Chapter Text
Walking through the woods, you suddenly realize that you can’t hear the sound of the forest at all.
You take stock of your senses to pull you to the present. Evergreens all around you, and the sky is winter gray. You can smell pine needles, the scent of wood smoke and tobacco on your clothes. There’s the dirt taste of mushrooms that you can’t get out of your mouth, regardless of how much coffee you drink to chase them down.
But there’s no toss of wind in the branches, no distant drumming of a woodpecker, none of the sounds that are familiar as these woods are to you.
At first you thought maybe that silence had gotten louder, the way it does when you’re an hour or two into a trip, and the tinnitus ramps up. But sound doesn’t seem like it’s wrapping around or playing off any of the objects in front of you in a normal manner. It feels like it’s warping on its way into your ears, and it doesn’t reflect anything you can see around you.
It didn’t completely stop you in your tracks until you saw the stairs.
They look like the sort you would find inside a school or city building. Rubber-topped tile on a metal frame, maybe twenty or so steps high. Clean, no trace of leaves or dirt on them. They don’t lead anywhere, and there’s no structures around them that would suggest they belong to anything, let alone in the middle of the woods.
You’re glad your brother is with you, because you’re not sure you would feel as brave if he wasn’t.
He’s not your brother technically, but you’ve known each other since forever. You can talk endless amounts of shit to each other, to the point where a stranger might ask, ‘do you want him to leave you alone?’ And you laugh and tell them hell no, he’s my brother, nobody else gets to talk to me this way.
You can also sit comfortably in a room for hours without talking. It’s the kind of friendship that annoys people who can’t stay quiet longer than five minutes. “Why don’t you two just get it over with and fuck already?” Your friends half-joke. But that just makes both of you laugh even harder.
Because he’s with you, it’s just a stupid staircase in the woods. Who gives a fuck what urban legends say? Your brother is reliably skeptical. You can imagine his response - how can it be an urban legend if it’s in the goddamn woods? It's some bullshit only someone from the city would believe.
Now the only thing you can hear is the sound of your brother breathing next to you.
You look over at him and his eyes are wide. He looks back at you, and cracks a smile. You grin back. His eyes dart to the stairs, and he raises his brows in inquiry. You grin wider.
Both of you take off running towards the stairs at the same time, pounding up the steps, laughing your asses off.