Chapter Text
Ze had never been more terrified in his life.
Fifteen days. I had him fooled for fifteen days.
When Ze opened the door to leave, he heard the mechanical sounding voice of the fucking freak. He didn’t know the creature’s name. He didn’t need to know the creature’s name. All he knew was that it was going to be the death of him. Ze had made it home in one piece, even if just barely.
He was soaked to the bone, looking like a wet cat, and when he came inside, nobody was there. Of course not. Had Moe or Regect even noticed his absence? Had they celebrated it, even? Maybe that’s what they were out doing. Celebrating that Ze was absent from their group for once. He knew he would most likely celebrate too if he were them.
Ze furrowed his brows, taking a swing at one of the windows, breaking it with ease, the glass shattering under his hand and pieces of it immediately retaliating by sticking into his fingers. He winced, but the pain was manageable enough, and it didn’t even leave a dent in his psyche. He felt his breaths coming in shakier the more he thought about everything.
Moe.
Regect.
It was all fake.
Fake.
Moe and Regect.
Everything that happened.
The cave dwellers.
It was fake. Fifteen days.
Fifteen days.
Fifteen days.
Ze let out a shaky cry, swinging again and squeezing his eyes shut.
Fifteen days. Another swing. Another thing broken under his hands.
Moe and Regect won’t forgive him.
All these stupid monsters did was replicate his friends, and he was such a terrible friend he couldn’t even tell the difference. Moe would be able to tell. Regect would be able to tell. He shook his head again quickly, continuing to punch. He kept going until all he could feel was the pain in his hands and skin, the pain behind his eyes from squeezing them so hard, from holding so much back.
He swung until he heard the barely intact door swing open. “Ze!?”
The man in question froze up, slowly turning to look over his shoulder. Moe approached, honking wildly as she grabbed the man’s wrists, but Regect looked a little cautious. “Guys?” Ze breathed out, looking between them.
By the time everyone had calmed down and proved themselves to be real, Ze was still skeptical. The hole had convinced him everything was real the first time, who’s to say the creature didn’t learn from its last mistakes and make some “bug fixes”? Who’s to say that any of this was still real? Of course neither of his “friends” would ever admit to it, so all he had to go off of was his own instinct, but now he couldn’t even trust that.
“Well, we can’t live here anymore.” Regect’s voice cut off his thoughts, even if barely. “Can’t you just- just fix it? Make it look new again?” Ze asked, giving him a slightly annoyed and rather wary look. “I mean yeah but it’s like… I don’t want to, that’s a lot of work, Ze, even for an amazing thing like me.”
Ze felt his eye visibly twitch. This has to be the real Regect. He thought to himself as he turned to Moe, looking at her fidget with her horn. “Besides, we tried covering the hole, it literally just keeps coming back.” Regect added, thinking aloud. “We can’t stay here, Ze. Not if you’re having some shit with it.”
Ze nodded slowly in agreement as Moe honked her horn. “Yeah, yeah that’s fair… I just… I don’t know where else we’d go.” He said. Moe let out a series of honks, ones that roughly translated to “well, we better get going then.”
“Yeah… just grab the last of our stuff that we wanna keep,” Ze sighed. “We’ll get a move on, hopefully quicker…” The man headed upstairs, or at least, what was left of the stairs, and looked through his now destroyed room. Sleeping stuff, important things, like his guns… He furrowed his brows. His gaze locked onto the pistol he kept in his nightstand, and he had to try to reason with himself.
Surely, if this had been the fake Regect and Moe, he would’ve noticed by now. But still, it wasn’t too far off for him to be cautious… He sighed, carefully tucking the gun into his waistband, pulling his sweatshirt down over it. Just in case.
Just in case.
Just in case they decide to leave you behind, on your own. All alone, because they don’t want to deal with you and your delusions.
Ze squeezed his eyes, shaking his head. What was that? What was this feeling? He knew that voice, it sounded like his own, of course, but… not quite. Deeper, maybe. Sounding like a shitty clone of sorts.
He just shook his head one last time before finishing up, heading downstairs. He only had to wait another minute or two before Moe came back, her and Regect carrying their own stuff.
“At least we know our car is still intact after Ze’s little freak out.” Regect commented as they left, all of them approaching to put their things in the trunk. Ze furrowed his brows, trying to fight off a snarky remark. He didn’t have the energy to fight back, truly, and if he’d started an argument, he’d have to let Regect get a big head and think he won just because Ze was so fucking tired and couldn’t even manage up some kind of good response.
Moe honked a couple times, getting in the driver seat. She’d proven herself behind the wheel several more times than Ze or Regect ever had, so neither of them argued once. Ze settled himself in the backseat, much to Regect’s surprise, as they almost always argued for the front seat. Ze buckled in, just so that Moe wouldn’t lecture him (though she didn’t lecture him for safety, she lectured him because she had to listen to the car’s dinging over the lack of his seatbelt), and then settled back, looking out the window blankly.
After a while, the rhythmic hum of the road began to pull at his consciousness, beckoning him toward sleep, but he forced himself to tense up, resisting the siren call of rest with a visceral terror. He gripped the fabric of his sweats with such intensity his knuckles turned white, the rough texture grounding him against the rising tide of paranoia. Every blink felt like a gamble—a moment where the world might shift, where his friends might stop acting like themselves when his guard was down. A heavy, suffocating dread settled in his chest, making each breath feel like he was inhaling lead. He was physically shattered, his muscles screaming for release, yet the jagged edges of his anxiety kept him tethered to a wakefulness that felt more like a fever dream than reality. He couldn't sleep. Not now. Not while the silence of the car felt so much like a trap.
He tried to anchor himself in the physical pain of his hands. The glass was still lodged in his skin, a jagged, bloody constellation of his own making, and the throbbing ache was supposed to be a tether to reality. It was a miserable, concrete fact in a world that felt like it was dissolving into smoke. But God, the exhaustion was a physical weight, pressing him into the upholstery until he felt less like a passenger and more like a ghost being pinned down. He wanted to surrender. He wanted to close his eyes and let the blackness swallow him whole, even if that surrender cost him his life. He took a breath, shaky, jagged, carefully modulated so Moe and Regect wouldn’t hear the tremor in his lungs, and squeezed his eyes shut.
The moment he blocked out the passing blur of the road, the world didn’t go dark, it shifted. His mind, starved of the visual input he used to get a grip on reality, immediately brought those stupid fucking eyes in the silence. Every creak of the car’s movement sounded like how he imagined his joints cracking did; every hum of the tires on the ground turned into a low whisper that just told him over and over again how fucking stupid he was. Fifteen days. You were in there for fifteen days. You didn’t even notice.
His head lolled against the window, the cold glass sending a shock through his temple that jerked him half-awake. He snapped his eyes open, heart hammering a frantic, erratic rhythm against his ribs. Not yet, he warned himself, his vision swimming with exhaustion. You can’t close your eyes. You have to keep an eye on them.
He tried to keep them open, staring fixedly at the back of Moe’s head, convinced that if he looked away, she’d turn into something else. But his eyelids felt like lead. Each time they drooped, the boundary between the car and his nightmares blurred. He caught himself starting to drift, his chin dipping, his breathing deepening—and then, terror, sharp and electric, would spike through his gut, forcing him to gasp back into full, panicked consciousness. He was caught in the worst kind of limbo, too terrified to sleep, but too exhausted to stay awake.