Chapter Text
“I stand and give my eyes to you,
Shadowed shore far undone.
To you I pour corroded sun,
Wake me, as one.
Wake me. Wake us.
Wake up, Derek.”
-
Derek Hutchins was alive.
That was the first surprise. Last he remembered, he was watching the cursor of a Google Document file blink over and over, until his vision blurred and his head collapsed onto his desk harshly. That was when he should have died. He thought he died. With infinite knowledge and all, he essentially felt his heart stop. Saw the neurons in his brain slowly eat each other one by one. So how was he here now, hearing his own ragged breaths, feeling his eyelids slowly flutter open?
The second surprise was how fucking thirsty he was.
If he thought infinite knowledge felt like getting hit by a semi, then ran over by said truck for extra good measure, this hurt more. His throat burned with a million tiny fires, the flesh so dry he could practically feel the vocal cords rubbing against each other with each pained groan he let out, and it irked him to no end. How long has it been since he’s had a sip of any subsistence at all? Why didn’t he know? Why did he have so many questions, shouldn’t he know everything? Nevermind that, he could address his significant lack of knowledge after he got a drink. He absentmindedly reached his arm in the direction of his mini fridge, palming around for some soylent--
The fridge wasn’t there.
That was the third surprise.
He was on a bed, that was the first thought that came to his head. Everything started registering at once; the faint beeping of a heart monitor, the oxygen mask his breath condensed on, the weighted blanket over his body, and the IV’s stuck into his veins.
Okay, so he was in a hospital of some sorts. Did someone hear him collapse back at home? Impossible, his mother was out for the night, the house was empty. Besides, it’s not like she had checked on him since the October night when he first befell upon those damned gates.
‘Move, Derek. Danger lurks here. We must waste no time. We must leave.’
There was the fourth surprise, if he could even call it that. A voice in the back of Derek’s head that burned with pain and knowledge as it invaded his thoughts. An entity separate from himself, yet one all nonetheless. Deep down he knew it was illogical, foreign--but a more survivalist, instinctual part of him only wanted to listen to it. To get up and get the hell out of here.
Despite the fact Derek could tell he formed the thought for his muscles to move, he was met with nothing but a dull ache in his two legs, maybe a sad twitch at most. He couldn’t have been out for that long, his muscles couldn’t have given up on him already, right? So, he tried again, unable to will his body to do anything but shift and flail weakly around like a fish out of water. With a sharp grit of his teeth in pain, Derek forced himself to lift his neck up, look around the room he was in.
And that’s when he caught sight of himself.
Derek looked…wrong. Well, all things considered, he actually hadn’t seen his reflection in God knows how long. But, from what he remembered, this person staring back at him was a far cry from himself. His skin, which was normally such a fair, deep mocha, was now a dry, ashen rendition of such. The long dreads he used to take immaculate care of--with his extensive and slightly dramatic pharmacy of product--were now overgrown and fading into a frizzy, tangled mayhem. His cheeks were sunken, facial hair grown into a scruffy mess, the skin resting on his lips a graveyard of chapped and dead cells. Then there were his eyes.
Oh, his eyes.
He remembered them as an enchanting dark brown. Almost black, as many people commented they didn’t know where his pupil ended and iris began. Eyes that could draw anyone in with just a glance, eyes that could withstand horrors beyond mortal comprehension for fifteen whole seconds.
Now, those fairytale eyes were lighter; in all the wrong ways. Yellow, vein-like cracks shot through his iris--and pupil, he noted--as he had to squint to see clearly in the mirror; a confusing, sudden deterioration of his once perfect vision. They pulsed and burned behind his eyelids, and the more he stared, the more he could hear the cursed whispers of Gods who shouldn’t exist manifesting in his neurons, and the onslaught of that semi-truck migraine starting up again. Though maybe the migraine wasn’t caused by seeing his reflection at all, as he suddenly felt the backhanded blessing of infinite knowledge flood his thoughts abruptly, his sentient third sense screaming at him ‘danger, run Derek, leave, danger--’
“Ah, Mr. Hutchins. What a pleasant surprise this is.”
Derek didn’t know why this unknown voice filled him with debilitating dread. From what he could see after he turned his head to look at them, they seemed professional enough, carrying a clipboard with over three pens clipped to it, like a true doctor. The only thing off-putting about their appearance was the strange, octopus-like emblem that was sewn onto the front pocket of the lab coat, which Derek had to squint to read.
United States…Department of…Metaphysical Sciences? What the hell was that?
“It’s good to see you finally responsive. You barely gave us any signs throughout the year, we were starting to think you’d never come to again,” the doctor humorlessly chuckled, though his smile didn’t reach his ears nor was it genuine.
Derek, on the other hand, felt like he was about to vomit.
“A year?” He weakly choked out, voice raspy and pained from, apparently, a whole year of disuse. A part of him cringed at how that was the first thing he said since he'd woken up, and how scared he sounded, but he had more pressing matters at the forefront of his mind.
Like, I’ve left Avery alone for a whole year?
‘You should be more concerned about the danger disguised as a friend directly in front of you. Do not let your guard down. We cannot afford that. You are not safe here. Do not discard such facts in order to focus on idiotic relations.’
“I’m afraid so,” the doctor continued, stepping closer. Derek could now read the last name sewn beneath the octopus emblem, which read ‘Hale.’
“Sorry to inform you that you’ve missed all of twenty twenty-six. Today marks the eighth day of January, twenty-seven,” Doctor Hale explained as he set his clipboard down, reaching out to put a stethoscope to Derek’s chest.
‘Danger, danger, danger-- Do not touch, pull away, you are not safe--’
“Quite the racing heart you’ve got there. That’s good. You seem to be recovering…abnormally fast,” Hale noted, his gaze narrowing ever so slightly at the faint, pulsing, golden cracks in Derek’s eyes.
Derek’s mind was spinning. This hospital, from what he could tell, was wrong. Everything was wrong. That light was too bright, the sterile smell seemed almost artificial now as Derek’s nose tracked it to the air vent in the ceiling, there were absolutely no windows in his room, and he’d been a comatose man for an entire year.
He wanted to ask about Avery, to see if Hale knew anything about the boy, if he was okay, if he was safe--but judging by the angry pulse of pain that shot through his body from the back of his head at the thought, he kept his lips tightly sealed.
“You’re not a real hospital,” is what came out instead, followed by an even sharper jolt of pain that made him wince. Apparently that wasn’t a smart choice either.
Hale only huffed out a breath--something between a laugh and a guilty exhale--before pulling a chair over. It angrily scraped against the tile floors with a grinding squeal, and Derek’s hands reached to cover his still sensitive ears, wearily eying the fake doctor that sat down in it.
“You’re smart, Derek. Perceptive too, and I deeply respect that. But you’re too perceptive for a man that’s been unresponsive for an entire year,” Hale leaned his body forward, elbows resting on his knees, staring at Derek like he was a…subject.
Derek can’t remember the last time he’d ever felt bone shaking fear.
“We here at the DMS serve as America’s virtual protectors. There’s a lot of scary stuff in the world of zeroes and ones, though I’m sure you figured that out the night of December thirty-first, twenty twenty-five.”
They know?
‘Not everything. Play dumb. Act a fool. Whatever you do, you mustn’t let them know about the gates. About Carcosa. About myself.’
Derek didn’t have time to question who ‘myself’ was. That, or he didn’t want to. For some reason he knew that if he did, here, in front of Hale; something worse than the pain of infinite knowledge would befall him. So, he did exactly what that nagging instinct said, and he played it safe.
“I…I don’t understand. What happened?” Derek murmured, manipulating his voice in a way he hoped sounded clueless and innocent.
Hale seemed unconvinced. With a heavy sigh, he leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms as he stared at Derek head on. “In your case, Minecraft is an easy game to infiltrate if one so wishes. It has simple code, it’s not hard to build, create, and destroy things with a few digital blocks. Therefore, that makes it easier for certain…entities, per se, to manipulate the code to their liking.”
They know.
‘Not everything. Not yet. Remain calm. Keep playing the role of incompetence.’
“The night of the thirty-first, our teams had responded to multiple electromagnetic pulses of foreign digital entities coming from your computer, Mr. Hutchins. When we responded to the call, we found you unconscious at your desk. You had suffered a stroke. The left side of your body was nearly paralyzed when medical professionals had tended to you. Miraculously, by the grace of God, you suffered no permanent injuries. Besides your eyesight, of course. Doctors are working on glasses for you as we speak.”
Derek didn’t like the fact that he emphasized some divine figure being his reason for avoiding death.
Alas, Hale continued, “While you were unconscious, we took the liberty of confiscating your laptop and carding through your files--”
“You what?” Derek suddenly interjected, his body pulled taut like a fishing wire. Wasn’t that illegal? If not, an insane invasion of privacy at the very least?
Hale only cleared his throat, mildly annoyed at the interruption. “--and we noticed a few things. What stood out to us the most was a YouTube video you posted. What was it called again? Ah, right. ‘Goodbye from D3rlord3.”
Derek’s blood ran cold.
“This implies you saw your stroke coming. You knew of the fact you were going to die. You aren’t telling us what happened in that Minecraft world, fine. We don’t need only you to figure it out.”
‘They know.’
“But what was most interesting to us, Mr. Hutchins, is the person you addressed your letter to,” Hale slyly included, his eyes glinting in a hint of amusement as he saw the way his words shocked Derek to his core.
Oh, no. Please no. Not him, don’t you touch him--
‘He is not safe anymore.’
“So tell me, Derek,” Derek’s breath hitched as Hale leaned closer to the edge of his hospital bed, his heart pounding in his ears, blood rushing anxiously through every core of his body, breath trembling with the fear of the inevitable follow up.
“What do you know about one ‘Avery Mayo’?”