the number to emergency services. The thing must hear the rotary dial’s decent chirp each time it whips back to its original spot, because now it begins to speak once more, something along the lines of “Open the door,” and “I just have a gift for you” and “What’s wrong with you lately?” He swears he’s heard Cesar say these lines before. Jokes at the front of his house. Kind words at a birthday party. Concern for him whilst nudging his shoulder. Mark tries not to worry about it, for the emergency services mattered more above the spiraling hurricane of his thoughts clawing for center stage.
Had anyone answered the phone, though, this story would have ended. But it doesn’t, not in the way that Mark wants it to. He’s never wished to be taken into police custody before. Now, though, he doesn’t just wish, he prays, hands clasped and facing his bed. Carpet burns into his knees, and for five grueling hours, he sits on the phone with police officers and waits for them to dispatch to his house.
They never do.
He assumes fault unto the phone line. The alternate’s corrupting the phone's wires, somehow, just like it had with the camera footage back at Cesar’s house, buzzing static in the corners of the frame hiding evidence at the scene of the crime. The alternate doesn’t seem to panic when he picks up the phone, either, only speaks louder and taunts him harder for his hubris, so it doesn’t sound like the kind of thing that would best its psychological onslaught.
They would save him if they had the chance. He has to trust that.
The thing, though, has another idea, six hours into the first night: “They’re too scared to save you.”
Mark turns his head. Loosely clasped hands, slowly, peel apart, still on his knees. “...That’s the most normal thing you’ve said in hours.” He idly comments, fully expecting to be talking to a brick wall. It’s not like he wants to sit down with the alternate for a chat, either. “Can you speak to me normally?”
“I always could, Mark.” Cesar’s face says, and the thought unnerves him.
He’s not sure why he’s entertaining this. “Was it you who made the phone call?”
The doorknob’s rattling ceases. It seems content, at least, to know Mark’s staying put. And he is. He doesn’t have any other choice, unless he wants to try and break the drywall, in which case he’s sure he wouldn’t make it far. It was, realistically, best to wait out the time before the police realized he was on the line and found him.
“It was your best friend.” It tries.
“That doesn’t answer anything.”
“Of—of course it does.”
It just feels off to hear the call and response. Up until now, it’d repeated the same words on a broken record. Now, although strained, it was speaking. “You… you’re talking. Coherently. Why are you doing that?”
“Because I’m Cesar.”
Okay. That approach isn’t working. The alternate’s not trying to break down the door, though. Dully, Mark realizes the thing is just going to wait it out. Either he succumbs to starvation or the urge to open the door and test his chances against Death herself. He’s never considered himself tough. “Are you… going to break the door down?”
“No.”
Slowly, he adjusts himself to sit fully on the ground, knees cracking from the freed weight of his body against his knees. “Why not?” He tests, prodding the waters. Mark scoots a little closer, squinting at the crack beneath the door frame, but when something barely resembling a finger tries to reach for him he mercilessly fires another shot of his gun. “Stop it!”
“Fifteen bullets left.” The alternate sings, without giving a direct answer.
The reverb forces him to rebound much longer than he would’ve liked, arms shaking and numb. “Can you–” Fear always turns stale, and at some point there’s nothing left to choke on. For now, though, it’s full and hearty, turning his stomach inside out. Mark scrambles backwards, palms against the grout and muck of his carpet as he holds himself upwards with limbs like numb jelly. “Can you just answer my question?”
“I have no reason to, Mark. As long as I don’t leave, I’ll ss-see your face again.”
The scenario that screams at the front of his mind feels like being dunked into cold water: opening the door and testing the reflexes of a monster against the terrified adrenaline of an eighteen-year old boy. “Can you just accept that I know you’re not Cesar?”
“Why would I?” Comes oddly authentic. “I-I’m your friend. I’ve always—always been your friend.”
“Yeah, well, I know you’re not my friend. There’s no point.” His words shake no matter the forced insistence in each syllable. His father had always wanted him to be a tougher man. In theory, he was. In practice: “If I’m going to die, I–don’t want to die not getting to… to speak, or say anything, to someone who’s just acting like someone you’re not.”
Silence pushes between them. Mark swallows on the thick taste forming in his throat, lack of water muddling the senses in his tongue until every breath he inhales stained itself in a dull medicinal taste. “Please,” He repeats, and he’s not really sure why. “Give me this. Don’t pretend. I know you won’t kill me until I open the door. It doesn’t matter.”
“Until you open the door,” It introduces instead, “What w-will happen?”
He leans forward, shoulders slouching into a near-painful slump, as the handgun sits weighted in two unsteady palms and sweat gleams against its black finish. Mark considers shooting him from the crack beneath the door, again, as its half-illuminated face ducks to look at him through the crack, one gleaming eye peaking outwards and boring into his soul. A wide jester’s grin tugs across its face, smug and absolute. Cesar’s smile never looked like that. It was soft and hesitant, waiting to be proven wrong for his optimism, and even in such a case he found himself reviving it with the CPR of laughter. Cesar favored humility in such grand gestures that he brought himself down in his own worth to relish in the life of the humble.
And Mark had hated that, he remembers with a solemn softening of his tense expression. He’d hated the way Cesar ruined opportunities for himself to favor the slow, the familial, the steady suburban life. Mark knew he was destined to it from the patterns exposed in his childhood, with no direction even now and no purpose leaving the state to go somewhere else. Cesar was headed for much bigger things. But he never wanted to be the star the furthest out in the galaxy, even if the view was so much brighter from miles ahead.
Now Cesar Torres seemed infinitely far. If the star still existed at all.
He just missed Cesar’s voice. It’s impossible not to admit when words desperately push past his mouth, like a light snuffed repeatedly in his many years spent in shy silence. Now, facing Death, he realizes he had so much to say, so much to promise to other people. So many opinions to share and too many questions to ask. “...Will you talk to me?”
It doesn’t respond for thirty seconds.
Just when he considers giving up hope: “They said you were defiant.”
Mark stills. Blinks. Again, the sensation of being dunked directly in cold water rushes through his body like blood pooling to his feet. “What does that...? What?”
“Everything is chosen.”
Almost too quick, “Well, if you think that God isn’t real… that’s not true.” He feels like he’s acting a little too sure in his words for someone defending his livelihood with a creaking chair and any weight that can press against the door and reinforce the lock the alternate intermittently toys with. “Wouldn’t you think it’s, um… I don’t know, random? A hopeless coincidence?”
“But who ss-said anything about God choosing?” Cesar’s face smiles wider. Wider, wider. “Everything is chosen, but for which power, you won’t get to know. And isn’t th-that—beautiful, Mark? You won’t know.” He can hear his heartbeat in his ears. He knows the alternate can hear it, too. “You won’t know anything.”
Mark’s breath shudders. “If I’m about to die, can’t I know just…. just to have the answer? Before it’s over? If you’re going to kill me no matter what?” He can’t remember how long it takes to guarantee death from starvation. It has to be dehydration that gets him first. Mark hadn’t remembered to refill his water on the nightstand before he left for Cesar’s. It didn’t matter. Favors were more important when it came to Cesar.
He’s not sure if he regrets the charity now, even if it was the alternate who called. Something about the accuracy in the alternate’s voice convinces him that he’d rather assume humanity than assume monstrosity. But it doesn’t matter, now, not at the edge of the world, bartering with a Devil who favored mindgames. “You don’t want that,” says the alternate, and he swears its eyes squint with something vaguely akin to amusement. “You d-don’t know what you’re asking for, do you?”
“Probably not.” Mark’s sinuses burn. He can’t remember the last time he cried. It won’t be tonight, not if there’s still a chance for the phone lines to come back up. Not if he can walk away with the truth and his life, in the slim chance that a gunshot hits mock flesh and he can save himself. He tries to betray the idea that it’s blind hope to allow himself to pray for reasonable chances. “But tell me.”
Ever-piercing, it stars through the crack in the door, face unchanging. Mark pushes himself away, further, clutching the gun to his chest like a lifeline. He watches as the maw of the alternate separates, slowly, pure black splicing as it opens its mouth properly to speak for the first time. And it begins to talk.