Chapter Text
Ever since Grace was a child, she’d always been very inquisitive.
She’d spend most of her days on reddit and showed much interest on crimes and trying to decipher some of them on her own. The vanishing of Ethan Winters, specially, stuck out to her the most. The man went missing in Romania years back, and tied to the missing of his wife, Mia Winters. Ever since then, Grace had been trying her best to find out any clues on what exactly happened.
“Hi Boss, I just wanted to inform you that I will be out of the country for a week. I’m taking a trip up to Romania to visit some old family friends. I will try my best to get what I can done while I’m there, and I should have the report you asked for done in the next three days, tops. Thanks, Grace.”
Grace sighed as she hit send on the email. She didn’t enjoy lying, especially not to her boss, but if she told him she was going to a different country to investigate a crime that she wasn’t assigned to, things would not end well. She then switched tabs on her laptop and hovered over the button to purchase the plane ticket. She wasn’t a fan of traveling alone, especially not to a country she’d never been to before, but this case had been eating Grace alive for years, and she wanted to do whatever she could to get more clues.
Grace stepped into the uber she purchased, setting her luggage down beside her. “It’s okay, Grace. It’ll be fine,” she’d think to herself as she looked at the driver. The first thing she noticed was how the car smelt like oil and smoke. Great.
“Where to?” The old man croaked out, his window wide open as he placed a cigarette in his mouth, inhaling deeply. His voice was raspy and he had a heavy Romanian accent, which was expected.
“I- uhm... it’s a small village, its kind o-of isolated…” Grace spoke nervously, showing the man a picture on her phone. The picture was a map that she found when digging deep on the case, showing areas where Ethan passed through before he went missing.
The man would furrow his brows, pulling his glasses a bit down to see better. He looked confused, and a little concerned, almost.
“Young lady, what exactly are you here for?” He’d murmur, looking at Grace with an almost-fearful expression.
Grace’s cheeks would turn rosy. She didn’t expect him to ask questions, and now here she was, having to lie once more, like she did to her boss. “I-its.. um.. I’m visiting some old family friends.” She would attempt a smile, looking awkward as ever as she avoided the old man’s gaze.
He’d simply scoff, taking another glance at the photo as he kept his cigarette in between his teeth that were already rotting.
“Heard young man and his wife were murdered near there, some years before.” He’d place one hand on the wheel, the other now holding his cigarette outside of the window. He began to drive as Grace looked down shyly.
“…O-oh. I-I don’t think I’ve heard.” She’d stammer, fidgeting with her fingers as she stared outside, noticing the sun’s contrast against the bright greenery.
It was breathtaking.
Grace never got to travel much, so the beauty of what was Eastern Romania absolutely astonished her.
Grace sighed as she leaned against the window, still looking outside. She watched as the more the man drove, the less green things got. Now, the trees seemed dead, the sky slightly grey, and the mountain tops hidden by a thick layer of fog. Grace began to see fewer cars the more he drove.
Suddenly, the comfortable silence in the car was broken with a loud pop, and the car quickly swerved off the road. The man slammed on the breaks, gasping as it stopped. Grace sat up immediately, looking at him.
“W-what the fuck.. What happened?” Grace looked around, confused as the car’s front tire slowly deflated.
“La naiba!” The man would curse out, a word Grace was unfamiliar with, likely in Romanian. Grace watched as he exited the vehicle, walking around to check what had happened. The man tossed his cigarette on the floor before putting his hands on the back of his head, clearly in distress. Grace would observe, breathing heavily. As she moved to open the door on her side, she heard the old man scream. She jolted her head back to look at him, and—
It was a monster.
Grace’s eyes would widen as she saw the scene. A giant, hairy creature with extraordinarily sharp claws and teeth would strike the man repeatedly, tearing him apart right in front of her. Grace felt her mind go blank; her ears began to ring as she watched in horror.
After a few seconds, her fight or flight response triggered, and she’d quickly reach for the door handle, rushing out of the car.
Obviously, she didn’t get very far as the creature eyed her, jumping onto the car and chasing after her. She cried out in pain as it struck her lower back, her vision turning white for a second. Her body collapsed immediately, she clearly couldn’t run after the blow. She started to cry as she fell, turning her body around to look at the creature, trying to move away from it. It struck her again, this time on the thigh.
She was going to die.
For the last time, she let her curiosity get the best of her, and now she was finally going to pay for it.
Her vision blurred as it pinned her onto the ground, both from tears and the slow loss of consciousness.
Abruptly, the creature screeched in pain as something dug into its back. Grace could make out the silhouette of a person. A woman. She looked dressed in all black, and Grace could just barely see her striking gold eyes.
The woman took out the sickle from the creature’s back, stabbing it into its face, ripping it apart swiftly. Grace laid on the ground, the creature’s cries muffled in her ears as they continued to ring, and the pain in her back making her vision turn black around the edges.
The last thing that she saw before she lost consciousness was the creature falling to the ground, and the woman holding the sickle to her mouth as she looked at Grace, seemingly licking the blood off of it.
Maybe she did die.
And this was all a hallucination.